 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. To talk more about this, we have with us Paranjay Guhatakurtha, a senior Indian journalist who has been covering the deeds and misdeeds of corporates for many decades and who also has a personal connection to Pegasus as his name has been listed in a list of those people who may have been targeted with this malicious spyware. Thank you so much Paranjay for joining us. Thank you Prashant. Paranjay, so like I said, this is a complex story, a lot of details, some of it building on earlier revelations, of course some of it completely new. So for our viewers, could you maybe first take us through what are some of the two or three standout points that occurred to you after reading this story? The New York Times investigation has several aspects which were not known. It was a very detailed kind of an investigation, took them about a year, took two journalists about a year, one in Tel Aviv, one in New York. Firstly, I think for an international audience, what is very clear is that long before the US government, the Federal Trade Commission blacklisted NSO, the federal bureau of investigation of the United States of America had actually been using Pegasus. It was testing, targeting, the spokesperson said, no, you know, we keep looking out, we keep trying different types of technology. It's not that we were using it to spy on citizens, in this case American citizens. I think that revelation has attracted a lot of international attention that the FBI had that spyware under a different name. It was called Phantom or something, but yeah. Yes, but it was the same company, it was, I mean, you can, you know, call it by any other name, but it was the same technology which was zero click, you could infiltrate any citizen's phone and read everything. And that person would not have the foggiest idea that her or his phone was compromised, infected, as happened in my case also. And you, everything, your entire, all your chats, all your WhatsApp messages, everything could be accessed by somebody else very far away and you wouldn't know what was going on. I think that's very important. I think it's also, there are lots of information that has come out about how this, the NSO's software actually became a tool of Israeli foreign policy. In Israel, there was again a human, big human cry when the present Prime Minister Bennett, his supporters who were opposed to the earlier Prime Minister Netanyahu, they found that even their phones would be tapped. So this has become a big international issue because it's no longer confined to Pakistan and India and South Africa and Morocco and Hungary and France. The country where this software, this spyware was developed and of course the United States. I think among the other revelations that have come up is that when the cloud prince of Saudi Arabia, there was some glitch in their, in their deployment of that software, he just calls up Netanyahu and everything is all back to what it used to be. It just shows that how this has been used by the Israeli defense services to, you know, not just authoritarian regimes across the world but part of their outreach within West Asia and we all know what happened to Khashoggi, the columnist of the Washington Times who was murdered, decapitated in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in Turkey. So all of this is new. But what is, as far as India is concerned particularly, is the New York Times categorically states that in 2017 when Narendra Modi became the first Prime Minister of India to visit Tel Aviv, they and Netanyahu was the Prime Minister of Israel at that time, that India purchased Pegasus software as part of a bigger weapons and armaments deal. Now the government of India has steadfastly neither confirmed nor denied and a privileged motion means ought to be moved against the government and the minister for saying, look, we never, you know, I mean, I mean for all intents and purposes saying that we never misuse this software. But what the government of India has steadfastly refused to acknowledge is whether it bought or an agency of the government of India bought it or did not buy it. And this entire issue is before the country's highest court, the Supreme Court of India that has appointed a committee, a three member committee headed by a former judge Justice Ravindran. And there's a three person technical committee, which is supposed to be examining the funds, including mine. I'm waiting for a response for them. Right. So Paranjai will come to India of course in a minute, but before that just also wanted to focus on the angle you first mentioned, which is that the United States, you know, not only it tested this, it purchased it, it tested a version, it finally decided against it. But the fact that the fact that the United States is also in many other ways involved very closely with this whole enterprise, it definitely knew of how it was being used while it did not say give its own software to certain other countries, it knew that Israelis were doing it. So we also see a much stronger nexus, which sort of makes it more disingenuous when the US says that oh, we are imposing curbs on NSO. You know, it's a little complex because what has happened is in San Francisco and all this came out before the present set of revelations in 2019, when WhatsApp moved court against the NSO group. And that time it says that it was a kind of a clickbait. You click on something and your phone would get infected with malware. After that, a host of international organizations including AlphabetStore, Google, Microsoft and others also said that this was against their interests. So at one level we have big tech in America also very unhappy with all that's happened. Now as far and on the Israel side, the NSO group spokespersons are flatly denying everything. But and this is an important part, even as they are denying that, you know, it's a standard thing. You know, I mean, we sell it after getting a license from the, from the, you know, an export license from the Defense Department. What can we do if somebody else misuses that software? I mean, that argument is now wearing thin and fewer and fewer people are willing to believe it. To the extent where the NSO group's future itself is is in jeopardy because the people who financed this company gave them generous loans, etc. are all having second thoughts whether to continue to financially support. And if the New York Times reports it speculates that it might just get bought up by somebody else and perhaps even an American couple. Exactly, right. So one of my final questions really is about journalists themselves because the campaign again, you know, basically NSO has been exposed largely by the collaboration of journalists working across the world and of course with Forbidden Stories, Amnesty, all of them collaborating. But what we have seen is actually that in very few countries has any real impact been seen at the level of structural, you know, any structural impact governments mostly being in denial, making noises. For instance, Morocco, I believe, has even filed a case against Amnesty in a French court. And one of the promoters of NSO was saying, no, no, we never really infiltrated the phone of the French president. I mean, so all these denials and allegations are floating. Exactly, right. So in this context, how do we see this sort of, you know, I wouldn't call it a campaign, but how do we see what journalists can do, what activists can do in the coming weeks and months in terms of actually bringing more accountability globally on this issue because they're at the most inquiries have been announced, but we've not really seen any in Hungary, journalists have actually come together and filed a case not only against their own government, but also against NSO kind of something akin to a class action suit. We haven't seen that happening here. The, I don't know how long the committee here in India will take to come up with the report and when it'll come, it doesn't seem to have been given a specific deadline to complete the work. But what is happening is this, these set of revelations about the misuse of the Pegasus software that it was not just one of the, as the NSO group claims, this is meant for, you're not checking terrorists and drug traffickers and pedophiles and we all helping law enforcement agencies do their work, that I think myth has now been shattered. See, it's not, it's political opponents of the ruling regimes, it's social activists. I mean, look at India, a well-known virologist and internationally recognized virologist, Dr. Gagandeep Khan, she's been snooped into, allegedly being snooped into. We see Ashok Lavasa, the former election commissioner who disagreed with his colleagues on the election commission away and he was snooped into and even ministers in the government. So, those in power are using this technology to snoop on even people, their so-called ministers and supporters. As far as journalists are concerned, I think what is of great concern is not just the invasion of your privacy and the very threat to democracy and freedom of expression, the chilling effect is had on your sources. I mean, if you are an investigative reporter and you depend on off the record conversations and leaks from others, all such people would now be very because their identities would get disclosed. So, this has had a huge negative impact on the future of free speech and expression and in that sense, democracy itself. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Paranjee. Of course, a key aspect which is also not so much mentioned in this report is that Palestinians, the victims of Israeli occupation were also among those targeted in large numbers as well. We'll keep covering this issue and come back to you as well. Thank you. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.