 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are covering the big ticket item which is the hacking of phones in India by Pegasus. A software which was developed by an organization called NSO. It's an Israeli organization with very close ties to the defence ministry over there because this is supposed to be an item which needs special export clearance. Pornja, without getting into the details right now of what Pegasus and all of it is, just for our viewers, it is something which targets essentially mobile phones which have become de facto what everybody uses in communications and obviously this is a therefore an extremely good vector of attack and if the phone is hacked which is what the software does, then you can also hack into the microphone, record whatever you are saying doesn't matter where the phone is speaking on the phone to somebody or not and even the camera. So it's really a very high level snooping tool that this is developed. The big story today is of course that the political parties particularly the opposition political parties have been targeted the names are coming out it's been given out in install beds. Can you tell us who are the major names today that have come out of this particular exercise which is going on? On Sunday night we had the revelation that journalists had been zoomed on and as we are recording our conversation on Monday evening the wire has disclosed that there is a long and a very interesting list of individuals whose phones were snooped on. Wire is a party to this expose which is worldwide to the 17 media organizations that are part of this expose called the Pegasus Project which is being led by a France based non-government organization called Forbidden Stories together with MNST International as one of their partners. So let's look at the big names Rahul Gandhi, two of his political associates and quite a few of his social acquaintances who have nothing to do with politics. Number two Prashant Kishore supposed to be the political strategist and interestingly Prashant Kishore's phone has been tracked all the time when he was a consultant with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamuta Banerjee all the way till very recently when he met Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi in Delhi. Then of course Mamuta Banerjee's own nephew Abhishek Banerjee her personal secretary these are among the important people who are in the opposition who have been snooped on. At least these are the names that have been revealed but what is interesting is also the people who are part of the ruling party and the ruling establishment. Most recently and this is really the ironical part of it the young former IAS officer Ashwini Vaishna who currently heads Meti the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has himself been snooped on and his wife of course the snooping happened before he became the minister. Another person who's been snooped on is a Minister of State for Water Resources the Jal Shakti Ministry and his name is Prahlad Patel. Interestingly he has had this kind of a loveate relationship with certain members of the BJP and the RSS the Rajeshwaram Srivaksant we can talk about that. Then we have a person who's not exactly Prime Minister Narendra Modi's best friend and that is Praveen Tugadia of the Vishwar Hindu Parishad. And then we have Minister Smriti Irani's former officer on special duty and his name is Sanjay Kachu and we also have Rajasthan's former Chief Minister Vasundhara Rajesh's former personal secretary Pradeep Awasthi. Now the list doesn't stop there. What has been disclosed so far by the wire is that days after the former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoey now a Rajasabha Member of Parliament days before a court officer an assistant to the court leveled allegations of sexual harassment against the former Chief Justice of India. Her phone and that of her husband was also tapped. Just after she made the coup. Just soon after that. Days after that. Wait. The former Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa who dissented against the Chief Election Commissioner and the another Election Commissioner in the run up to the 2019 Luxabha elections and who's now with the Asian Development Bank. His phone was also tracked. Also civil society activist Jagdeep Choker who's one of the founders of the Association for Democratic Reforms. And there are of course others and that is this is really now interesting and we don't know how many more names are going to come up. But these names are pretty explosive and they are pretty sensational. That's what I can say. Well there has been a ruckus in the parliament. The opposition is obviously up in arms. And we also had a very anodine statement if I may say so from the current IT minister whom you named Mr. Vaishnav. That's right. Who says that due diligence has not been done by the media houses while investigating this case. Now his argument is that WhatsApp said you know there is their software was not broken. They said it long back. They filed a case against NSO. That's good. In the US court. That's correct. I think 19. Yeah. Which is still pending. 2020 it was admitted by the court and there are at least five major software companies technical companies like Microsoft and various others who have joined in that petition as well saying it's a huge risk to everybody. So you know it's not a minor issue that the minister for instance says that people have not done due diligence. Also the fact that they say that we have already given answers to that. Now if you remember that answer it was that no unauthorized tapping has been done. So the question that was argued was it authorized this hacking that was being done because this is really a hacking of the phone. All right. It is not a legal tap in that sense. So let me respond to what you've said. What is unauthorized hacking? We know that this is violating the law. What is authorized? That means there is I'm sorry to disagree. There is nothing called authorized hacking. Okay. There is authorized snooping snooping if surveillance if you like. Okay. Authorized surveillance. That means if you take prior permission from the secretary of the ministry of home affairs then you can tap a person's phone. Only if you go not by the gray area but legally only by getting access to the telephone companies infrastructure which they will provide you. Absolutely. But if you recall that's right. You know that is still at best a very much a gray area. Probably if you recall the radio conversations which were recorded and at that time it was argued that the income tax department and the CBI had sought the permission of the home ministry and had received it. That's one part of the story about authorized and unauthorized. But what Mr. Ashwini Vaishnav's response has been it's not just anodyne he's repeating what has been said. There was a response to a write to information query about it was a very pointed question. Has any agency of the government of India purchased this Pegasus software which runs into millions of dollars and even I can't purchase it even if you have the millions of dollars because they'll only sell it to a government agency. And whether the government had purchased it if so which which department of the government or which agency of the government. And even now the government of India and Mr. Ashwini Vaishnav is their silence is deafening. They are neither denying that they've purchased Pegasus software nor are they confirming it. So this is really the truly amazing part of the whole story. You know when we go into the issue of of course Pegasus software it's interesting because that's the biggest money spinner for the NSO the organization. Three-fourths of the revenue come from Pegasus and it has become a hot item in 40 odd countries. And one of the of course main targets of all of this were journalists. And let's look at the total number of what we see as investigations that this group has done into this NSO hacking. And out of 160 or 180 journalists across 45 countries more than 40 are in India. So that's a very big number. Absolutely. Compared to the total number of hundred journalists in the world out of 180 40 are in India. More than 40. In fact it's close to 50. Okay. So and yours is also one of them. Wait wait wait before you ask me about myself let me just react to one or two points you made about the NSO. If you visit you know by the way the NSO after issuing various statements including to forbidden stories one of these people before they published this. They are now saying you know this is all nonsense you haven't got any leaked material this is all in the public domain. And what they are saying they've even now threatened to sue this Paris based NGO called Forbidden Stories. That's one part. Secondly if you go through the NSO's website they are very clear that this software is meant for law enforcing agency. You want to track pedophilic drug traffickers. You want to you know if there are some drones which are going to threaten the security of the country it can track them. And if there are some somebody who's been kidnapped or even people who have been buried under rubble if there any survivors you can. So it was all made out that this is very very legit and this is very very it has a very very positive kind of thing. But what is very clear is the 40 plus journalists if you look at their profiles they have something in common. All of them have taken a critical position vis-a-vis the government of India at present. So it's not a coincidence that you don't find for instance Mr. Arnab Goswami's name among the 40 journalists. Or for example the representatives of the so-called Godi media. So it was clear that they were targeting individuals. It was not a blind kind of mass surveillance but whether it's Rahul Gandhi or Prashant Kishore or Abhishek Banerjee or Ashok Lavasa or Jagdeep Choklar or the person who's accused the Chief Justice of India, former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi or for that matter the Abhinav Vaishna, Praveen Togadia, Smriti Rani's former officer on special duty Vasundhara Rajesh's former personal secretary or the minister Pralat Patel. They were targeted. That's very clear and this is coming very clear take Rahul Gandhi's case. His two aides who are his political aides Alankar, Alankar Sawai and Sachin Rao, they were targeted. But what wire has done they've not revealed five names of individuals who are not in politics but there are social acquaintances of Mr. Rahul Gandhi. Even their phones were tapped. And interestingly Prashant Kishore was being tapped right through from 2018. So you know one thing is very clear that the attack on media particularly the digital media has been there for some time now. We have had cases filed against various journalists. Siddharth for instance of wire has had cases filed against him. We had you know Dua cases filed against him. So this has been there. But this part of it that they were being tracked all these figures who as you said are could be considered totally digital platform this time also in the mainstream media could be considered as not particularly pro-visit. For instance Indian Express journalists like Rithika Chopra, former Indian Express staff for Sushant Singh, other journalists working for mainstream media organizations like the Hindustan Times even they were part of the list of 40 plus journalists who were tracked. Prem Shankarja of the Doins of Indian Journalists. Well-known columnist absolutely correct Rohini Singh who broke that article about Amit Shah's son's assets going up. So it's very clear that they were all targeted. I mean it was not as I said earlier not a sort of mass surveillance individuals were targeted. And the big question which remains unanswered is were these authorized? Or who authorized them? Because it is clear that this is not the doesn't cost peanuts. It seems to be very close to the shall we say the government. Probate 8 million dollars. It's not small change. And to think that the government of India if it is actually true is spending your money and my money. This is taxpayers' money to spy on me and you. I don't know whether your name will come up but as of now I know I was snooped on. How did you come to know that you were snooped on? Can you tell us a little bit of the personal story? All right. My personal story is like this. In March Sandhya Ravi Shankar who is a journalist a well-known investigative journalist. She's a Chennai based journalist. She works for an organization called the LEED which she's founded. She contacted me out of the blue and said I want to meet you. I have to meet you face to face. This is in March. By that time the second wave hadn't started. The second COVID wave had she came over. He says I'm coming from Chennai and I said you have to come early because I was going out of station on that day. So she came early in the morning and then she told me the story that she is there representing forbidden stories which is in partnership with Amnesty International, their lab and they have come across my number. And they suspect that my number was compromised. Now the interesting part of the story is she says can I have your phone? Can I download all the data on your iPhone onto my hard disk and we'll put it up on the cloud. I said why should I give it to you? Why should I trust you? She convinced me. Later on her forbidden story is a young journalist called Phineas Rukard. He's also written a long article. Another lady they all convinced me that my data would be safe. So I overcame my inhibitions and I said okay I'll do this in the public interest. Twice they went through all the data. They said you keep a copy in your laptop and they downloaded it not once but twice. And they said it'll take about a month and a half. Short enough it took that much. And then they said we have come across, your data has been, your phone has been compromised. And it happened between April, May and June 2018. That's the time that you are looking at the Amnesty story. Absolutely that was the time I had just started working on a regular basis with NewsClick. And then so they asked me, so one of the first questions I asked me, who has compromised? He says we don't know. Yes that is the big part of the story. That we don't know who has. That compromising the phone is something which even the experts are saying is almost impossible to prevent. And you know what is called zero's click. And I thought I had an iPhone and that Apple phone was supposed to be more secure than Android phones. That was the impression I got but I was told no. Later on I learned that this Pegasus software can infiltrate even your FaceTime account which is supposed to be as secure or more secure than signal. They don't keep any data. To come back to my story, it was only actually on Sunday night I realized it was Pegasus. But they were quite clear. They said what were the stories you were working on? And I said yes. My colleague Abir Das Gupta and I at that time we had put together a detailed story about the late Dhirubhai Ambani's overseas assets, foreign assets, how they had been moved from one tax haven to another tax haven. And we sent questionnaires to his two sons Mr. Mukesh Ambani, Mr. Anil Ambani. We got no response and then NewsClick in May 2018 published this story. And I was also working at that point of time on the book on Facebook that eventually got published in April 19. So I said as far as I remember these were the only art I think. But now it seems there's a pattern before the 2019 election just like Mr. Ashok Lavasa. At the time where he dissented against his colleagues about whether Mr. Narendra Modi and Mr. Amit Shah had violated the model code of conduct. You know the pattern is very clear. Prashant Kishore meets Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, his phone is being tracked. Everything is a pattern. Days after the former Chief Justice of India is accused of sexual harassment. The person who accuses him, her phone, her husband's phone is tracked. So it falls into a pattern. And interestingly, the minister, the 50-year-old former IAS officer Shwini Vaishnav and his wife, who's now not just handling the electronics and information technology, it's also the ministry of railways. Yeah, a very important ministry. At that point of time he hadn't joined the BJP. And it was the Biju Jantadal which actually vacated a Rajya Sabha seat for him, which the Chief Minister of Orissa, Navin Patnakset, after he received a phone call from Prime Minister Narendra Modi. So I think there's probably more to this story. We have to wait and watch. Well, let's put it this way. What we are seeing is tip of the iceberg because even the NSO hacking in India is tip of the iceberg. This is the more sophisticated, more than shall we say, the intrusive part which is being done. But there's a whole bunch of other things which is also continuing. So, you know, which is the old-fashioned style activities which are in progress. So what it does seem is this government is increasingly getting more and more upset with opposition to its views. And we know that, for instance, they really have decided not to have any compromise on any of the issues, but basically ramrodding whatever they want. And increasingly, when they face resistance, then I think their response is getting more and more of this kind. You know, I have a feeling that this kind of very defensive response denying that any law had been broken, that we had been doing it in an authorized manner, I think after a point it's going to be counterproductive. Simply because after the disclosure of these names, parliament is in session, but as you know, it's not functioned because the opposition was screaming and shouting, but because of the fact that this is not just concerning India. There are 45 countries from Azerbaijan to UAE to Saudi Arabia. And in fact, Jabal Khashoggi's wife and lawyer, they were apparently tracked using the software. This has become a huge international issue. When you have international publications, even if our government doesn't care about what the Washington Post publishes this is no longer a story confined to India alone. It's a global story. People are asking, how could Apple's systems be so compromised? And I think we're going to hear much more about this. Yes, and also, you know, this has been a part of Israel's foreign policy offensives in West Asia because the two parties, two countries which came close to Israel recently, as you know, the United Arab Emirates and the Saudis, both of them were clients of NSO first, you see. And then you have the thaw with Israel. Saudi is not as much as United Arab Emirates, but both of them are also against the Qataris. So in fact, that is the other target. And if you recall some time ago, there was a big hue and cry about the journalists of Al Jazeera, their phones also being compromised. Of course Jamal Khashoggi was a Washington Post columnist. So Washington Post obviously has that in mind. And as we know that that time itself, the NSO connection on Jamal Khashoggi was public. So it wasn't that secret that was known at that time also. But the interesting part is how closely NSO is also part of Israel's foreign policy. And I think those are also what you, when you talk about international ramifications. That's where you connect the dots and it's all, so it's going to be a big story. So international ramifications are also in that way, that when you look at geopolitics of all of this, then obviously the NSO Israel is a very important angle to analyze geopolitics itself. Thank you very much Praveen. It's been more than one and a half years I'm meeting you face to face. It's very good to actually be back in the studio. Back in the studio and we hope before or if a third wave strikes, we can do more of these shows. Let's take this window that's been given to us and see how best we can utilize. Thank you so much. This is all the time we have news click today. Do keep watching us and also follow me visiting our website. We will continue to cover the Pegasus hack in the coming days. And of course, Parujay Guhatakutta will be with us for many of these discussions.