Pegasus Snooping in 2019: Did Modi Government Investigate? Not Really, Say RTIs
The article was originally published in The Quint. Read here.
“What happened to that?”
As heated arguments on the Pegasus snooping issue flew back and forth in the Supreme Court on Monday, 13 September, senior advocate Kapil Sibal asked a pertinent question.
He had been trying to establish to the judges how even the union government had acknowledged that the phones of Indian citizens had been targeted using the powerful Pegasus spyware, back in 2019, when the first revelations about this had been reported by The Indian Express.
On 31 October 2019, then-Union Law and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had openly said that the government “is concerned at the breach of privacy of citizens of India”.
On Twitter and in responses to Parliament, Prasad said the government would look into the issue, including by sending notices to WhatsApp and the NSO Group.
But as Sibal asked in the Supreme Court nearly two years later: What happened to that?
Continued…
