Amnesty International has found evidence of journalists in India being targeted with Pegasus spyware. The discovery comes amid what the rights group claims is a “targeted crackdown on freedom of expression.”
The website of Israeli company NSO Group which features Pegasus spyware on a smartphone Spyware produced and sold by the Israeli company NSO Group has been found on the phones of journalists, activists and politicians High-profile journalists in India have been targeted with the invasive spyware Pegasus, according to a report published by Amnesty International on Thursday.
The civil rights watchdog carried out forensic investigations on the iPhones belonging to Siddharth Varadarajan, the founding editor of The Wire, and Anand Mangnale, the South Asia editor of The Organized Crime and Corruption Report Project (OCCRP).
“Our latest findings show that increasingly, journalists in India face the threat of unlawful surveillance simply for doing their jobs, alongside other tools of repression including imprisonment under draconian laws, smear campaigns, harassment, and intimidation,” Donncha O Cearbhaill, the head of Amnesty’s Security Lab, said.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
High-profile journalists in India have been targeted with the invasive spyware Pegasus, according to a report published by Amnesty International on Thursday.
“Our latest findings show that increasingly, journalists in India face the threat of unlawful surveillance simply for doing their jobs, alongside other tools of repression including imprisonment under draconian laws, smear campaigns, harassment, and intimidation,” Donncha O Cearbhaill, the head of Amnesty’s Security Lab, said.
Amnesty was unable to ascertain whether his phone was successfully compromised, but the attack came while Mangnale was working on a story about alleged stock manipulation by a large multinational conglomerate in India.
The Pegasus spyware was devised by Israeli company NSO Group and has been found to have been used on phones belonging to journalists and politicians worldwide — in both authoritarian regimes and democracies.
In response to the latest findings, the company told The Washington Post that it could not comment on specific customers, but that they were all “vetted law enforcement and intelligence agencies that license our technologies for the sole purpose of fighting terror and major crime.”
“Amnesty International is calling on all countries, including India, to ban the use and export of highly invasive spyware, which cannot be independently audited or limited in its functionality,” he added.
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