India surveilling high-profile journalists with Pegasus Spyware, reveals Amnesty
Israeli firm NSO Group, is used to gain access to someone's phone messages and emails, peruse photos, eavesdrop on calls, track locations and even film the owner with the camera Notably, the Pegasus spyware is only sold to governments or security agencies -- against journalists and activists in dozens of countries, including India. The investigation revealed that the Pegasus spyware had been extensively used against journalists and activists in dozens of countries, including India.
Amnesty said journalists Siddharth Varadarajan of The Wire and Anand Mangnale of The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) had been targeted with the spyware on their iPhones. In 2021, New Delhi was accused of using Pegasus spyware to surveil journalists, opposition politicians and activists, with leaked documents showing the spyware had been used against more than 1,000 Indian phone numbers.
Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, was among those targeted. PM Modi's government denied conducting "illegal surveillance" but refused to cooperate with a Supreme Court probe into the allegations, the findings of which have not been made public.
The OCCRP, one of the two target organisations named in Thursday's report, published an investigation in August into the financial dealings of Indian tycoon Gautam Adani, a key business ally of Modi. Gautam Adani's conglomerate shed more than $100 billion in value earlier this year after a US short-seller investment firm made explosive allegations of accounting fraud, which the Indian company dismissed as an organised "smear campaign".
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