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Monday, July 19 2021 Dive In |
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That’s Jamia Millia professor Farhat Basir Khan paying tribute to his former student Danish Siddiqui—who was killed by the Taliban on Friday while embedded with the Afghan military at Spin Boldak on the Pakistan border. The photojournalist’s death was widely mourned—with peers, politicians and others offering tribute to his Pulitzer-prize winning work. And even the Taliban issued an apology of sorts. He was laid to rest at the Jamia Millia Islamia graveyard on Sunday night. Reuters put together a collection of his finest images. |
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An epic-sized phone-hacking scandal |
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The TLDR: Paris-based media non-profit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International accessed a global database of more than 50,000 phone numbers—which may have been targeted by a powerful spyware tool called Pegasus. In India, these include phones of 40 journalists, three opposition leaders, serving government ministers, current and former officials of security organisations and businesspersons. We look at who was targeted and how Pegasus works.
What happened here, exactly?
Point to note: Here’s the big picture on who this global database included:
A bit of recent history to note: Back in 2019, WhatsApp informed more than two dozen Indians that their phones had been targeted by spyware. A Canadian-based NGO Citizen Lab confirmed that the tool used was none other than Pegasus. The targets included activists, journalists, human rights lawyers, and some of the accused in the Bhima Koregaon case.
So what is this Pegasus?The spyware tool is made by an Israeli company called NSO which sells spyware like Pegasus to governments to help them catch terrorists and criminals—or so it claims. The secretive firm operated entirely under the radar until 2016, when its product was detected on the iPhone of a human-rights activist now in prison in the UAE. The company primarily built its reputation on the ability to crack Apple’s rigorous privacy measures. Also this:
Most of the numbers came from 10 countries including India, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, Mexico and Rwanda. So not parts of the world known for their commitment to democracy—and all of them are known clients of the NSO.
The WhatsApp lawsuit: In 2019, the company sued NSO in San Francisco, accusing it of targeting 1,400 of its users—including “100 journalists, prominent female leaders, several people who had been targeted with unsuccessful assassination attempts, political dissidents and human rights activists — as well as their families.” NSO has thus far failed to shut down the lawsuit.
Point to note: As the Financial Times reports, “Through Pegasus, Israel has acquired a major presence—official or not—in the deeply classified war rooms of unlikely partners, including, researchers say, Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.” The Middle East accounts for more than half the revenue of this billion-dollar company.
The NSO response: to the latest revelation was to “firmly deny” the “false claims,” dismissing the media coverage as a kind of “conspiracy theory” peddling a “salacious narrative.” It made clear that it does not operate the technology it sells, and has shut down several customer relationships where it has detected misuse of data. In sum, it claims to be the ‘good guy’:
FYI: in its response to WhatsApp’s users, NSO acknowledged that its software was used to access its users' data.
Ok, but what does Pegasus actually do? |
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