On October 27 last year, the Supreme Court had appointed an expert committee headed by former Supreme Court judge, Justice RV Raveendran, and assisted by Alok Joshi (former IPS Officer) and Dr. Sundeep Oberoi, Chairman, Sub Committee in (International Organisation of Standardisation/International Electro-Technical Commission/Joint Technical Committee).
In January this year, the expert committee constituted by the apex court had issued a public notice seeking details from citizens who have a reasonable cause to suspect that their devices were compromised by the Pegasus spyware.
So far, at least 13 people, including journalists N Ram, Siddharth Varadarajan and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta have deposed before the committee.
Recently, in early February, this year, a Special Court under the National Investigation Agency (NIA) Act allowed the investigating agency to submit seized mobile phones of seven accused from the Bhima Koregaon case of 2018 to the Supreme Court appointed technical committee probing the Pegasus spyware scandal.
Israel based spyware firm NSO is best known for its Pegasus spyware, which it claims is sold only to “vetted governments” and not to private entities, though the company does not reveal which governments it sells the controversial product to.
An international consortium, including the Indian news portal The Wire, had recently released a series of reports indicating that the said the software may have been used to infect the mobile devices of several persons including Indian journalists, activists, lawyers, officials, a former Supreme Court judge and others.
The reports had referred to a list of phone numbers that were selected as potential targets. Upon analysis by a team from Amnesty International, some of these numbers were found to have traces of a successful Pegasus infection, while some showed attempted infection, the reports had said.
A slew of petitions then came to be filed before the top court seeking probe into the allegations.
The petitioners included advocate ML Sharma, Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas, Director of Hindu Group of publications N Ram and founder of Asianet Sashi Kumar, Editors Guild of India, journalists Rupesh Kumar Singh, Ipsa Shatakshi, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, SNM Abidi and Prem Shankar Jha
Source: Barandbench
