- Saturday, May 18, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Supreme Court of India while hearing a clutch of petitions on the Pegasus snooping row on Thursday (5) said “the allegations are serious if the media reports correct”.
Opposition politicians, advocates, journalists and a journalist’ body moved the apex court seeking a special probe into the allegations that opposition leaders, journalists and others were being targeted by the Narendra Modi government.
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A two-member bench comprising Chief Justice NV Ramana and Justice Surya Kanta is hearing the petitions.
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“Reports of snooping came in 2019, I do not know whether any efforts were made to get more information. I am not going into facts of each case, some people claim phones intercepted. There is Telegraph Act for complaints,” Ramana said.
The top court’s observation came in response to senior lawyer Kapil Sibal, who is representing the petitioners, saying that Pegasus is a rogue technology that enters our lives without our knowledge and is an assault on the privacy, dignity and values of the republic.
A global media probe involving a number of leading publications, including India’s The Wire, has disclosed that 300 phones in the country were on the list of potential targets of surveillance using Israeli spyware Pegasus. It has, however, not been established that all the phones were hacked.
Two petitions were filed in the Supreme Court on the case and they were by Left parliamentarian John Brittas and advocate ML Sharma. After them, veteran journalists N Ram and Sashi Kumar also sought a special investigation team headed by a sitting or former judge to look into the allegations.
Later, the editors’ guild also requested the top court to seek details from the central government on the spyware contract and a list of people who have been targeted.
