The Supreme Court has given its verdict on the petitions for investigation of the Pegasus espionage case. The court has constituted an expert committee to investigate the matter, which will work under the chairmanship of retired Supreme Court Justice RV Raveendran. The court has asked this committee to investigate the allegations related to Pegasus and submit the report to the court. After 8 weeks, the matter will be heard again.
The Supreme Court has said that everyone's privacy should be protected. Let us tell you that many journalists and activists had filed applications in the Pegasus case. Their demand was that the investigation should be conducted under the supervision of the Supreme Court judge.
The petitioners also said that spying with military-grade spyware is a violation of the right to privacy. Hacking the phones of journalists, doctors, lawyers, activists, ministers and leaders of opposition parties is a compromise on the right to freedom of speech.
An international group of investigative journalists claims that Pegasus, the spy software of the Israeli company NSO, spied 50,000 people in 10 countries. In India also 300 names have come up, whose phones were monitored. These include ministers in the government, leaders of the opposition, journalists, lawyers, judges, businessmen, officers, scientists and activists.
According to cyber security research group Citizen Lab, hackers use different methods to install Pegasus on a device. One way is to send an "exploit link" via message to the target device. As soon as the user clicks on this link, Pegasus is automatically installed on the phone.
In 2019, when Pegasus was installed on devices via WhatsApp, hackers took a different approach. At that time, hackers took advantage of a bug in the video call feature of WhatsApp. The hackers made video calls to the target phone through a fake WhatsApp account. During this time, Pegasus was installed on the phone through a code.
