Why the Pegasus Snooping is a Hacking of India’s Democracy
The widespread use of the Pegasus spyware in India suggests a disrespect for the institutions of democracy at the highest levels of government. What could be worse for the future of India’s democracy?
The India Forum, Aug 20, 2021

Hey, where the heck is my Pegasus?

I recently realized a bitter truth. I am not an important person at all. I thought I could be classified as a cool ‘been there, done that’ kind of guy. But no, I have not been to important enough ‘theres’, or done important enough ‘thats’.

In light of recent happenings and hackings, I figured you could only consider yourself a real success if your phone is hacked by the Pegasus spyware. Over 50,000 phones in 50 countries have apparently been hacked. And India is among the top 10 countries where phones of prominent personages have been pegasused. According to reports, at least 1000 phones have been listed as potential targets in India, of which 300 have been verified.

But my phone was not one of them. How disappointing.

The honour of being hacked has been awarded to noted journalists, lawyers, government officials, opposition party politicians, activists and a sitting judge of the Supreme Court. They had all been walking around (except for the sitting judge of course), unaware of the spyware that had taken over their phones.

As it is, today’s world is full of stress and distress. Rising prices, falling economies, global pandemics, local politics… Now we have one more thing to worry about – our phones being hacked. Imagine finding out that our favourite stress buster – that incredibly expensive, impossible-to-hack smart phone – is not that impossible to hack after all. And digital piracy could invade our privacy before we could stammer, ‘Is… Is… Israel?’.

When I first heard about Pegasus, I said to myself, ‘it must be those Greeks again, with their unbelievable stories of winged horses and Platonic philosophers’. But then I found out this hacking thingy was started by three bright young Israelis. Instead of joining a kibbutz, Niv, Shalev and Omri (NSO for short), started a nice little company that created not-so-nice spyware.

All spywares are bad, but this one in particular is quite sneaky and sleazy. This is evident from NSO’s official policy. ‘We sell Pegasus spyware only to governments’. Quite understandable, since we know what governments are made of. Sneaky and sleazy politicians.

Now you might think that people who make military grade spyware must be cruel and callous. Not so. The folks at NSO are really quite considerate. They know that potential targets of Pegasus are extremely important VIPs who will be too busy to click on new links or open unknown emails to get unwittingly hacked. So Pegasus uses a zero click process to get installed. This means you don’t have to do anything. When Pegasus is sent to your phone, it installs itself automatically and starts spying immediately.

Are you hearing this, all you people who make regular apps? No clicking and waiting, no complex step after step, no answering personal questions. So all you entertainment and food app companies, teach your apps to adapt to easy installation procedures. I find it so tedious to install apps on my phone. And I get nervous when I have to visit the appstore, wondering if it will ask for my already burdened credit card info again.

But why all this fuss about Pegasus? What exactly does it do? Apparently it is a modular malware, which means it could be customised to perform specific activities. Like intercepting communications. So when you use iMessage, Skype, Telegram, WeChat, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, there is an unseen someone, at an unknown somewhere, who is proof reading your private chats to see if you have made any spelling errors. Pegasus also downloads your browser histories and contact lists. I am sure this is just to keep you on the straight and narrow, to prevent you from befriending the wrong people.

And this spyware ‘borrows’ all your confidential data. Which is why Mr. Rahul Gandhi, one of this spyware’s high profile victims, is extremely worried. All his secret Italian family recipes might have been stolen. And some remote Gujarati dhaba might be serving his favourite spaghetti alla carbonara to unappreciative drunkards.

So with all this hacking going on left, right and center (well, mostly left-leaning journalists and activists), people started asking the million dollar question. Who was using this spyware in India? (Actually this might be a 61 million dollar question, since Mexico’s top security official admitted that two previous administrations had spent $61 million, around Rs. 452.8 crores, to buy Pegasus spyware.) Well, the NSO company admitted it sells Pegasus only to governments. So opposition parties had a strong suspicion that the BJP government might be behind the hacking. After all, most of the hacked people were not exactly friends of this government.

Like Mr. Ashok Lavasa, a nice election commissioner. He was so nice that he was about to be promoted as the next Chief of the Election Commission of India. But Mr. Lavasa had a bad habit of speaking his mind. He openly said that Prime Minister Modi had violated the Election Commission’s model code of conduct during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. And quite soon, instead of becoming Chief of the Election Commission as he was supposed to, Mr. Lavasa found that his name had been added to the Pegasus snoop list. Now this was probably just a big coincidence, but opposition parties refused to be reasonable. And refused to believe in coincidences.

Or take the tale of Mr. Prashant Kishor. Recent West Bengal assembly elections were heatedly contested by the BJP and TMC parties. In the middle of intense campaigning, Mr. Kishor, the main election strategist for the TMC, found that his phone had been broken into by the Pegasus spyware. This was proved by digital forensics conducted by Amnesty International’s Security Lab. Of course the TMC party raised a ruckus over this, saying that all their secret election strategies had been stolen. But think about it, if the BJP had hacked Mr. Kishor’s phone and were privy to TMC’s secret strategies, why did they lose so badly in West Bengal? The only logical explanation for this is that people of West Bengal suffer from a condition known as TMT (too much Tagore).

But the central government denies it was behind the Pegasus snooping. Which makes the whole thing more alarming and sinister. Remember NSO sells this spyware only to governments. This means that if the BJP government was not behind the snooping, then it must have been a foreign government.

Opposition parties boycotted an entire parliament season in protest. The media has been asking loud questions. The Supreme Court has taken note. But like any other major controversy, like black money accounts of Indians in Swiss banks, or how politicians had easy access to millions in new currencies after demonetization, this investigation too might go on and on and on.

But in the meantime, I want to do something. After hearing so much about all this hacking and tracking of important people’s phones, I honestly feel quite envious. All I have gotten so far are convincing texts from generous donors telling me that I have won uncountable dollars, and if I share bank and personal details to confirm I am me, dollars a-plenty will find their way into my account. Or more often, friendly emails from enterprising conmen, telling me that my email account has shown unusual activity, and if I do not click on the given link and verify my identity, my account will be locked and blocked. If only I had been a judge or journalist, an anarchist or activist, my phone would have been Pegasus-friendly by now. So I asked myself, ‘What should I do to make my phone spyware worthy?’

So here is my strategy.

Dear boys and girls of Israel based NSO, let me tell you why you should consider my phone for hacking. My phone has a few items you will surely be interested in – a rare rock version of Hava Nagila, really hilarious Jewish jokes including the one that goes A really funny thing happened to me on the way to the Synagogue, names of popular closet Hollywood celebrities who have not yet declared they are Jewish, and a list of things to do to brighten up your kibbutz stay. So kindly hack my phone, you will not be disappointed.

I also promise to write about more politically controversial topics. And hopefully, all these will be enough for my phone to get hacked when the new version, Pegasus 2.0, gets ready.

Reference
https://www.theindiaforum.in/article/why-pegasus-snooping-hacking-india-s-democracy.