The Indian Express / By Ravi Shankar
WhatsApp Pegasus controversy has stoked new fears about government surveillance. As terrorists use encryption to hide their plots, civil society groups cry violation of rights.
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The Wire / by The Wire Analysis
While the home ministry says reports have attempted to malign the Centre, we need to know who wanted to snoop on Indian targets and how successful they were.
New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government on Thursday sought a detailed response from WhatsApp over the issue of an Israeli spyware allegedly being used to target Indian journalists and human rights activists through its platform.
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The Wire / by Sukanya Shantha and Anuj Srivas
Just around the time when news of Israeli spyware Pegasus being used to target activists and human rights lawyers was breaking in India, Partho Sarothi Ray, a 42-year-old Kolkata-based molecular biologist, was dealing with another peculiar problem.
His Yahoo email account had received an alarming message from the technology company: “We believe your Yahoo account may have been the target of government-backed actors, which means that they could gain access to the information in your account.”
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The Telegraph / by The Editorial Board
No country that claims to uphold human rights deprives prisoners of the right to self-improvement or the peaceful habit of reading. Yet Shalini Gera, an activist who went to visit the lawyer, Sudha Bharadwaj, imprisoned in Pune’s Yerwada jail since October 2018 for alleged links with the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in the – rather enigmatic – Elgaar Parishad-Bhima Koregaon case, had her birthday gift of two books returned.
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The Times of India / by Srinath Vudali
Hyderabad: Three daughters of Pendyala Varavara Rao, key accused in the Elgar Parishad case, are happy they didn’t drop their surname after marriage.
As luck would have it, the decision to retain the “Pendyala” name has helped them meet Varavara Rao, who is lodged in Yerawada jail in Pune for the past one year.
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The Free Press Journal / by FPJ Web Desk
Facebook-owned WhatsApp on October 31 said Indian journalists, lawyers, human rights activists and politicians were among those globally spied upon by unnamed entities using an Israeli spyware Pegasus.
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8/11/2019
Countercurrents.org / Press Release by Pegasus Targeted Persons
We, the undersigned, have all received messages from WhatsApp Inc. over the last fortnight, informing us that our mobile devices were the target by a highly sophisticated cyberattack.
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The Indian Express / by Nandagopal Rajan
WhatsApp claims it detected the attack in May 2019 and found that NSO exploited a “buffer overflow vulnerability in WhatsApp VOIP stack” to send its Pegasus malware to the target devices, even without the users answering the calls they received.
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National Herald / by Aakar Patel
The Modi govt has not yet denied acquiring the spyware. In any case, it takes assistance of pvt companies and individuals in IT investigations; hacking is often unauthorised and conviction around 1%.
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Scroll.in / by Scroll Staff
In response to the Centre’s notice, Facebook-owned WhatsApp attached a vulnerability note filed in May and a letter sent in September about the privacy breach.
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The Asian Age / by The Asian Age
New Delhi: The activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan will move the Supreme Court for investigation into the hacking of the WhatsApp accounts of the human right activists, lawyers and journalists seeking to know whose phones were tapped and at whose instance.
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