Hindustan Times / by HT Correspondent
Union home minister Amit Shah, on his maiden visit to the CRPF headquarters on Friday, asked the force to carry out an effective and decisive campaign against left wing extremism (LWE) in the next six months while stressing that “action needs to be taken against urban Naxals and their facilitators”.
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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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Sabrangindia / by Sabrangindia
The Whatsapp Snoopgate issue that spread like wildfire, not only had the general public under its attack, but lawyers defending the human rights activists arrested under the controversial Bhima Koregaon case have also confirmed that their phones were being targeted by Pegasus, a the surveillance software developed by Israeli company NSO group that came to be in question, The Huffington Post report.
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The Wire / by Sukanya Shantha
Nihalsing Rathod says he was first contacted by CitizenLab researchers, who have done work on Pegasus, and then later by WhatsApp about his phone being compromised.
Mumbai: Over the last two years, Nagpur-based human rights lawyer Nihalsing Rathod has received receiving calls on WhatsApp from unknown numbers. These calls would be made from international numbers, and would invariably turn out to be a group call.
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Scroll.in / by Scroll Staff
Nihalsing Rathod and Adivasi rights activist Bela Bhatia were among the targets of the security breach notified about the problem by the messaging platform.
The incriminatory letters cited as evidence in the Bhima Koregaon case may have been planted by government agencies through a spyware that targeted Indian journalists and human rights activists on WhatsApp, Nagpur-based advocate Nihalsing Rathod told Scroll.in on Thursday.
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News18 / by PTI
The state government told the court that activists Arun Ferreira, Sudha Bharadwaj and Vernon Gonsalves are active members of frontal groups funded by the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist).
Mumbai: The Maharashtra government on Tuesday opposed bail pleas filed by three activists arrested last year for alleged Maoist links and involvement in the Koregaon Bhima caste violence case.
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Millenniumpost / by Editorial Board
Maoism has been a persistent threat to India’s internal security and any effort to contain the menace is more than necessary. But recent times, however, have seen an apparent evolution of this idea to include unsuitable rebels and questioning voices that are boldly directed at the establishment. The Bhima Koregaon case comes back to highlight with the September 10 incident when a team of Pune police raided the home of Delhi University Associate Professor Hany Babu M T in Noida for more than six hours in connection with the Bhima Koregaon violence case.
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Feminism In India / by Namrata Mishra
On the night of 6th August, while updating myself with what’s happening around in the country, debates around the passing of the contentious UAPA Bill seemed to be ubiquitous. As soon as I read the word UAPA, comes to my mind the arrest of five human rights activists: Arun Ferreira, Gautam Navlakha, Varavara Rao, Sudha Bharadwaj and Varun Gonsalves, who were arrested last year under this Act without any stark evidence by the police who could not explain the reason for arresting these activists. These human rights defenders were termed as “maoists” and “deshdrohis (anti-national)” by the BJP government.
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The Leaflet / by A J Philip
It is easy for the police to conclude that if I have read dozens of detective novels, which are mostly about murders, I have a murderous inclination. The truth is that I can’t even slaughter a chicken, though I may relish it when it is roasted and served on the table.
Dear Justice Sarang Kotwal,
First of all, I owe an apology to you. I was misled by a news-report that you questioned why Vernon Gonsalves, an academic accused of being an urban Naxal, kept the voluminous Russian Classic, Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, in his personal collection of books.
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Newslaundry / by Prateek Goyal
The Pune Police used patriotism to rope in staff members and students from colleges run by Deccan Education Society in Pune to covertly translate chargesheets in the Koregaon-Bhima Elgar Parishad case.
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