January 4, 2024

As recently as three months ago, the iPhones of some Indian journalists were targeted with Pegasus spyware, apparently by the government of India. The iPhones, which were sought to be monitored, included those of Anand Mangnale, the South Asia editor at The Organised Crime and Corruption Report Project (OCCRP), and Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, London based civil liberties group Amnesty International said in a statement.

“Our latest findings show that increasingly, journalists in India face the threat of unlawful surveillance simply for doing their jobs, alongside other tools of repression including imprisonment under draconian laws, smear campaigns, harassment, and intimidation,” said Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, Head of Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

In October 2023, Apple reportedly notified more than 20 journalists, and opposition politicians in India, that their iPhones may have been targeted by “state-sponsored attackers”.

A day after Apple’s warning, “officials under Prime Minister Narendra Modi promptly took action — against Apple,” The Washington Post reported last week. The officials summoned an Apple security expert from outside the country to a meeting in New Delhi, where government representatives pressed the official “to come up with alternative explanations for the warnings to users.” The visiting Apple official did not change the company’s warnings.

 But U.S. social media platforms and other big tech firms, “protective of their position in one of the world’s largest markets, have often given Modi and his allies what they want,” The Post reported.

India is already the largest market, in terms of users, for Facebook and WhatsApp, owned by Meta Platforms. The country is forecast to account for 10% of Apple’s total sales in 2025, up from 4% in 2023, according to Wall Street analysts.

“Despite repeated revelations, there has been a shameful lack of accountability about the use of Pegasus spyware in India which only intensifies the sense of impunity over these human rights violations,” Amnesty’s Ó Cearbhaill said in a statement.

In June 2023, Amnesty’s Lab observed renewed Pegasus spyware threats towards individuals in India, during a regular technical monitoring exercise. Months earlier there were media reports that the Indian government was seeking to procure a new commercial spyware system.

Amnesty undertook a forensic analysis on the phones of individuals around the world who received these notifications, including Varadarajan and Mangnale. The analysis found traces of Pegasus spyware activity on devices owned by both Indian journalists.

Amnesty conducted the investigation in partnership with The Washington Post and nonprofit Reporters Without Borders, which is based in Paris.

The attempted targeting of Mangnale’s phone happened while he was working on a story about an alleged stock manipulation by Adani Group, a large multinational conglomerate in India, The Post reported. The targeting was done with a zero-click malicious software that enables spyware to be installed on a device without requiring any user action from the target, such as clicking on a link.

A spokeswoman for Adani denied that the group was involved in any hacking effort . She also criticized The Post for asking whether the Adani Group was involved in, or had knowledge of, the hacking attempts against OCCRP. She stated that the Group finds “it disturbing and inappropriate that you would make an attempt to draw our name into this specious construct…The Adani Group operates with the highest level of integrity and ethical standards.”

OCCRP, where Mangnale works, is a nonprofit investigative reporting platform for a network of media centers and journalists, mainly in the U.S. and Western Europe.  

In October 2022, OCCRP reported, based on analysis of commercial trade databases, that India’s main domestic intelligence agency, the Intelligence Bureau, got a shipment of hardware from NSO Group, which makes the Pegasus spyware. The hardware matched the description of equipment used to run the Pegasus spyware system in India in 2017.

The earliest Pegasus attacks in India, identified by Amnesty, occurred in July 2017. Amnesty documented how Varadarajan’s phone was targeted and infected with Pegasus spyware in 2018.

His devices were later forensically analysed by a technical committee established in 2021 by the Supreme Court of India. While the committee concluded its investigation in 2022, the Supreme Court has not made the findings public. The court noted that the Indian authorities “did not cooperate” with the investigations, Amnesty reported.

Siddharth Varadarajan was targeted again with Pegasus on October 16, 2023.

Pegasus and other spyware products are sold only to government intelligence and law enforcement agencies “for the sole purpose of fighting terror and major crime,” NSO said in a statement. NSO “has no visibility to the targets, nor to the collected intelligence.”

Indian officials have provided no clarity or transparency on whether they have procured or used the Pegasus spyware in India, Amnesty notes.

Amnesty has called for the findings of the Supreme Court Committee report on Pegasus use in India to be released immediately. It has also asked the Indian government to conduct “an immediate, independent, transparent, and impartial investigation into all cases of targeted surveillance, including into these latest revelations.”

Amnesty’s Ó Cearbhaill said in a statement that “Targeting journalists solely for doing their work amounts to an unlawful attack on their privacy and violates their right to freedom of expression. All states, including India, have an obligation to protect human rights by protecting people from unlawful surveillance.”  

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