November 4th Editorial

4th November 2019

TOPIC: Right to Privacy (Paper-II)

Discuss the need for the government to clarify its actions on the recently deployed Spyware. 

Introduction

The government’s reaction to messaging platform WhatApp’s revelation that Indian journalists and human rights activists were among some 1,400 people globally spied upon using a surveillance technology developed by Israel-based NSO Group is inadequate and, more, unfortunately, far from reassuring.  

Background

• Disclosure by Facebook-owned WhatsApp, which is suing the Israeli company in a California federal court for the hack, is a chilling reminder that nothing is private in the digital world, given the right tools.
• In this case, a malicious code, named Pegasus, exploited a bug in the call function of WhatsApp to make its way into the phones of those select users, where it would potentially have had access to every bit of information.
• But the disclosure raises a more worrying question: on whose directions were the Indian journalists and human rights activists spied upon?

Deployed spyware to snoop into the private lives of the public: 

• There are a few reasons why this question is important.
• One, this was not done with money in mind.
• Two, as the NSO says on its website, “NSO products are used exclusively by government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to fight crime and terror.”
• The NSO, by its own admission, sells its service only to government agencies.
• Three, those targeted include civil rights activists, lawyers, and journalists.
• Notably, some of them have legally represented activists arrested I the case related to the violence in Bhima Koregaon in 2018.
•  It is, therefore, extremely important for the government to clear the air on this issue in no uncertain terms especially when WhatsApp had given information to CERT-IN, a government agency, in May, even if without any mention of Pegasus or the extent of breach.
• It is all right to ask WhatsApp, as the Government has done, as to why the breach happened and what it is doing to safeguard the privacy of its users in India, estimated to be around 400 million.

Conclusion

It is imperative that the Government sends a strong message on privacy, something that the Supreme Court in 2017 declared to be intrinsic to life and liberty and therefore an inherent part of the fundamental rights. The first thing it could do is to answer categorically if any of the governmental agencies used NSO’s services.