New Delhi: Concerned by a ‘PR problem’, the Narendra Modi government is reported to be looking to spend up to $120 million (over Rs 986 crores) on new spyware sold by firms less exposed than Israel’s NSO Group which sells Pegasus, says a report by the Financial Times, based on inputs from sources it says are familiar with the move.
Pegasus is a military-grade spyware which can surveil targets with the help of their phones. In 2021, The Wire, along with an international consortium of news outlets led by French media non-profit Forbidden Stories, broke the story on how journalists’, opposition leaders’, government critics’ and activists’ phone numbers were on a list of presumed Pegasus targets accessed by Forbidden Stories. Forensic tests on various devices by Amnesty International’s Security Lab also revealed that some activists and journalists’ phones had the spyware active.
The NSO Group, which came under global and particularly US-led censure in the aftermath of the reports, maintains that it only sells its spyware to “vetted governments” but has declined to identify client countries.
Last year, the New York Times, which was not part of the Forbidden Stories consortium, reported from Jerusalem that India had indeed purchased Pegasus from Israel as part of a wider $2 billion defence deal in 2017.
At the Supreme Court hearings prompted by PILs filed by some of the victims and by media professionals demanding a probe, the Modi government cited ‘national security’ and said that it could not reveal whether it uses Pegasus. A Supreme Court-appointed technical committee headed by a retired judge to probe the allegations reported back last year that the government had refused to cooperate with its investigations. the committee also said it had found the presence of malware in at least two phones it had tested though it said it could not positively confirm whether this was Pegasus in the absence of more information.
The FT report says that “about a dozen competitors” – NSO rivals – are likely to join the bidding process.
The report notably says:
“Modi government officials have grown concerned about the “PR problem” caused by the ability of human rights groups to forensically trace Pegasus, as well as warnings from Apple and WhatsApp to those who have been targeted, according to two people familiar with the discussions.”
The two people mentioned above reportedly told the news outlet that such issues led the Modi government to “look elsewhere” for spyware.
Contracts that these sources said were likely to be drawn could begin from $16 million “and increasing to as much as $120 million over the next few years.”
The FT reported that many of the spyware sellers that Indian defence and intelligence officials are considering have the direct or implicit involvement of the Israeli military.
Read: The Wire’s coverage as part of the Pegasus Project and subsequent developments
Among the companies named is Intellexa, headquartered in Greece, which has created the Predator spyware with the involvement of Israeli military veterans. Predator already has a lengthy record of having been used in countries low on the human rights index, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Madagascar and Oman.
Also mentioned is Quadream, which reports have said was approved for sale to Saudi Arabia after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Another company purportedly on India’s list is Cognyte, “which was spun out of publicly traded Verint, and had its stock dumped by Norway’s sovereign wealth fund after an investigation by Meta found widespread abuse,” notes FT.
While talks within the defence ministry, headed by Rajnath Singh, are in “advanced stages,” formal ‘Requests for Proposal’ are still weeks away, the report says.
Quadream, Intellexa, Cognyte and the defence ministry either could not be reached or chose not to offer a comment to FT.
The report comes as the United States has led fresh attempts to clamp down on a largely unregulated spyware industry. US President Joe Biden signed an executive order on March 27 that prohibits the federal use of commercial spyware that authoritarian governments have used for surveillance.
On March 30, at the ‘Summit for Democracy’ that the US hosted – and Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at – the governments of Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, France, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the US said they had come together to develop and implement legal frameworks for the use of spyware.
“The misuse of these tools presents significant and growing risks to our national security, including to the safety and security of our government personnel, information, and information systems,” the White House noted in a joint statement released yesterday.
The FT report notes that many governments themselves have spyware tools developed by their own intelligence forces.