Indian government dismisses allegations of any kind of surveillance on its part on specific people.
More than 300 verified mobile phone numbers, including two serving ministers, over 40 journalists, three opposition leaders, and one sitting judge besides scores of business persons and activists in India could have been targeted for hacking through Israeli spyware sold only to the government agencies, and international media consortium reported on Sunday.
The government, however, dismissed allegations of any kind of surveillance on its part on specific people, saying it "has no concrete basis or truth associated with it whatsoever".
Asserting that "India is a robust democracy that is committed to ensuring the right to privacy to all its citizens as a fundamental right", the government dismissed the media report as an attempt to playing "the role of an investigator, prosecutor as well as jury".
The report was published by The Wire news portal from India as also 16 other international publications including Washington Post, The Guardian, and Le Monde, as media partners to an investigation conducted by Paris-based media non-profit organization Forbidden Stories and rights group Amnesty International into a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers from across the world that are believed to have been the target of surveillance through Pegasus software of Israeli surveillance company NSO Group.
The Wire reported that forensic tests conducted as part of the media investigation project on a small cross-section of phones associated with these numbers revealed clear signs of targeting by Pegasus spyware in 37 phones, of which 10 are Indian.
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