Totally Concocted: Modi govt accused of planting evidence using Pegasus malware

[muriel_volestrangler]

More than 150 Indian journalists, politicians, lawyers, student leaders and activists have been identified by the Pegasus project as possible surveillance targets. Reporters at the Wire, an independent newspaper, are keeping a live list as they work through the fifty thousand phone numbers thought to have been compromised by the Israeli NSO Group’s spyware. Using a toolkit built by the Amnesty International Security Lab, they discovered that two of their founding editors’ devices were infected with the code. The software enables users to take control of other people’s smartphones: encrypted messages are visible to them, and cameras and microphones may be remotely accessed and switched on. The NSO Group says it only sells its spyware to ‘vetted governments’. The government in Delhi claims the Pegasus project is ‘bereft of facts’. Journalists have submitted pleas to the Supreme Court to investigate the allegations. They will be heard on 5 August.

The targets identified so far include several of those accused in the Elgar Parishad case. Elgar Parishad was an event held on New Year’s Eve 2017 to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon, in which 22 Dalit Mahars died fighting for the British East India Company against the Brahmin (and violently casteist) Peshwas. At the event, fights broke out between right-wing Hindus and Dalits. Over the following months, sixteen activists who had spoken at Elgar Parishad were accused of starting the violence and taken into custody or placed under house arrest. Documents allegedly found on their laptops were leaked to the press.

The documents seemed to reveal a plan to assassinate Narendra Modi; discussed buying arms and setting up guerrilla training camps; and named Dalit and Muslim student leaders as comrades with ties to the Congress party. It was sensational, with all the trappings of a classic conspiracy: a group of armed activists with links to the opposition, plotting to topple the government. The police called the evidence they had gathered ‘conclusive’; the BJP’s propaganda machine branded the accused as Naxalites. One of them, Sudha Bharadwaj, a trade union activist and lawyer, passed her defence team a handwritten note. ‘It is totally concocted,’ she wrote, ‘fabricated to criminalise me and other human rights lawyers, activists, organisations.’
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Another document found on Wilson’s computer appears to show minutes from a meeting at which the alleged conspirators planned to ‘intensify tactical training for women ... including booby traps/directional mines’. Arsenal identified it as one of three files placed on Wilson’s computer in the space of two minutes on the morning of 11 January 2018. They were even able to ‘capture a command-line syntax mistake (and quick correction) made by the attacker’. Arsenal then investigated the hard disk of the human rights lawyer and activist Surendra Gadling, and found the same hacker had accessed Gadling’s computer for over twenty months. Arsenal called it ‘one of the most serious cases involving evidence tampering’ they had seen.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/august/totally-concocted