“Allegations Serious If Media Reports Correct”: Supreme Court On Pegasus: 10 Points

New Delhi: The allegations of Pegasus spyware getting used to focus on opposition leaders, journalists et al. are “serious if newspaper reports are correct”, the Supreme Court said today because it heard a batch of petitions seeking a special probe into the scandal.

Here’s your 10-point cheatsheet to the present big story:

• A two-member bench, headed by judge NV Ramana, asked all petitioners to serve a replica of their petitions to the govt . Justice Surya Kant is that the second judge on the bench. The court will take up the petitions again on Tuesday, saying the centre has got to present at the hearing.
• The Editors’ Guild of India, in its petition filed two days ago, requested the Supreme Court to hunt details from the govt on the spyware contract and an inventory of these targetted.
• Two other petitions were filed earlier within the Supreme Court on an equivalent case, one by CPM MP John Brittas and therefore the other by advocate ML Sharma.
• Earlier, senior journalists N Ram and Sashi Kumar had sought a Special Investigation Team (SIT) headed by a sitting former judge into the snooping allegations. “The government must tell us how they got into the contract, who they purchased this,” their lawyer Kapil Sibal said today. judge Ramana asked them, “In 2019 itself, problems with Pegasus were reported. Why come to us after two years?” When Mr Sibal acknowledged that there are reports of an old number of a former Supreme Court judge and phones of registrars being on the list of potential targets of snooping, the judge said, “Truth has got to begin . we do not know whose names are there,” it said.
• “I understand tapping phones of terrorists, etc. But here it’s ordinary citizens who may have views opposing the govt . Then it is a matter of constitutionality and criminality,” the lawyer of journalists SNM Abdi and Prem Shankar Jha told the court today.
• Mamata Banerjee has found out a commission of inquiry – consisting of retired Calcutta supreme court judge Jyotirmay Bhattacharya and retired Supreme Court Justice MB Lokur – to probe the scandal.
• The global media investigation involving several leading publications, including The Wire, has disclosed that 300 phones from India were revealed to get on the list of potential targets on the leaked database of NSO, which supplies Israeli spyware Pegasus. it’s not established, however, that each one the phones were hacked.
• Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, ace poll strategist Prashant Kishor, two serving Union Ministers, ex-Election Commissioner, 40 journalists among others were found to get on alleged leaked list of potential targets.
  Dismissing demands for a search , the govt has maintained that there has been no unauthorised interception by its agencies, adding that allegations regarding government surveillance on specific people has no concrete basis or truth related to it whatsoever.
• The NSO group, which sells Pegasus to governments and government agencies only, says it’s not connected to the leaked database of phone numbers. the govt has said there’s “no substance” in these reports.