Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi raises Pegasus in House, Amit Shah loses cool seeks proof on allegations

Union home minister Amit Shah on Wednesday slammed  Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi's statement mentioning Pegasus spyware and said Parliament is not a place where one can make a comment without evidence. "The MP has made a serious allegation that there is Pegasus on his phone. You can not say this in the house," Amit Shah said during a debate on the drug menace in the Lok Sabha as the Congress MP asked how many drug mafias has the government caught using the Pegasus software that the "government used on political leaders and journalists," Gaurav Gogoi said.

As Amit Shah protested the statement, Gaurav Gogoi said, "If I have said anything wrong, then the government should say that they have not used Pegasus. For the unversed, a number of prominent news websites, including the Guardian and the Washington Post, published details of what they called global surveillance operations using Pegasus. The surveillance reportedly targets journalists, including over 40 journalists in India, activists and other key public figures. The reports say that over 10 governments, including India, are involved in surveillance of people using Pegasus spyware.Pegasus is a spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli company that specialises in what experts call cyber weapons. It first came to the limelight in 2016, when an Arab activist got suspicious after receiving a shady message. It was believed that Pegasus was targeting iPhone users. Several days after its discovery Apple released an updated version of iOS, which reportedly patched the security loophole that Pegasus was using to hack phones.However, a year later, security researchers found that Pegasus was equally capable of infecting Android phones. More security patches and more information trickled. Then in 2019, Facebook filed a case against NSO Group for creating Pegasus. The security researchers at Facebook were chasing Pegasus across their systems, and they found that the software was used to infect several journalists and activists in India. This was also the time when WhatsApp told the affected Indian users about it through a message.