The ‘yes or a no’ the Court must ask about Pegasus Gautam Bhatia
https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/the-yes-or-a-no-the-court-must-ask-about-pegasus/article36953053.ece   OCTOBER 12, 2021

The issues before the Court were simple: did the Government of India authorise the use of Pegasus upon the individuals whose names had appeared in the list? If it did, was there any justification for the use of such intrusive surveillance upon individuals who, admittedly, were not accused of any wrongdoing? And if it did not, was it not a breach of the
Government’s constitutional obligations to protect its citizens from the use of military-grade surveillance by rogue actors?

..Throughout the hearings, the Government continued upon its track of evasion.. whenever the question of widespread and serious rights violations arises, the Government recites the words “national security” like a mantra, not simply to avoid providing answers, but to hint that even asking the question is somehow illegitimate. In this way, “national security” becomes a cloak for impunity.

A record of the hearings so far indicates that the Court has allowed the Government to get away with much of its evasion. Despite the passage of two and a half months, the Court is yet to pass anyconsequential orders 

On the last date of hearing, September 13, the Court indicated that it would establish a Committee to look into the matter.

In India, we have a long experience of “death by Committee”: issues that require urgent attention linger for many months in a Committee, and once public memory has dulled, are given a quiet burial.

We Thought It Was Fiction https://www.radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/we-thought-it-was-fiction/ 
September 18, 2021 Alfredo Lopez, Melanie Bush, Hamid Khan and Ken Montenegro, from "May First Movement Technology", discuss the threat posed by Pegasus, the malicious hacking software, and how the progressive and “alternatives” communities should organize to push back against this steady erosion of people’s rights, and work to end tech dominance and intrusion into our lives

Extracts: 

Techno-colonization is rapidly creating a world of haves and have-nots in its own culture and practice of profound dependency. Even those who don’t use technology and the internet are impacted by it in many aspects and in the control over their lives.

The governments usually don’t comment — this is spy activity, after all — and many “civil society” NGOs will only say that it provides needed software support for governments fighting terrorism, human trafficking, and other crimes. However, Pegasus has been found on the phones of thousands of activists, politicians, journalists, researchers and educators. 

For the most part, the victims are opponents or observers of very repressive governments in developing countries, which makes this mega-surveillance even more predictable.

Pegasus is a weapon that embattled governments use to keep tabs on and then repress their opponents.

It’s a nightmare for popular and liberation movements. Although activists have deployed social media in their liberation movements as in Egypt and other places, it has come back to haunt them once the tech driven stalker state has gathered, stored, and shared information on the activists and launched massive witch hunts.

The people most affected by this growth in surveillance, movements for social change, face a vexing contradiction: in a climate ravaged, capitalism collapsed world where society itself seems to be falling apart, how important is “privacy” and is privacy even the right framework for this fight?

How do you have a successful movement against a government and its policies while the government is examining, logging and analyzing every single thing you do and say?

The only answer to Pegasus, and the galloping intrusion it represents, is a multi-pronged response. There is no universal law on privacy, nor any real attempt to urge the world’s government to develop a law with some strength and specificity. The laws that exist, dis-unified and sometimes contradictory, are as toothless as a sloth. Pushing that, through organizations like the Association for Progressive Communications, is one prong of a potential effective approach. But to be effective, it must be blanket: no more spying software. Abolition. Period.

Perhaps most important, all organizing, education and lobbying must be internationally coordinated. A framework that demystifies and decolonizes the language that surrounds such tools to help communities understand its capacity and scale of harm. That would represent an act of growth, learning, and love; but the Pegasus adventure (taking advantage of disparate national laws and uncoordinated national movements) should teach us how important international coordination and solidarity are.

Email Poser from Hari DK

1) "But to be effective, it must be blanket: no more spying software. Abolition. Period."

We live in a path-dependent world. A lot of the acceleration of spying technologies has been in the aftermath of 9/11 and we should factor that into the explanation of its presence. Would you still support the abolition of spying software if it meant a 9/11 this year? This week? Tomorrow? Every day?

2) Keeping the above in mind, surely surveillance to a *reasonable extent *is the price we have to pay in order to secure ourselves from ourselves. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty".
Could I suggest that, if this is so, instead of a blanket abolition of spying, we should push for better and more oversight through proper governance and process?

3) If you say that better process on when and how to engage spying technology is not possible, then may I say to you - your agenda of "revolution" to achieve this seems to be much more impossible! What are you going to do - force every spying node on the Internet to decommission its tech? How? By pointing a gun to their head?

Cristine Dann:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/04/surveillance-state-september-11-panic-made-us-vulnerable It gives a very detailed account of how biased, excessive and either damaging or ineffective the state and corporate spying in the USA has been post 9/11.

how the spying potential of IT is abused by states is available from the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab ( https://citizenlab.ca/).

One of the few clever and positive uses of technology to keep people safe recently is the international anti-drug smuggling initiative reported on here -
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/sep/11/inside-story-most-daring-surveillance-sting-in-history 
In this instance, however, only those people who were known bad actors or in close contact with bad actors were targetted for surveillance - and this is how any legitimate surveillance operation should work.

Sadly, it is far more common for 'good actors'

No chance that the military-industrial complex (now including Big Tech) is about to stop working for and with the Market-State any where any time soon, and as demands for ethical behaviour don't cut any
ice on this issue as with climate change and so many others, I think the only realistic position for good actors, be they activists or journalists, is to assume that their digital communication devices can and will be hacked at any time, and to take every precaution accordingly.

"Why Abolition Is The Response To Surveillance" https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/2179387 

Hearing on the implications of the Pegasus spyware at Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, Parliamentary assembly Council of Europe https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=27455&LangID=E 

Statement by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet 14 September 2021

widespread use of the spyware commercialized by the NSO group, affecting thousands of people in 45 countries across four continents. The targeting of human rights defenders, journalists and politicians is just another example of how tools allegedly meant to address security risks can end up being weaponized against people with dissenting opinions.

Abuses facilitated by the surveillance industry have grown so common that only days before the Pegasus revelations, another report described opaque deals involving the marketing of a different spyware, Candiru. That spyware was said to have similarly targeted at least 100 human rights defenders and journalists in at least 10 countries.

Governments and companies have developed numerous surveillance tools, citing real security threats and noting the urgent need to fight criminal activity online and offline. And this surveillance industry has thrived in the absence of minimal levels of regulation and control at both national and global levels. A surveillance technology market has dangerously flourished in the shadows, far from justice oversight and public scrutiny –both in authoritarian countries and in democracies. The prevailing opacity and lack of regulation created the perfect conditions for broad security claims to be translated into new measures of repression.

RSF’s complaint in Paris and before the UN https://rsf.org/en/news/nsopegasus-17-journalists-7-countries-join-rsfs-complaint-paris-and-un 

Seventeen journalists from seven countries who were listed as potential or actual victims of Pegasus spyware have filed complaints with prosecutors in Paris, against NSO Group and all other persons the investigation will identify. 

RSF has also formally referred the cases of these 17 journalists to four UN special rapporteurs – the rapporteurs on freedom of opinion and expression, the right to privacy, human rights defenders, and protecting human rights while countering terrorism – asking them to seek explanations from those governments suspected of using Pegasus to spy on these journalists.

The Indian Journalists who have put their names to this complaint are:

• Swati Chaturvedi

• Sushant Singh

• Siddharth Varadarajan

• MK Venu

• Shubhranshu Choudhary