WhatsApp spyware: 17 confirmed cases of activists, lawyers, scholars targeted in India
Scroll.in
October 31, 2019
Seventeen individuals including human rights activists, scholars and journalists have so far confirmed to Scroll.in that they were targeted by a spyware on the messaging platform WhatsApp. Some of them suggested that Indian government agencies may have been involved in the surveillance, as they were told by a Canada-based cyber security group that is assisting WhatsApp in investigating the spyware attack.
Three lawyers who were targeted linked the security breach to the Bhima Koregaon case, in which 10 human rights activists were arrested last year on charges of links with a banned Maoist outfit.
WhatsApp on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against NSO Group, an Israeli cyber intelligence firm whose spyware Pegasus was used to target around 1,400 users globally during a two-week period in May. NSO Group has disputed the allegations but said it has sold its spyware only to government agencies.
At least two dozen Indian journalists, academics, Dalit activists and lawyers may have been targeted, The Indian Express reported on Thursday. The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has asked WhatsApp for a response on the security breach by November 4, News18 reported. Ravi Shankar Prasad, who is in charge of the ministry, said the government is concerned at the breach, and that state agencies have a well-established protocol for interception for clearly stated reasons in the national interest.
The Internet Freedom Foundation called for an urgent official disclosure on whether and how the spyware was used in India. “The Government of India must issue an official public statement providing complete information,” the organisation said, calling for surveillance reform. “The Government must also clarify which law empowers it to install such spyware.”
The targets Scroll.in spoke to were alerted by Citizen Lab, the University of Toronto’s cyber security group, some time around late September and early October. Citizen Lab said that after the incident in May, it had volunteered to help WhatsApp trace the breaches that targeted human rights activists and journalists. Over 100 such cases were identified in at least 20 countries, the group said.
Here’s what the 17 people Scroll.in spoke to said about the calls they received from Citizen Lab informing them that they were targeted using the spyware:
Shalini Gera, Chhattisgarh-based activist
Shalini Gera of the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group said that when John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab contacted her in the first week of October, she first googled and convinced herself of his credibility before taking him seriously.
“I was really surprised when he told me the targeting was done between February and May this year,” she said. “As you know, I was persecuted by the Chhattisgarh police two years ago but now I assumed I was of no interest to the government. Then, it struck me that this could be because of the Bhima Koregaon case, I am involved in the case as Sudha’s lawyer.”
Sudha Bharadwaj, also a lawyer, is one of the accused in the Bhima Koregaon case.
When she asked him who was responsible for the hacking, Scott-Railton told Gera that “the software costs millions of dollars, and it cannot be your neighbourhood crank using it against you. It has to be someone with a lot of resources, like the state.”“So I guess it is the Indian state,” Gera said. “I don’t think I am of interest to any other state.”
Nihalsing Rathod, Nagpur-based lawyer
Advocate Nihalsing Rathod, who heads the Human Rights Law Network in Nagpur, alleged that the incriminatory letters cited as evidence in the Bhima Koregaon case may have been planted by government agencies through the spyware. Rathod said Citizen Lab got in touch with him on October 7, he spoke to the group on October 14, and he also received the official communication from WhatsApp about the security breach on October 29.
Rathod is a lawyer for accused Surendra Gadling in the Bhima Koregaon case. Police claim to have recovered several letters from the computers, pen drives and memory cards of the 10 activists arrested in the case since June 2018. The letters allegedly hinted at an intricate Maoist conspiracy todestabilise the country, dislodge the Bharatiya Janata Party government and assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Asked about the probable cause for him being a target, Rathod told Scroll.in he suspects this is related to the case. “I have reason to believe that the Bhima Koregaon case is based on the letters which were planted through this route or some other route by government agencies itself,” Rathod said. “The ridiculous contents of those letters make it more apparent.”
“My senior, [advocate] Surendra Gadling, used to receive similar calls and messages and that is perhaps how they managed to plant those stupid letters on him,” Rathod said. “It all seems connected to the Bhima Koregaon case.”
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