Chennai: Congress leader and former Union Minister P Chidambaram has asked why is it so difficult for the government of India to give a straight answer as to whether it is a client of the Israeli firm NSO Group that sells the surveillance spyware Pegasus.
Stating that the NSO Group had 40 governments and 60 agencies as its clients, the former Home and Finance Minister said, “A simple question: was the government of India one of the forty? Why is it so difficult for the government of India to give a straight answer to that simple question?”
Afer an international media consortium had reported that over 300 verified Indian mobile phone numbers were on a list of potential targets for surveillance using Israeli firm NSO’s Pegasus spyware, the issue has snowballed into a major political crisis in the country.