# 18 Our State of Perpetual Surveillance

The Panopticon

Perpetual Surveillance and the Power of Knowledge

At the Jaipur Literature Festival last weekend, I had the opportunity to discuss the State of Surveillance with a stellar panel, consisting of retired Supreme Court judge, Madan Lokur, Member of Parliament, Shashi Tharoor, and journalist Swati Chaturvedi, who wrote the book, “I am a Troll”.

Inevitably, the discussion converged upon the Pegasus spyware, developed by the Israeli company NSO, and sold exclusively to governments. In 2019, a global group of media organisations found 300 Indian phones were listed as targets for Pegasus, including those belonging to 40 journalists. Amnesty International’s Security Laboratory examined 13 iPhones from Indians on this list, and found that 9 had been targeted, and 7 successfully infected. Android phone logs don’t record the same level of data as Apple software does, so the studies of 9 Android phones in India were only able to conclude that 1 phone had been tampered with.

Inevitably, the row around Pegasus reached Parliament, where the Government stonewalled the debate. There were vague assertions about nothing illegal having been done. Separately, in the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General refused to confirm or deny whether it had procured Pegasus or other software from Israel, leaning on the tired old crutch of national security, “The moment this information is divulged, terror networks may take pre-emptive or corrective steps.”