This is no ordinary spying: Our most intimate selves are now exposed

The Pegasus project shows we could all soon be ruled by states that know everything about us, while we know less and less about them

Here in India, the summer of dying is quickly morphing into what looks very much like a summer of spying.

The second wave of coronavirus has retreated, after leaving an estimated 4 million Indians dead. The official government figure for the number of deaths is a tenth of that – 400,000. In Narendra Modi’s dystopia, even as the smoke dwindled in crematoriums and the earth settled in graveyards, gigantic hoardings appeared on our streets saying “Thank you Modiji”. (An expression of the people’s gratitude-in-advance for the “free vaccine” that remains largely unavailable, and which 95% of the population is yet to receive.) As far as Modi’s government is concerned, any attempt to tabulate the true death toll is a conspiracy against India – as if the millions more who died were simply actors who lay down spitefully in the shallow, mass graves, or floated themselves into rivers disguised as corpses, or cremated themselves on city sidewalks, motivated solely by the desire to sully India’s international reputation.

This same charge has now been levelled by the Indian government and its embedded media against the international consortium of investigative journalists from 17 news organisations who worked with Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International to break an extraordinary story about global surveillance on a massive scale. India appears in these reports, alongside a group of countries whose governments appear to have bought Pegasus spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance firm. NSO, for its part, has said that it sells its technology only to governments that have been vetted for their human rights record and undertake to use it only for purposes of national security – to track terrorists and criminals.

The other countries that seem to have passed NSO’s human rights test include Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Mexico. So who, exactly, has agreed upon the definition of “terrorists” and “criminals”? Is this simply up to NSO and its clients?

Pegasus, we are told, can be installed in a targeted phone with just a missed call. Imagine that. A payload of invisible spyware delivered on the missile of a missed call. An ICBM like no other. One that is capable of dismantling democracies and atomising societies without the bother of red tape – no warrants, no weapons agreements, no oversight committees, nor any kind of regulation whatsoever. Technology is value- neutral of course. It isn’t anybody’s fault.

The Pegasus scandal has now created an uproar in the monsoon session of parliament. The opposition has demanded that the home minister step down. Modi’s ruling party, comfortable in its brute majority, fielded Ashwini Vaishnaw – newly sworn in as the minister for railways, for communications and for information technology – to defend the government in parliament.

If you set aside the bluster and obfuscating bureaucratese of the government’s many statements, you will find no outright denial of the purchase and use of Pegasus. NSO hasn’t denied the sale either. The government of Israel has opened an inquiry into the allegations of abuse of the spyware, as has the French government. In India, the money trail will, sooner or later, lead us to the smoking gun. But where will the smoking gun lead us?

So, what are we to make of Pegasus? To cynically dismiss it as a new technological iteration of an age- old game in which rulers have always spied on the ruled would be a serious mistake. This is no ordinary spying. Our mobile phones are our most intimate selves. They have become an extension of our brains and bodies. Illegal surveillance through mobile phones isn’t new in India. Every Kashmiri knows that. Most Indian activists do, too. However, for us to cede to governments and corporations the legal right to invade and take over our phones is to voluntarily submit ourselves to being violated.

The revelations of the Pegasus project show that the potential threat of this spyware is more invasive than any previous form of spying or surveillance. More invasive even than the algorithms of Google, Amazon and Facebook, inside whose warp and weft millions live their lives and play out their desires. It’s more than having a spy in your pocket. It’s like having the love of your life – or worse, having your own brain, including its inaccessible recesses – informing on you.

We will have to migrate back to a world in which we are not controlled and dominated by our intimate enemy – our mobile phones. We have to try to rebuild our lives, struggles and social movements outside the asphyxiating realm of digital surveillance. We must dislodge the regimes that are deploying it against us. We must do everything we can to prise open their grip on the levers of power, everything we can to mend all that they have broken, and take back all they have stolen.

The revelations of the Pegasus project show that the potential threat of this spyware is more invasive than any previous form of spying or surveillance. More invasive even than the algorithms of Google, Amazon and Facebook. It’s more than having a spy in your pocket.