India tried to hack phones of Kashmiri leaders

SRINAGAR: An India-based government agency that is also believed to be a client of Israeli company NSO Group reportedly made hacking attempts on phones of over 25 Hurriyat leaders hailing from Indian occupied Kashmir between 2017 and mid-2019.

According to leaked record reviews by The Wire, besides Delhi-based Kashmiri journalists, more than 25 people from the held Kashmir Valley were selected as potential targets of intrusive surveillance.

The France-based journalism non-profit, Forbidden Stories, and Amnesty International accessed a massive list of 50,000 numbers which are believed to have been selected as potential targets of surveillance by 10 countries.

The records were then shared with a group of 16 media houses across the world –including The Wire – who worked collaboratively to investigate the scope of this intended or actual surveillance over several months in an initiative termed as the Pegasus Project.

Of these, The Wire was able to conduct forensic analysis on the phones of two – Hurriyat leader Bilal Lone and the late Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The Israeli firm, however, has denied that the records accessed by the Pegasus Project have anything to do with surveillance.

“It is not a list of targets or potential targets of NSO`s customers, and your repeated reliance on this list and association of the people on this list as potential surveillance targets is false and misleading,” NSO said in a letter to the Pegasus Project on Tuesday.

Before the government of India revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional status in August 2019 and jailed hundreds of political opponents, dissidents and activists, Lone had formed a political outfit of his own, the Peoples Independent Movement, “to avoid confusion” with the Peoples Conference, which is headed by his brother Sajad Lone.

“I used to hear rumours about phone tapping. It never occurred to me that I also may be a target. But I am too small a person to do anything about it,” said Lone.

Geelani’s phone showed clear signs of Pegasus spyware activity between February 2018 and January 2019, forensic analysis showed, according to the publication's report. The days and months in which the infection was detected on his phone match with his appearance in the leaked data.