A good chunk of the journalists who appear in the records are based out of the national capital and work with prominent organisations.
Days after a team of researchers mapped all the known targets — celebrities, journalists and human rights activists — whose devices were hacked globally via Pegasus, an explosive report claiming the use of the controversial software, developed by Israeli company NSO Group, to hack phones of 40 Indian journalists. According to The Wire, verified phone numbers of 40 Indian journalists associated with top media houses appeared on a leaked list of potential targets for surveillance. The report further alleged that some of them were successfully spied upon by an unidentified agency using Pegasus. The leaked data includes phone numbers of like the Hindustan Times, including executive editor Shishir Gupta, India Today, Network18, The Hindu and Indian Express. The presence of a phone number in the data does alone not reveal whether a device was infected with Pegasus or subject to an attempted hack. However, the Pegasus Project, a consortium of international news organisations, believes the data is indicative of potential targets identified in advance of possible surveillance attempts. Two founding editors of The Wire are on this list, as is its diplomatic editor and two of its regular contributors, including Rohini Singh. Singh’s number appears after she filed back-to-back reports on the business affairs of Home Minister Amit Shah’s son, Jay Shah, and Nikhil Merchant, a businessman who is close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and while she was investigating the dealings of a prominent minister, Piyush Goyal, with businessman Ajay Piramal, The Wire said. The number of former Indian Express journalist Sushant Singh appears on the list in mid-2018, at a time when he was working on an investigation into the controversial Rafale aircraft deal with France, besides other stories. Digital forensics conducted on Singh’s current phone showed signs of Pegasus infection earlier this year. The Wire said the list of journalists to emerge from the Pegasus Project’s reporting cannot be considered exhaustive list or even a representative sample of reporters subject to official snooping as it is limited to an analysis of one leaked dataset over a narrow time period and covering only one potential vector of surveillance, i.
