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DMK MP Thol Thirumaavalavan has written a letter to the Attorney General AG Venugopal seeking consent to initiate criminal contempt proceedings against directors of the NSO Group, Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba and Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla in the Pegasus Snoopgate case.

NSO Group, is an Israel based cyber weapons development company which has developed the Pegasus Spyware.

Thirumaavalavan in the letter addressed to the Attorney General has said  “It has now become reasonably apparent that they were involved in an effort of military grade surveillance against a Supreme Court justice, while he still was in office, two Supreme Court registry officials on the judicial side of the writ section, and another Supreme Court staffer. This effort may have been using a spyware called Pegasus. This is tantamount to shockingly gross interference and obstruction of the administration of justice, for which accountability ought to be fixed inter alia under S.2(c)(iii) of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971.”

The letter refers to the list published by The Wire where the names of a former judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Arun Mishra and two former officials of the Supreme Court Registry, N.K. Gandhi and T.I.Rajput have appeared on the list of potential targets.

It has further been stated that the list also revealed the name of a Supreme Court Staffer, who had made allegations of Sexual Harassment against the then Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi, in April 2019. It was revealed that three of her own phone numbers, along with eight other phone numbers belonging to her husband and two of his brothers were marked as potential targets of the surveillance, in the same week when her allegations against CJI were first reported.

Thirumaavalavan states that the NSO Group Technologies has repeatedly said that it sells the spyware only to vetted sovereign governments. If this is taken to be true on face value, the law of the land authorises only the Ministry of Home Affairs to organize interception of messages only in exceptional cases.

It has further been stated that Under the rules under the Telegraph Act and the Information Technology Act as cited by the Government of India, the competent authority to direct interception, monitoring or decryption is the Secretary of Home Affairs. Some of the alleged hacking and surveillance has occurred during the tenure of the present Home Secretary Mr. Ajay Bhalla and some of it in the tenure of Mr. Rajiv Gauba, the then Home Secretary (who now happens to be the Cabinet Secretary).

Thirumaavalavan has therefore proposed that both Mr. Bhalla and Mr. Gauba be arraigned as alleged Contemnors in the proposed contempt petition.

 Recently the Supreme Court expressed displeasure at the petitioners in the Pegasus Cases expressing opinions on public forums like Twitter & other platforms in a sub-judice issue

A batch of petitions have been filed seeking investigation into the Pegasus Controversy  by Adv. ML Sharma, CPI MP John Brittas, N Ram of The Hindu, Jagdeep Chokkar, Narendra Mishra, Rupesh Kumar Singh, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, SNM Abdi and the Editors Guild of India.

On 19th July 2021, a consortium of 17 international media organizations including an Indian news portal published an investigation around a leaked list of phone numbers from across the world, named the Pegasus Project.

These numbers in the leaked list are allegedly the “target list” of phones hacked /to be hacked by the Pegasus spyware product sold by Israel’s NSO Group.

The target list said to contain the numbers of 136 prominent politicians, judges, journalists, businessmen, rights activists etc.

NSO Group, who owns ‘Pegasus Spyware’, was sued by WhatsApp and Facebook in 2019 before the US Californian Court for exploiting its platform to carry out remote surveillances. NSO claimed sovereign immunity as its products were sold only to governments and state agencies. However, The Californian Court ruled in favour of WhatsApp and dismissed NSO’s claim.