10 reactions to Pegasus leak from Snowden to Swamy: ‘Tapping-jeevi’ enters vocabulary

BJP’s Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy, who had set off a frenzy of speculation by tweeting on Sunday that the leak on Pegasus was coming, on Monday morning tweeted, “It will be sensible if the Home Minister tells Parliament that Modi Government has not had any involvement with the Israeli company which tapped and taped our telephones. Otherwise like Watergate truth will trickle out and hurt BJP by halal route.” He did not however follow up on the promise of revealing the complete list of people whose phones were tapped.

Chief spokesperson of the Congress, Randeep Surjewala, promptly coined a word in Hindi, namely ‘Tappingjeevi’, and had a dig at the Government by sarcastically saying that the Modi Government didn’t seem to have spared even its own ministers, RSS leaders or businessmen and industrialists.

Author of the book ‘How to win an Indian election’ and whose new book ‘ The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities and How Information Warfare shapes your world’ is coming out in August tweeted, “Democracies that haven’t yet descended into ‘electoral autocracies’ — such as US, UK, Japan, Germany — need to come together and save the world from Israeli spy tech companies. It is very clear the Israeli government encourages and nurtures them. Has to stop.”

Defence analyst Pravin Sawhney tweeted, “Were 2019 elections unfair? Were they influenced by 1. Balakot - by exposing IAF’s operational weaknesses 2. Pegasus malware - when you know opposition leaders’ election strategy, you can easily modify your own campaign with unfair advantage - never mind the damage to India!”

Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security at MIT, Vipin Narang tweeted, “Government surveillance of journalists and opposition leaders isn’t new. What’s new is the speed, stealth, and totality of ownage by the Pegasus tool, which requires no user interaction whatsoever. It’s like the nuclear weapon of government surveillance.”

Author and journalist Nisha Susan tweeted, “Cardinal Richelieu is supposed to have said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."

Economist and former Chief Economist at the World Bank, Kaushik Basu tweeted, “ When there is corruption and a free press reporting on it, political leaders lose popularity. The easy way out that some countries take is to put an end to the free press. Many nations and economies have been destroyed by this choice.

The Economist correspondent Pfeffer pointed out, “There’s absolutely no way that NSO could have put its tech at the disposal of foreign governments to track 180 journalists without getting the go-ahead from the highest levels of the Netanyahu government. That’s the real scandal here.”

John Scot-Railton, researcher at Citizen Lab tweeted, “This leak exposes the farce of that performance. When your customers are dictators... they will do bad things. NSO knows this. We know it. Now everybody knows it.”

Read other reactions on Twitter from Edward Snowden and others: