Allegations serious if correct: SC seeks Centre's stand on plea for probe into use of Pegasus spyware

The court also wondered why no serious concern was shown when such allegations came to light first in May, 2019

The Supreme Court on Thursday decided to seek the Union government's response on a batch of petitions seeking independent probe into the use of Israel's Pegasus spyware to snoop into phones of a cross section of people, including members of the judiciary.

A bench of Chief Justice N V Ramana and Justice Surya Kant said that no doubt the allegations were serious if media reports were correct. The court also wondered why no serious concern was shown when such allegations first came to light in May 2019.

After hearing senior advocates Kapil Sibal, Shyam Divan, Arvind Datar, Rakesh Dwivedi and Meenakshi Arora, the court asked the petitioners to serve their copies to the Union government to respond to the matter.

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The court put the matter for consideration on Tuesday.

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for journalists N Ram and Sashi Kumar submitted that Pegasus is a rogue technology and infiltrates our life without our knowledge.

"All that it requires is a phone and it enters into our lives. It is an assault on privacy, human dignity and value of our human republic, it penetrates into our national internet backbone," he said.

The bench, however, said, "People who have filed the writ petitions are more knowledgeable and resourceful. They should have put more hard work to put more material."

"I don't want to say also that pleas don't have anything. Some of the petition who have filed the plea are not affected and some claim their phones are hacked. But they have not made efforts to file a criminal complaint," the CJI said.

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Sibal, for his part, referred to proceedings in a California court and said that the governments in France and USA have taken actions based on newspapers reports about snooping individuals, activists, journalists and others.

Other counsel Dwivedi, Divan, Datar and Arora said it was not a question of individual complaints as the issue had huge dimention affecting right to privacy.

Petitions filed by advocate M L Sharma, CPI(M) MP John Brittas, N Ram, former IIM professor Jagdeep Chokkar, Narendra Mishra, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, S N M Abdi and Editors Guild of India came up for hearing before the court.