The parliamentary committee on information technology is considering calls by opposition members to summon Apple for information details on why certain people, including at least nine political leaders, were sent notifications warning them of hacking attempts, a day after the issue turned into a political row with the opposition accusing the BJP-led government of snooping on them.
Shiv Sena’s Prataprao Jadhav, the chair of the committee, told HT that the he will ask the secretariat whether Apple can be summoned and added that the issue will likely be taken at a meeting after Diwali.
The push to summon the company, which had warned a number of opposition leaders of attempts by “state-sponsored” attackers to break into their Apple accounts and their iPhones, was made by opposition members of the panel. “I am writing to parliamentary committee chairperson Prataprao Jadhav to call all the affected parties and the company [Apple] representatives. This is a very important issue. How can they [the government] claim that it is an ‘algorithmic malfunction’ when it affects only Opposition members,” said Congress MP Karti P Chidambaram, a member of the panel.
A member from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) told HT that the committee has not yet decided whether or not to call Apple representatives. “The country does not run by creating pressure by giving statements to newspapers. The Standing Committee on Information [Technology] and Telecommunications is no longer controlled by Rahul Gandhi Ji as it was under [the chairmanship of] Shashi Tharoor Ji. This committee runs according to the rules of the Lok Sabha under which the investigation of @Apple done by the Central Government and the investigation of the phone is by the state police. Our committee of which I am also a member cannot hold a meeting on this subject,” BJP lawmaker Nishikant Dubey tweeted on X, formerly Twitter.
{{/usCountry}}A member from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) told HT that the committee has not yet decided whether or not to call Apple representatives. “The country does not run by creating pressure by giving statements to newspapers. The Standing Committee on Information [Technology] and Telecommunications is no longer controlled by Rahul Gandhi Ji as it was under [the chairmanship of] Shashi Tharoor Ji. This committee runs according to the rules of the Lok Sabha under which the investigation of @Apple done by the Central Government and the investigation of the phone is by the state police. Our committee of which I am also a member cannot hold a meeting on this subject,” BJP lawmaker Nishikant Dubey tweeted on X, formerly Twitter.
{{/usCountry}}Rajya Sabha MP from TMC, Jawhar Sircar, who is also a member of this committee told HT that he has also written to the chair to take up this. “I have also written to take this up, update us on steps taken after Pegasus episode and the leak of 80 crore [Indians’] Aadhaar data,” he said.
John Brittas, a Rajya Sabha member of the committee from Communist Party of India (Marxist), has separately written to Jadhav, calling for an “urgent meeting” on the issue.
Earlier, Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra, one of the MPs who received the threat notification on Monday night, tweeted that she had written to the Lok Sabha speaker “on serious issue of surveillance on Opposition members in violation of Constitutional freedoms & rule of law”.
In her letter, she said that in the last few years, “numerous cases of planting fabricated evidence on communication devices have come to light and innocent citizens have been framed to meet political ends”. This echoes what CPI(M)’s Sitaram Yechury, another recipient of Apple’s threat notification, wrote in his letter to the prime minister on Tuesday.
“We will talk to the secretariat to get their legal opinion. If the secretariat allows us to call them, [Apple and the affected parties], we will call them,” Jadhav, the chair of the committee, told HT after Chidambaram’s comments and Dubey’s tweet. Jadhav was unsure whether an American company like Apple could be called.
When the Pegasus issue first arose in November 2019 --- when WhatsApp sued Pegasus-maker NSO Group in a Californian court and WhatsApp said that 121 Indians were targeted with the spyware in India --- the IT Committee, then headed by Congress’s Tharoor, had taken up the issue, and had attempted to take it up in July 2021 as well.
Jadhav reiterated the need to check with the secretariat when cited these precedents.
The panel chair said that this is a larger issue since he believed that the alerts were simultaneously sent out to people in 150 countries. To be sure these threat notifications have been sent out to people in 150 countries since November 2021, when the system was set up, and not on Monday night itself.
Jadhav pointed out that this issue had arisen a day after the committee had already met, when it discussed rising online financial frauds in the country. This can only be taken up in the next meeting which will take place after Diwali, he said.
At least nine Opposition leaders said on Tuesday that they were sent emails by Apple warning them of hacking attempts by unidentified “state-sponsored” attackers, prompting the government to ask the American tech company to share more details amid a political row.
Amidst the ensuing political furore, Union minister of electronics and information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the government would investigate this matter and sought Apple’s cooperation for the same. At the same time, Apple released a statement saying that it was not attributing the attack to any “specific” state actor.