MANOHAR LAL SHARMA Vs. UNION OF INDIA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The Court is convened through Video Conferencing.

(2.) A short conspectus of the events leading up to the present batch of petitions would not be misplaced to highlight the scope of the issues at hand. In September 2018, Citizen Lab, which is a laboratory based out of the University of Toronto, Canada, released a report detailing the software capabilities of a "spyware suite" called Pegasus that was being produced by an Israeli Technology firm, viz., the NSO Group. The report indicated that individuals from nearly 45 countries were suspected to have been affected.

(3.) The Pegasus suite of spywares can allegedly be used to compromise the digital devices of an individual through zero click vulnerabilities, i.e., without requiring any action on the part of the target of the software. Once the software infiltrates an individual 's device, it allegedly has the capacity to access the entire stored data on the device, and has real time access to emails, texts, phone calls, as well as the camera and sound recording capabilities of the device. Once the device is infiltrated using Pegasus, the entire control over the device is allegedly handed over to the Pegasus user who can then remotely control all the functionalities of the device and switch different features on or off. The NSO Group purportedly sells this extremely powerful software only to certain undisclosed Governments and the end user of its products are "exclusively government intelligence and law enforcement agencies" as per its own website.