MUMBAI: “Who provided the funds for snooping?” asked Shiv Sena MP Sanjay Raut, raising questions over the annual expenditure on Israeli companies to hack phones of politicians and journalists through Pegasus spyware.
Raut, in his weekly column in Saamna, said that according to the NSO company, it sells the software only to the governments. “If it’s true, then which government has the capacity to spend over Rs 300 crore to spy on 300 people?” Comparing the ‘snooping’ case with the Hiroshima bombing, he said: “While people died in Hiroshima, in the case of Pegasus, it’s the death of freedom.”
