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Pegasus and the Deep State
The Global Snooping Pandemic
Speakers
Project Pegasus, an investigation by 17 global media outlets (including Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International) suggested widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which is sold only to Governments. Recently, French Intelligence has independently confirmed some of findings of the Pegasus Project.
There has been evidence of its misuse in India. The issue continues to rock the current Parliament session and the Supreme Court is hearing petitions about the use of the spyware. The issue raises questions about privacy, defence, national security, legality and more which will be addressed by the panel.
Speakers
Siddharth Varadarajan
Siddharth Varadarajan is a Founding Editor of The Wire. He was earlier the Editor of The Hindu and is a recipient of the Shorenstein Journalism Award and the Ramnath Goenka Award for Journalist of the Year. He taught Economics at New York University and Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, besides working at the Times of India.
Praveen Swami
Praveen Swami is an Indian journalist and author specialising on international strategic and security issues. He is currently the Group Consulting Editor at Network18 Group. He was the Diplomatic Editor of The Daily Telegraph newspaper between September 2010 – October 2011, after which, he became the National Editor (Strategic and International Affairs) of The Indian Express newspaper from August 2014- January 2017. Swami is the author of two books on the India-Pakistan conflict in Kashmir. He was described by the BBC as “one of India’s foremost experts of Islamist terrorism”.
Apar Gupta
Apar Gupta is a lawyer and the Executive Director of the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF). The IFF is an Indian digital liberties organisation that seeks to ensure that technology respects fundamental rights. Apar represented public interest litigants in key constitutional challenges on Section 66A, Criminal Defamation, the Right to Privacy and Aadhaar. For his work in 2019 he was elected as an Ashoka Fellow.
Maya Mirchandani
Maya Mirchandani is an award winning Indian journalist. She now teaches Media Studies at Ashoka University and a Senior Fellow at the Delhi based Observer Research Foundation, Maya’s research is focused on ‘Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism’ (P/CVE), De-radicalization, Misinformation and Hate Speech, and focuses her teaching on principles and practice of conflict journalism in an environment where free speech, debate and dissent are increasingly challenged, condemned, or silenced. Maya moved to academia after over two decades with NDTV, India’s pioneering private private news network. Maya has won the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism twice, the Red Ink Award for Reporting on Human Rights as well as the Exchange for Media Broadcast Journalism Award for best International Affairs reporting.
Maya obtained degrees in History from Delhi University, Mass Communications from Sofia Polytechnic in Mumbai and a Post-graduate Diploma in World Politics from the London School of Economics.
