Dalai Lama’s key advisers, staff of Buddhist clergy on Pegasus ‘snooping target’ list

Samdhong Rinpoche, the head of the trust that will oversee the task of selecting the next Dalai Lama, also figures in Pegasus list.

The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader | Peter Foley | Bloomberg

New Delhi: Key advisers of the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, and staff members of Buddhist clergy figure in the fifth tranche of names released by the Pegasus Project, a global media consortium spearheading an expose on people that governments allegedly sought to target with the Pegasus spyware.

According to a report in The Wire, which is part of the consortium, the numbers of several Tibetan officials, activists and monks were marked for potential surveillance from 2017 to 2019.

The list includes numbers for the staff of the 17th Gyalwang Karmapa, Urgyen Trinley Dorji, the third-highest ranking monk in Tibetan Buddhism, who has been living outside India since early 2017.

Tempa Tsering, a long-term envoy of the Dalai Lama who currently serves as the director, India and East Asia, in his office in New Delhi, also appears on the list. The office serves as the nodal agent of the Dalai Lama and the Dharamsala-based Tibetan government-in-exile, with the Indian authorities, foreign embassies and NGOs.

Other names include the Dalai Lama’s senior aides Tenzin Taklha and Chimmey Rigzen.

Samdhong Rinpoche, the head of the trust that will oversee the task of selecting the next Dalai Lama, also figures in the list.

The list also includes the phone numbers of Lobsang Sangay, a former head of the Tibetan government-in-exile, and several Tibetan activists based in India.

The presence of a number on the list doesn’t convey that it was necessarily targeted with Pegasus spyware, only that these were persons of interest for potential surveillance, the Pegasus Project has said. 

The NSO Group, which owns Pegasus and claims to only deal with governments as clients, has denied any link between these numbers and surveillance attempts.

Parliament ruckus

Meanwhile, the Pegasus controversy continued to rock the monsoon session of Parliament, with the Opposition not allowing proceedings of the Lok Sabha or the Rajya Sabha for the fourth consecutive day. 

In the Rajya Sabha, the Opposition did not allow newly-appointed Union Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw to make a statement on the snooping controversy, with Trinamool Congress MP Santanu Sen snatching a piece of paper the former held, tearing it and throwing it towards the deputy chairman.

The IT minister was subsequently forced to lay the statement on the table of the House. In his statement, a written copy of which was distributed to the media, he hit out at news reports alleging attempts to use the Pegasus spyware against journalists, ministers, and Opposition leaders, saying there is “no substance behind the sensationalism”. 

He noted that the publisher of the reports has pointed out that it cannot say if the numbers in the list were under surveillance, and the company whose technology was allegedly used has “denied these claims outrightly”.

Quoting the NSO Group, which owns Pegasus, he said: “NSO Group believes that claims that you have been provided with, are based on misleading interpretation of leaked data from basic information, such as HLR (Home Location Register, which provides permanent subscriber information of a mobile network) Lookup services, which have no bearing on the list of the customers’ targets of Pegasus or any other NSO products. Such services are openly available to anyone, anywhere, and anytime, and are commonly used by governmental agencies as well as by private companies worldwide. 

“It is also beyond dispute that the data has nothing to do with surveillance or with NSO, so there can be no factual basis to suggest that a use of the data somehow equates to surveillance”.

Late Sunday night, a global consortium of media organisations came out with a list of numbers allegedly identified by governments dealing with Israel’s NSO Group for attempted snooping. 

The list had some 300 numbers of Indians. These include Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, Vaishnaw, political strategist Prashant Kishor, and West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee’s MP nephew Abhishek Banerjee.

Also on the list are numbers of former Karnataka chief minister H.D. Kumaraswamy’s secretary, former deputy chief minister G. Parameshwara, and the secretary of another former CM, the Congress’ Siddaramaiah.

(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)