#137 Opening Up And Closing Down 🎧

<strong>India Policy Watch #1: A Winged Horse And A Prison  </strong><br/><br/><em>Insights on burning policy issues in India</em><br/><br/>- <em>RSJ</em><br/><br/>Heh! Let’s start in the most unoriginal way possible:<br/><br/>Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still babbling away…..<br/><br/>The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. <em>There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment</em>. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. <em>It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time…..</em><br/><br/>You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. <br/><br/> —- <em>1`984, George Orwell</em><br/><br/>The Pegasus spyware story broke this week. Coordinated investigations by 17 media organisations revealed governments, mostly authoritarian, used Pegasus, a product sold by Israeli surveillance company NSO, and hacked into over 50,000 phones to read messages, access mails and photos, record calls, activate microphones or even plant incriminating data into them. The NSO continues to maintain it sells Pegasus exclusively to governments for the sole intention of tracking criminals and terrorists. The analysis of the phone numbers so far suggests governments of Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Mexico, Rwanda, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Morocco, UAE and India have been users of Pegasus. The list has over 300 Indian names and counting. <br/><br/>NSO has denied the story in its own way. It claimed it “does not operate the systems that it sells to vetted government customers, and does not have access to the data