The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology (IT) is deliberating the possibility of summoning Apple representatives to address recent alerts concerning "state-sponsored attacks" sent to Opposition leaders and other public figures in the country via their iPhones, according to ANI, citing an official from the committee's secretariat.
The committee's secretariat has expressed deep concern regarding the matter, treating it with the utmost seriousness. A number of opposition leaders, including Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, party leaders Shashi Tharoor, Pawan Khera, KC Venugopal, Supriya Shrinate, TS Singhdeo, and Bhupinder Singh Hooda, along with other political figures like Mahua Moitra, Sitaram Yechury, Akhilesh Yadav, Priyanka Chaturvedi, Raghav Chadha, Asaduddin Owaisi, and some aides of Rahul Gandhi, reported receiving notifications from Apple warning of potential state-sponsored attacks on their iPhones. This led to allegations of government surveillance, a claim refuted by IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who assured a thorough investigation.
In response to the controversy, Apple issued a statement, indicating that it had not attributed the threat notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker and suggesting that the alerts might be false alarms.
The government, while expressing concern and initiating an investigation, noted that Apple had issued similar advisories in nearly 150 countries and characterized the alerts as vague.
In the wake of this situation, Sitaram Yechury, Priyanka Chaturvedi, and Mahua Moitra have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, expressing their concerns and demanding action. Rahul Gandhi criticized the government's handling of the issue and emphasized that they were not intimidated by phone tapping or any other forms of surveillance. He also touched on the Adani issue, implying a hierarchy of power in the country.
Other individuals who received similar alerts included Samir Saran, the president of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), an OSD of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, and Siddharth Varadarajan, the founding editor of The Wire.
Opposition leaders have accused the government of undermining democracy, while IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw defended the government, stating that the critics were engaging in the politics of distraction and assured that a technical investigation would be conducted by Cert-In, the national nodal agency for responding to computer security incidents.
MoS IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar noted that similar threat notifications were sent to individuals in over 150 countries by Apple and reaffirmed the government's commitment to protecting citizens' privacy and investigating the threat notifications and Apple's claims regarding device security and privacy compliance.
