Heena Sharma Blog

Over the last two years, Nagpur-based human rights lawyer Nihalsing Rathod has received receiving calls on WhatsApp from unknown numbers. These calls would be made from international numbers, and would invariably turn out to be a group call. The moment Rathod answered them, the call would disconnect. He assumed these were innocuous calls made to his number but as a safety measure, reported each of the “suspicious calls” to WhatsApp. On October 7, 2019, Rathod, however, was contacted by a senior researcher from the Toronto University’s CitizenLab informing him that he faced a “specific digital risk”. “ John Scott-Railton, the senior researcher told me that his lab had followed my work and during their research had found out that my profile was under a surveillance attack. All those calls made to me for two years suddenly began to make sense,” Rathod told The Wire. CitizenLab was one of the first few organisations to examine how the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group’s Peg