As Opposition leaders intensified allegations of government snooping after receiving alerts from the tech firm Apple that a “state-sponsored attacker” may be targeting their digital devices, government officials and ruling party politicians moved to advance a series of misleading and vague statements on the nature of the warning. The government says that it will investigate Apple’s message, which was delivered on Monday night to top leaders in the Congress and other Opposition outfits, as well as some journalists and civil society members.
Minister of Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw, for instance, posted on the social media platform X that “information by Apple on this issue seems vague and non-specific in nature,” even as the company warned users in detail how the attacks they may have detected could infiltrate targets’ phones and remotely access their devices’ contents, and get a real-time feed from devices’ cameras and microphones.
The Minister, as well as other officials, seized on a so-called ‘background’ note that Apple had included in its messages to journalists, which said that the alerts had been sent in 150 countries. Background notes are usually sent by public relations workers to provide additional background information that they do not want to be directly quoted on. The firm as well as the Minister left out some key context: that this number was for all alerts sent since 2021, not the batch that Opposition leaders and others in India had received this week. No user in any other country has publicly reported receiving such an alert since the warnings were first delivered this week.
