Last week, a jury in the US ordered NSO Group, the Israeli technology firm that sells Pegasus spyware to pay millions in dollars in damages to the messaging service WhatsApp.
The six-year trial in the US stands in stark contrast to the pace of proceedings in India’s Supreme Court related to Pegasus, legal experts told Scroll.
Since July 2021, petitions have been pending before the Supreme Court demanding a judicial investigation into whether the Indian government used Pegasus to spy on opposition leaders, activists, journalists and even its own ministers. However, the court has not yet been able to get an answer from the government about whether it deployed Pegasus against the petitioners and other citizens.
The US case started in 2019, when American tech giant Meta sued NSO, alleging that Pegasus was used to spy on users of Meta’s messaging service, WhatsApp.
Five years later, a US court found the NSO Group liable for the unauthorised surveillance of 1,400 WhatsApp users.
On Tuesday, NSO was ordered to pay Pegasus $167.3 million, or over Rs 1,417 crore, in punitive damages, as well as $444,719, or over Rs 37 lakh, as compensatory damages.
Legal experts that Scroll spoke with expressed disappointment at how the matter has dragged on in India’s Supreme Court in contrast to the manner in which the US case has proceeded.
This is because the judiciary in the US enjoys greater independence than in India and is more sensitive to the right to privacy. Lawyers also pointed out that the US court order, the first instance of NSO being fined for illegal surveillance, must serve as an example to India’s Supreme Court and other courts across the world.
US Court ruling
Pegasus is a sophisticated spyware that can be covertly installed on mobile phones to extract data and conduct surveillance of the user.
The spyware is licensed to governments around the world by the NSO Group. The cyber intelligence company says that the Pegasus software is intended to target criminals and is only sold to “vetted governments” with good human rights records.
In 2019, WhatsApp sued NSO for using its platform to send Pegasus to about 1,400 mobile phones.
The US District Court for the Northern District of California in its decision in December found the NSO Group liable for violating key US laws that criminalise unauthorised access to computers, networks and other digital information.
The court said that NSO had illegally accessed protected computers and exceeded its authorised access on WhatsApp’s systems. It did not accept NSO’s defence that its clients operated Pegasus for surveillance – not NSO itself.
The court ruled that the NSO Group breached its contract with WhatsApp. By creating WhatsApp accounts and then reverse-engineering the app to deploy Pegasus, NSO violated WhatsApp’s terms of service, which prohibit sending harmful code or using the platform for illegal purposes.
With the NSO Group found liable, the case proceeded to a jury trial to determine the damages NSO should pay WhatsApp. The jury’s order on Tuesday is the first instance anywhere in the world of NSO being asked to pay damages for its hacking operations.
Advocate Vrinda Bhandari, who specialises in the fields of digital rights, technology and privacy and is representing some of the petitioners in the Pegasus matter in the Indian Supreme Court, described the US court order as “a significant victory for transparency”.
“The jury trial and the judgment revealed important insights into who NSO targeted and how the Pegasus spyware was deployed,” she explained.
A major win for privacy!
— Access Now (@accessnow) May 6, 2025
Israeli spyware company NSO has been ordered to pay $168 million in damages for targeting @WhatsApp with Pegasus spyware.
Access Now and partners will continue to advocate for NSO to be held accountable for its actions. https://t.co/8vuKdBZDAG
Supreme Court proceedings stalled
The petitions filed in the Supreme Court in India followed a different trajectory.
In July 2021, an investigation by a group of 17 media organisations and human rights group Amnesty International showed that Pegasus was being used for the unauthorised surveillance of journalists, activists and politicians in several countries across the world, including, they claimed, in India.
Seven of those purportedly targetted had filed petitions before the Supreme Court demanding an investigation into the allegations – journalists Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Rupesh Kumar Singh, SNM Abdi and Prem Shankar Jha, and activists Jagdeep Chhokar, Degree Prasad Chouhan and Ipsa Shatakshi.
The court had asked the Union government to respond to the allegations. The government filed a “limited affidavit” in which it denied the allegations without specifically responding to the question of whether it had used Pegasus.
Dissatisfied with the government’s position, the court had formed an expert committee to investigate the allegations. In August 2022, the court said that some malware – malicious software – was found on five of the 29 phones that the panel examined. However, it was not clear whether the malware was Pegasus.
The judges also noted that the Union government did not cooperate with the inquiry.
The panel’s report has yet to be published or even shared with the petitioners.
Hearings in the petitions were stalled for almost three years from May 2022.
Meanwhile, during the course of the lawsuit in the US, it was revealed in a legal filing published by WhatsApp that at least 100 of the 1,223 persons targeted using Pegasus in 2019 were located in India.
The Indian Supreme Court resumed hearing the matter on April 29. The court said there was nothing wrong with India possessing spyware for the purposes of national security but expressed concern about its alleged misuse against private individuals.
The matter is scheduled to be heard again on July 30.
Concerning contrast
The lack of meaningful progress in the matter before the Indian Supreme Court, considering the US court order, was an indictment of the Indian judicial system, legal experts told Scroll.
“In the US, you had a proper trial and a case that has actually been heard to its conclusion, which is the way it should be,” said advocate and legal scholar Gautam Bhatia. “In India, the Supreme Court has stonewalled substantive hearings on these petitions for years.”
He added that the court has still not “actually required the government to even confirm whether Pegasus was used – which is just a simple yes/no question.”
Advocate and public interest lawyer Prashant Bhushan linked this to the lack of judicial independence in India. “In the US, courts are more independent,” he said. “Here, the Indian government has an agreement with [NSO Group]. They purchased the software from them – that’s obvious.”
While the government has not confirmed that it is using Pegasus, The New York Times reported in 2022 that India bought Pegasus in 2017 from Israel as part of a $2-billion defence package.
On the other hand, the US government blacklisted the NSO Group in November 2021 after it determined that the company had acted “contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the US”.
Advocate and writer Kaleeswaran Raj linked the slow progress in the case in India’s Supreme Court to judicial insensitivity towards fundamental rights. Privacy was declared a fundamental right by the Supreme Court when the Aadhaar project to give every Indian resident a biometrically linked identification number was almost completed, he said.
“The judgement only involved more or less an academic issue,” Raj said. “However, when the right to privacy was invoked in the concrete and direct sense in the ongoing Pegasus case, there have been no judicial follow-up measures after the formation of the committee.”
Raj said that “the long delay in adjudication and lack of judicial sensitivity in such cases tell a sad commentary on our system.”
Lawyers also pointed out that there was no need for the Supreme Court to have considered the question of national security in the matter, considering that the spyware was allegedly used against ordinary citizens.
“The government is authorised to intercept communications and to use surveillance for national security reasons, but there are procedures for that and the courts can review whether the law has been followed,” said advocate Shruti Narayan, who had served as counsel to the committee formed by the West Bengal government in July 2021 to investigate the allegations about the use of Pegasus by the Union government.
The committee’s proceedings were stayed by the Supreme Court in December 2021.
She added: “The court must look at the facts of the case, treat it as a case of alleged unlawful interception and surveillance and proceed accordingly.”
Narayan said that the Indian Supreme Court, as well as courts around the world, must pay attention to the US court order. “WhatsApp sued the NSO group for violating the contract that every WhatsApp user has with the service,” she said. “So the court’s findings regarding unlawful activity by NSO would be true of NSO usage through WhatsApp anywhere in the world.”
Bhandari said that the US court order and the fine would be “useful for the petitioners arguing before the Supreme Court”.
Narayan agreed. “The Indian Supreme Court is absolutely entitled to look at a parallel proceeding to understand how privacy is being valued and how breaches of privacy are being investigated in other jurisdictions,” she said. “There’s no reason why the privacy of people in India should not be worth the same compensation and consideration as privacy of people elsewhere.”
