N.V.RAMANA,CJ. - (1.) The Court is convened through Video Conferencing. "If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself." ­George Orwell, 1984 1. The present batch of Writ Petitions raise an Orwellian concern, about the alleged possibility of utilizing modern technology to hear what you hear, see what you see and to know what you do. In this context, this Court is called upon to examine an allegation of the use of such a technology, its utility, need and alleged abuse. We make it clear that our effort is to uphold the constitutional aspirations and rule of law, without allowing ourselves to be consumed in the political rhetoric. This Court has always been conscious of not entering the political thicket. However, at the same time, it has never cowered from protecting all from the abuses of fundamental rights. All that we would like to observe in this regard is a reiteration of what had already been said by this Court in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, (Opinion of Justice Khanna) AIR 1973 SC 1461: "1535 .... Judicial review is not intended to create what is sometimes called judicial oligarchy, the aristrocracy (sic) of the robe, covert legislation, or Judge­made law. The proper forum to fight for the wise use of the legislative authority is that of public opinion and legislative assemblies. Such contest cannot be transferred to the judicial arena. That all constitutional interpretations have political consequences should not obliterate the fact that the decision has to be arrived at in the calm and dispassionate atmosphere of the court room, that Judges in order to give legitimacy to their decision have to keep aloof from the din and controversy of politics and that the fluctuating fortunes of rival political parties can have for them only academic interest. Their primary duty is to uphold the Constitution and the laws without fear or favour and in doing so, they cannot allow any political ideology or economic theory, which may have caught their fancy, to colour the decision ..."
(2.) A short conspectus of the events leading up to the present batch of petitions would not be misplaced to highlight the scope of the issues at hand. In September 2018, Citizen Lab, which is a laboratory based out of the University of Toronto, Canada, released a report detailing the software capabilities of a "spyware suite" called Pegasus that was being produced by an Israeli Technology firm, viz., the NSO Group. The report indicated that individuals from nearly 45 countries were suspected to have been affected.
(3.) The Pegasus suite of spywares can allegedly be used to compromise the digital devices of an individual through zero click vulnerabilities, i.e., without requiring any action on the part of the target of the software. Once the software infiltrates an individual 's device, it allegedly has the capacity to access the entire stored data on the device, and has real time access to emails, texts, phone calls, as well as the camera and sound recording capabilities of the device. Once the device is infiltrated using Pegasus, the entire control over the device is allegedly handed over to the Pegasus user who can then remotely control all the functionalities of the device and switch different features on or off. The NSO Group purportedly sells this extremely powerful software only to certain undisclosed Governments and the end user of its products are "exclusively government intelligence and law enforcement agencies" as per its own website.;