India officials under Prime Minister Narendra Modi blame Apple for poor iPhone security features

A day after Apple warned independent Indian journalists and opposition party politicians in October that government hackers may have tried to break into their iPhones, officials under Prime Minister Narendra Modi took action — against Apple, according to The Washington Post.

The articles says officials from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) publiclyquestioned whether the tech giant’s internal threat algorithms were faulty and announced an investigation into the security of Apple devices.

Quoting three unnamed “people with knowledge of the matter,” The Post says that, in private, senior Modi administrationofficials called Apple’s India representatives to demand that the company help soften the political impact of the warnings. They also purportedly summoned an Apple security expert from outside the country to a meeting in New Delhi, where government representatives pressed the Apple official to come up with alternative explanations for the warnings to users.

The visiting Apple official stood by the company’s warnings. But the intensity of the Indian government effort to discredit and strong-arm Apple disturbed executives at the company’s headquarters, in Cupertino, California, says The Post.

Engadget notes that journalists and politicians who posted about Apple’s warnings on social media had one thing in common: they were all critical of Modi’s government. Amnesty International examined the phone of one particular journalist named Anand Mangnale who was investigating long-time Modi ally Gautam Adani and found that an attacker had planted the Pegasus spyware on his Apple device. 

Engadget says that while Apple didn’t explicitly say that the Indian government is to blame for the attacks, Pegasus, developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, is mostly sold to governments and government agencies.