‘Apple warnings issue being probed professionally’

New Delhi: India is conducting investigations into the Apple threat notification incident “professionally” and has not resorted to any “strong-arming” to resolve the issue, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the Union minister of state for electronics and information technology (IT), said on Thursday.

The minister was responding to a report in The Washington Post, which claimed that India’s IT ministry officials had put pressure on Apple to “help soften the political impact of the warnings” it had sent out to opposition parliamentarians and journalists about “state-sponsored” cyber attacks on them.

“We’ve been very clear and upfront. On the same day as the threat notifications being sent, Apple clarified what they were about, and that they didn’t have anything to do with the government. We’re custodians of the safety and trust of our citizens, and we certainly would like Apple to explain why a device, that they claim is secure, is putting out such notifications. Either the device has been compromised, and if it hasn’t, then they should explain why it is sending such notifications. We were fairly transparent about it,” Chandrasekhar told Mint.

On 31 October, several individuals, including Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, party president Mallikarjun Kharge and Aam Aadmi Party politician Raghav Chadha, were sent a threat notification by Apple that suggested government hackers had attempted to hack their iPhones.

Shortly after the security notifications were reported about, Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said, the Centre ordered a probe into the matter, and that the issue was being handled by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In).

Earlier on Wednesday, a report by the Post claimed, citing unnamed sources, that government officials “pressed (an) Apple official to come up with alternative explanations for the warnings to users,” adding further that the government-affiliated officials in this matter “were really angry.”

“…the intensity of the Indian government’s effort to discredit and strong-arm Apple disturbed executives at the company’s headquarters, in Cupertino, California, and illustrated how even Silicon Valley’s most powerful tech companies can face pressure from the increasingly assertive leadership of the world’s most populous country—and one of the most critical technology markets of the coming decade,” the Post report said.

Responding to the report, Chandrasekhar said that Cert-In is engaged in the investigation, and that the involved parties have so far met two batches of Apple executives as part of the probe.

“To be very clear, what (the Post report) has characterized as strong-arming—nobody here has had any conversation like that. Our approach has been extremely professional and transparent—we put out what we expect of them in the public domain, and that is what they are answering,” he said.

An email sent to Apple late on Thursday did not elicit any response till press time. The incident comes at a time when the Centre is about to introduce the final rules of its Digital Personal Data Privacy (DPDP) Act, which is expected to be notified by 31 January. Large companies, including Apple, are likely to get a six-month window to comply with the law from the date of notification of the rules, Chandrasekhar said.