'Half facts, fully embellished...' India dumps WaPo story on Apple being told to soften hack warnings' impact

Union Minister of State for Electronics & Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar dismissed the Washington Post report as "creative imagination and clickbaiting" while emphasizing that it omitted Apple's response.

Union Minister of State for Electronics & Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Thursday gave a hard-hitting response to the report published in the Washington Post, which claimed that the Narendra Modi government demanded that Apple soften its alert warnings in the aftermath of the iPhone messages sent to Indian opposition politicians about government hackers likely hacking into their devices. The report had claimed that Apple's India representatives were called by administration officials who demanded that the company help weaken the political impact of the warnings, the newspaper said, citing three unidentified sources.

An Apple security expert was also summoned from outside the country to a meeting in New Delhi and the expert was pressed to come up with alternative explanations for the warnings, the report further claimed.

In response to the Washington Post report, Union Minister of State for Electronics & Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that rebutting the US daily newspaper's "terrible storytelling was tiresome, but someone had to do it". He said that the WaPo report is the outcome of "creative imagination and clickbaiting at work masquerading as journalism".

While stating that the WaPo story had "half facts" and was "fully embellished", the minister pointed out that the report left out Apple's response from October 31,  the day when some lawmakers shared screenshots on social media of a threat notifications quoting the iPhone manufacturer. The alert read, 'Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID". 

Apple had, at that point in time, said that it did not attribute the threat notifications to "any specific state-sponsored attacker".

The Union minister also recalled the position adopted by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology then that the onus was on Apple to explain if their devices are vulnerable and what triggered the notifications.

Laying out more facts, MoS Rajeev Chandrasekhar said, "Apple was asked to join the enquiry with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team under the Electronics & Information Technology Ministry, and that meetings have been held and the enquiry is ongoing."