The intrusive presence-nanny state?
The debate about how the government has notified several agencies to be able to tap our communications has resurfaced. Yes the Gazette is from the UPA era, and the powers were meant to be exercised with due caution. Most importantly the data that was sought to be drawn for further analyses was perhaps linked to the NATGRID that was being set up at that time, in response to the worst ever terror attack on Indian soil at Mumbai, which we call our 26/11.
But that was way before our Supreme Court had ruled about Privacy being a Fundamental Right. (https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/supreme-court-rules-privacy-is-fundamental-right-here-s-full-text-of-the-judgment/story-Wheiu7B8nbgbqtJYT1KzkO.html)
While doing so the Supreme Court did not introduce any caveat while covering Privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution. In fact, the Supreme Court went so far as to say that without privacy the dignity of life stood diminished and hence even for public figures privacy was an essential decorum in conduct of their affairs. Personal choices and views, irrespective of our modern technological world remained in the veil of privacy and while the right does like other rights guaranteed by Constitution is not absolute in itself, it cannot become subject to majoritarian consideration.
So conducting ‘beef’ searches to snooping on your smart phones for any idealogical leanings are all part of the privacy gambit, and there will be sufficient regulation to ensure that privacy does not operate as unbridled piracy, by allowing shadow warriors to hack code or to obtain data or entertain access just by invoking its concern.
When we see how the system responds to a situation is how often as a society we stand perturbed by our lack of oversight. It is unfailing on our part, to stand thus exposed about our concerns only when it seems that we are directly in grief of such perversion. The whole operative realm of agencies in such that they must not create a situation when it becomes clearly overbearing, or when the target of their affections happens to be a celebrity, over whom the lay public will exercise their emotions.
From the times of Indira Gandhi we know that IB was tasked to detect the mood of the masses and how they famously called wrong when Emergency was lifted in 1976 and elections were announced shortly thereafter, paving the way for the Janata government of 1977-80. Phone tapping used to be the then only available method of ‘listening in’ and now with the modern gadgetry and media, one can actually indirectly snoop on citizens by hiring an agency like Cambridge Analytica and get them to cull data from Facebook and do much the same task that IB was getting done.
In fact, there is a whole industry out there in this predictive analytics, who use various guidelines and algorithms to make sense of how we tie our laces and choose our colours for our compounds and what they provide as insight for the way we will vote. But that is no way comparable to actually knowing how we think, and how politically informed we are, is it? Then there is the issue of what in India is called ‘Urban Naxalism’ which is the euphemistic manner of targeting intellectually ideological opposition, people from various walks of life who have within our Constitution a different take on how we must deal with issues like sharing our natural resources, the limits of State power and how and why the State should be involved in facilitating Industry. So when chargesheets are filed, the main contention is the ‘seditious’ nature of the emails and texts exchanged between various players of the latest round of this conflict of ideology, when lawyers, ideologues and social workers have been rounded up and their liberties curtailed in an ongoing trial. So State agencies do have a point, that to prove the involvement or otherwise of such players, they need access to their hard drives, to their email and social media platforms.
But can these very inputs not be sought from an engagement by human intelligence, by using software based bots that can engage them, the way policing is meant to be, with real ground work, surveillance, scrupulous evidence gathering and proof. Does it need no penetration of networks by covert police operations? Does it not need snaring, traps and such masterful tactics that old policemen were mighty proud of? Does it need simply a government order to a handful of shadowy agents to infiltrate into computers and smart phones?
Actually the Girl with the Dragon Tatoo trilogy reveals how evil and resourceful private and powerful people can be and how it needs such technological evidence gathering that borders on snooping and smart surveillance through hacking of private computers to fill the gaps of evidence that is sorely needed to obtain closure. As a crimes novel this series was the first to speak extensively of ‘ethical hacking’ and then we saw how Wikileaks and other ‘conscientious dissenters’ disgorged millions of megabytes of government data to stir up debate on the new nature of governments, the avatars they assume in presuming they know all that is good for us! So Chelsea Manning is seen as a warrior for free speech ironically and Strava’s hacking to reveal the routes taken by Fitbit users in US Military to locate offshore bases and off book camps( Dark Sites) was seen as a useful way of taking on the Goliath of Big Government. Yet were these actions not equally noxious? So do ends justify means? Or do we as citizens feel that we can anything we want as private people, that governments have no right whereas we as citizens do have the right alone to privacy?
In much the same way we seek justice to be served, when we are facing the law, we want it to follow its every due process, and when we seek to brandish the law, we root for vigilante justice, we clearly as individuals have stances that are at variance with our professed positions even on privacy. If one looks at the popularity of Jack Reacher novels, the argument cannot be lost on us, that we feel that a former US MP is better judge of character, maiming or murdering people who cross his path, and we cheer lustily his engagement with people from the position of a primordial prowess of brute physicality aided by an agile and alert brain. So if an individual is using a network to hack into a evil operation, it thrill us, for it will bring what we can relate to as swift justice. Even if such action makes short work of due process or legal stipulations.
In what can be seen as a fortuitous break, a young lady murdered in Whatcom county in Washington back in 1989 could have her killer brought to justice because a co-worker at Franz Bakery swooped some Coke cans and trash used by the alleged killer for DNA sampling. That is actually a kind of snooping where a private citizen volunteered against her fellow citizen. 18 year old Mandy Stavik evoked a lot of emotion being a bright young lady whose murder was unsolved for so long. So when the prosecution proves its charges against Bass, whose DNA was recovered from Stavik’s body, and whose DNA on the Coke can had a one in ten trillionth match, Bass can argue that his privacy was violated, the state can argue that while evidence against Bass was circumstantial, other than this DNA match there was no way they could prove that Bass was the perpetrator of the perfect crime. (https://freeblitz.com/2018/12/20/she-swiped-her-co-workers-coke-can-it-helped-solve-a-28-year-old-murder/)
Now we see how much of a dilemma we are placed in over privacy in this case, when for the sake of justice, we don’t mind bending the privacy lines a bit, blurring it or even erasing it just for this exception. Do remember that each blighting of privacy will provide more momentum to a state that believes that it alone must remain the arbiter of all information. That information and its use be judged solely from intention and not by another yardstick.
Is that agreeable to us? An intrusive Nanny?
indiarubberman.com 