Anyone who has read a recent spy novel or watched Enemy of the State is well aware that having a mobile phone in your pocket is as good a tracer of your whereabouts as having an ankle bracelet put there by a judge.
That’s a given and we all know we can be tracked, traced, overheard and be on CCTV footage for a large part of our waking lives. Nothing is confidential and our electronic files thicken like gout.
As for every man’s home being his castle suffice it to say that if the government wanted to put a bug into our computers, ping sounds of our windows or simply tune in to our telephone conversations and position trip words that would automatically start the tapes whirring we are not cascading into an Orwellian nightmare but accepting something that is part of hi tech big brother surveillance. That we are invaded and our privacy set up for grabs is so very possible that we do not take it seriously and it stays a non issue so far as it is done in clandestine fashion. As the public we duck the discomfort and pretend it isn’t happening. Last week, in India, that robe of secrecy got undone and a naked intent was on display.
The draft of an encryption policy that would make us all puppets on a string was sent out to the public for gauging a reaction. All our calls, our whatsapp conversations, i-messaging and sms conversations including Facebook would not only have to maintained for 90 days but it would also be a crime to delete anything in that period and the individual could be accountable for having pressed that button. That means private exchanges between friends, lovers, families,parents, married couples and political rightwingers, men and women of interest to authorities, criminals, gangsters, traffics, crooks and charlatans, terrorists and Uncle Tom Cobbely would all be treated with democratic equality. Ergo, if you chatting with your wife you’d have to keep that conversation on freeze for 90 days.
Six hours after the draft went out to the public with the proviso that it had till Oct. 16 to offer reactions it was snatched back.
An elitist howl of protest compelled the government to withdraw the draft and take the flimsy stand that the draft was not the real McCoy and had been dumped on 1.2 billion people without the knowledge of Minister for Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad who then rushed to seek sanctuary in the fact that he was not aware it was going public.
There are three factors that shriek for answers. One, no government withdraws anything in 6 hours. Nothing major happened, there were no strikes, no marches, no public displays of rage. It would be a comfortable surmise that 90 percent of India did not even register the invasion and frankly, the majority are so invaded in so many ways already, they couldn’t have cared less if the government wanted to listen in.
This sudden pullback gives rise to the doubt that the whole idea was a trial balloon sent up to see how the minority intelligentsia would respond. Couple that with the unholy haste of asking for a public assessment inside three weeks and you get the distinct impression that this bizarre plan is well on its way to fruition and way beyond the draft stage. Where is the almighty hurry to get it catapulted into reality that you expect to receive, assimilate and assess millions of responses in next to no time.
Two, governments do not ask the public if it can be spied upon. They do not need permission and it must be incredibly naive to imagine that any individual in his right senses would have written in before the deadline and found merit in being under the microscope. So the asking and the withdrawal seems to be a clever way of getting from the back door.
Let’s look at the element of haste. Haste to create a document with no prior warning. Haste to get the public give it’s okay in next to no time like before they wrap their heads around it. Then this hurtle to rescind it as if it never really happened, sorry folks, wrong call. Without being too sinister the wriggling suspicion that something is not quite right lingers. Is it just the Machiavellian plot of some fawning bureaucrat trying to toady upto his political master with a ‘good idea, suh’ or is it a fait accompli.
No reason why not. Either we take that route and write it off as a blunder in the corridors of power or we say, hey just a second there was something deeper there and it wouldn’t just be a single guy plan, more a think tank concept. A little paranoia is a healthy ingredient in assessing something that has no precedent.
There is this fond sensation that the matter is over,the people triumphed over the evil dragon and that’s that.
Which makes for a rather fragile faith. Why would it be over if it was started. I a quarter of a day?
You seriously cannot believe that the idea has been canned because in six turns of the clock we, the people, intimidated the government. Much as we would like to flatter ourselves it doesn’t work that way.
After al even a draft plan would have needed a fair amount of work on the back end of a system geared to collecting data from millions of people, correlating and monitoring the information flow. That would require a huge investment, quantified at several hundred crores, expensive skilled manpower and installation on super hi tech premises. Just the selection of programmers will come with a hefty price tag not mention maintenance.
Unless much of this was already done and much effort already gone into it why would it be given to the people for a plebiscite. The codicil to this will be the policing required to investigate individuals and capture those who break the new social media laws if they were to come into being.
On this canvas we have to assume that the kernel of such a blanket snoop has been sown. This just did not occur overnight and even some thought must have gone into the rules, the breaking of the rules and the consequences which is a dimension in themselves. It’s a whole new ball game in legal parlance.
Anything so draconian must be a matter of great concern whether it was a premature kick off or an inhouse exercise, it is scary that it was even considered. In capsule, why the government would be interested in a conversation between lovers, friends, colleagues and the such is beyond comprehension. Millions of private messages of trivial consequence go out every day and they are not meant for official reading. A joke can become an indictment, a remark in jest can have you up the creek, a stupid ‘pass it on’ photograph can have you hauled up on a porn charge.
Knock knock. Who’s there? Guess who? Gestapo.
Except, at least they knocked.
