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Tag: surveillance

November 30, 2014

Whats wrong with Government snooping/surveillance?

by viggy — Categories: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

A member in ILugC had recently asked this question and I spent some time trying to put up these points as an answer.

1) Can we trust the government itself?
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” which translates to “Who will guard the
guards themselves?”

Government itself is made up of people, even though, we can proudly say
that we democratically elected the government, can we trust the
government completely? The various scams of state governments and
central governments give us a good reason why we cant trust those
running the government. Also, a government in itself is transient, you
never know what kind of future government can come.

2) Security of the data collected

Its a common knowledge that when any riot happens, the organizers easily
target people from specific communities thanks to data such as Voter’s
ID Card list etc available for that region. Hence even we can blindly
trust the government, the fact that such a collated data exists, itself
makes it a honeypot to attract bad elements in society to misuse the data.

3) Mass Surveillance vs targetted Surveillance

Though there may be some strong reasons for government to do
surveillance on specific individuals, there is very little rational to
do mass surveillance. The very notion that everything you do or say is
getting recorded will curtail freedom of expression. Everytime someone
wants to express something little off the beat, he/she might have to
take extreme caution and in many cases, people might not come forward at
all to express.
An analogy is imagine a light tower in central yard in a jail where
prisoners cant see who is watching from the light tower. Since they know
that there is 24 hours watch on it, the notion that someone there is
watching itself creates fear in them to try anything to escape.

Even in case of targetted surveillance, we know how Gujrat government
‘allegedly’ misused the state machinery to snoop on an individual. So
even having means to do targetted surveillance needs to have very
stringent checks and balances.

4) Eternity of the data collected

The idea that the data collected will exist years later is also
something to worry about. A simple example is what happened with Sec
377. When the high court declared it unconstitutional in 2009, many
people came forward expressing their true orientation. However when
Supreme Court overturned the HC decision, it left all the people who had
come forward openly to be sitting ducks for harassment by the authorities.

5) Option to opt-out

Like in case of Aadhar which looks like will stay in India now that the
new government also seem to be comfortable with it, there is little
option for those who value their privacy to opt-out of these schemes.

In India, since government does provide for lot of amenities, Maria
Xynou who is working on the Surveillance in India in CIS-India had
mentioned that there is a attitude amongst us to look at government like
a parent who takes care of us. Hence this attitude makes us put lot of
trust in the government which is dangerous.

You can watch her talk at CCC on Indian Surveillance State here,

December 4, 2013

Big Democracy : Big Surveillance talk by Maria Xynou

by viggy — Categories: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I attended this talk today at CIS-India office. Maria as part of her research was able to point out very well on how the Indian government is investing heavily in various kinds of surveillance and how all of this is getting centralized under one big umbrella project called ICMS(Indian Central Monitoring System). This along with the UID project is going to be totally catastrophic with respect to an individual’s privacy in our country. We already know with SnoopGate case at Gujarat how privacy of individuals are easily violated for petty reasons and how the whole state machinery is put in use without any checks and balances just on the will of few people at the top of the state machinery.
The talk also covered part of her research where she went through different private companies who have developed various products specializing in mass and targetted surveillance through Telecommunication, Internet and biometric data. What is scary is that the customers of majority of these companies are Law Enforcement Agencies(LEAs) and Telecommunications and Internet Service Providers which they actively brag about on their websites. Moreover, most of these companies are not even ISO:27001 complaint and hardly any of them follow any privacy policies.
Hence Surveillance is becoming a big profitable industry in india where most of the profits are coming from tax payers money.
I will be sharing the link to the recorded video of the talk which will definitely give you a much detailed idea of the various surveillance projects run by Indian government and various companies involved sharing the profit and benefitting from the same.

In the blog, I would like to mention two issues that mainly stuck me during the discussion after the talk.

1) Privacy of meta data is equally important if not more than the actual content data.
One of the most common excuse that we heard from various NSA agencies after the Snowden leaks were that they are mainly storing the MetaData and not the content data in itself and hence it is not as bad as it seems. However Maria during the discussion pointed out very well why we should be more concerned if this is actually the case. Content data may not always be true. Many times it can just be garbage information or totally false information being exchanged between people. Also just due to its enormity, it becomes very difficult to actually do data mining on the content data itself. However MetaData in itself is true and cannot be contested upon. Suppose you sent an email from a particular location to your friend, the content in the data itself can be false and can be something which is not much useful. However the very fact that you were at a particular location and used a particular IP Address and communicated to a particular person with a specific email ID itself cannot be contested and this metadata of your converstaion can be used against you. This gets worse as these metadata over a period of time can draw a picture of you which is completely different than your actual personality but since the information in metadata cannot be contested, it becomes very difficult to prove otherwise.

2) Privacy awareness an cultural issue in India
Often whenever we try to create awareness about the growing surveillance in India and across the world, there is a complete indifference amongst people about it. ‘Why should I worry when I have nothing to hide’ and ‘It is for our own safety’ are the most common reply. Maria attributed two main reasons behind this lack of concern with respect to privacy amongst people.
a) Asian culture is more collective and less of individualistic as compared to western culture. Privacy in itself is a very individualistic right and since the asian cultures are more about the society in general than individuals, we are often happy to give up our privacy for better of the society.
b) Since large part of the society in India still depends in various aspects on government support, they are ok to let government have a kind of parental surveillance over their privacy. However the fact that such a surveillance leads to control over the people is mainly ignored or unknown to people. One of the biggest reason given behind UID/Aadhar Project is that since there are so many different projects of the government, there needs to be some kind of centralized system which will ensure that the support from government reaches the right people. However with no one way of currently identifying people, there is lot of leakages in the projects and hence unique identification method will help. People have actually bought this argument for the project and have enrolled enthusiastically. However the implications of such a huge database of all the people across the country will only be known in time. We know how such databases of people were used in Germany under a dictatorial regime. There is also some information of how Voter’s list were used during the 1984 and 2002 riots to identify people.

Over all the picture of surveillance in India is very grim. Another point what Maria pointed out is that though surveillance in itself is very scary, what examplifies it is the acceptance of it by people as a normal state affiar. In a dictatorial authoratative regime, surveillance would have been contested as something being pushed from the top and hence infringing people’s right. However what we now see is that most successful surveillance states are some of the biggest democratic societies.