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,
