My pensieve

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.