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Countering the Surveillance State

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August 13, 2018

What is the issue?

  • Over the past few years, the government has taken several steps to enhance its capacity to monitor citizens through various structures.
  • This has led to apprehensions of India becoming a surveillance state due to the government’s growing powers to spy on citizens.

What are the significant government moves to establish surveillance?

  • Home Ministry - The ministry recently stated its intention to create a centralised nationwide database of fingerprints of criminals.
  • This is part of the proposed “Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System” (CCTNS), which also plans to include face recognition capability.
  • There are also reports of the ministry seeking access to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) biometric database.
  • SEBI - Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) had set up a panel to review the regulatory powers of it and recommend improvements.
  • The panel recently recommended that SEBI be given powers to wiretap and record phone calls in order to enhance its ability to monitor insider trading.
  • Cyber Space - The Netra (Network Traffic Analysis) system for internet monitoring has been operational for several years.
  • But its exact capabilities are unknown since it is shielded from the Right to Information Act owing to security implications.
  • Further, the government had also mooted creating a social media monitoring hub in order to enable “360-degree monitoring” of the social media activity.
  • This was put on hold only after the Supreme Court (SC) observed that it would be akin to “creating a surveillance state”.

What are the implications?

  • The above cases effectively mean that the SC judgment recognising the right to privacy as a fundamental right is being undermined in practice.
  • Until there are specific laws limiting the surveillance powers of governments, the surveillance activities of the state will likely proliferate.
  • But the recent data protection legislation as suggested by the Srikrishna Committee provides too much leeway for the government for surveillance.
  • More significantly, even already existing rules limiting the state’s powers to infringe on a citizen’s privacy are not followed in letter and spirit.
  • For instance, although wiretaps are supposed to be authorised only by senior officials for specific purposes, they are done on a truly massive scale.

What is the way ahead?

  • As the years roll by since technological advances are likely to make surveillance systems even more invasive and efficient.
  • But technical solutions are also being evolved to better rationalise our ability to share data online like the MIT’s “Social Linked Data (Solid)” project.
  • However, the mere existence of technology will not prevent the government from coercively collecting data, and laws are needed for curbing them.
  • While the state needs to create such capabilities for legitimate reasons, each case of surveillance must be justified by high profile requests.
  • Moreover, the right to forget regulations need to be strengthened so that citizens can ask for data to be deleted from government databases.

 

Source: Business Standard

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