#18 a Our State of Perpetual Surveillance
An unknown glitch cut short the text of NL 18. I am reproducing the text in full below. My apologies for any inconvenience.
At the Jaipur Literature Festival last weekend, I had the opportunity to discuss the State of Surveillance with a stellar panel, consisting of retired Supreme Court judge, Madan Lokur, Member of Parliament, Shashi Tharoor, and journalist Swati Chaturvedi, who wrote the book, “I am a Troll”.
Inevitably, the discussion converged upon the Pegasus spyware, developed by the Israeli company NSO, and sold exclusively to governments. In 2019, a group of media organisations in India found 300 Indian phones were listed as targets for Pegasus, including those belonging to 40 journalists. Amnesty International’s Security Laboratory examined 13 iPhones from Indians on this list, and found that 9 had been targeted, and 7 successfully infected. Android phone logs don’t record the same level of data as Apple software does, so the studies of 9 Android phones in India were only able to conclude that 1 phone had been tampered with.
Inevitably, the row around Pegasus reached Parliament, where the Government stonewalled the debate. There were vague assertions about nothing illegal having been done. Separately, in the Supreme Court, the Solicitor General refused to confirm or deny whether it had procured Pegasus or other software from Israel, leaning on the tired old crutch of national security, “The moment this information is divulged, terror networks may take pre-emptive or corrective steps.”
The matter was taken up by the Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology, chaired by Shashi Tharoor. Three Secretaries to the Government of India were asked to present their statements at a meeting of the committee. All three confirmed they would attend, but, at the last minute, regretted their inability to make themselves available. Such a development is “completely unprecedented”, Shashi said - a complete breach of parliamentary procedure and privilege. The committee’s deliberations, such as they were, could not be taken on record, either, as 10 of the 17 members in attendance were from the BJP ranks, and refused to record their attendance.
Ever-feisty, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee announced that she would set up a commission of inquiry to probe the Pegasus matter, headed by Justice Madan Lokur. The Supreme Court had already set up a body to investigate the spyware, but its recent track record in dealing with matters of national importance - notably Article 370, electoral bonds - doesn’t lend much credibility to its intent. Defending its monopoly, a bench led by the Chief Justice of India, NV Ramana, stayed the proceedings of the West Bengal inquiry. Don’t be surprised if the matter sits on the back burner for years, yielding precedence to bail applications for the ruling party’s favourite journalists, or commercial matters for well-connected industrialists. In the remote circumstance that the Pegasus committee reaches some conclusion, and “Supposing the Supreme Court does find the government guilty of having broken the law on espionage of its own citizens,” I asked Justice Madan Lokur, “will it actually be able to enforce a penalty on the Executive?”
The short answer is, No. The Legislature and the Executive have effectively merged, and one will not penalise the other.
“What hope does this leave us citizens with?”, an audience member asked us. The answer, I said, was given by our farmers, who protested the farm laws on the ground, in peace and solidarity, and forced the government to repeal them.
When the political thinker Jeremy Bentham conceived the Panopticon, a jail of perpetual surveillance, he also asked himself the key question, “Who guards the guards?” When public officials fail, it has to be the public.
The other key question which came up in this debate was what the government seeks to achieve by surveillance. There is more than some merit to Michel Foucault’s assertion that knowledge is power; a regime desiring ever more power will grab at every opportunity to gather more data on its citizenry, especially those in search of the truth.
“There are some people and organisations that desire a monopoly over the truth”, the writer and politician Pavan Varma had said on another Jaipur panel. Three journalists whose phones seem to have been Pegasus-ed all threatened the ruling party’s version of the truth.
Sushant Singh, who has served in the Indian Army, and is a widely read columnist on defence and strategic affairs, repeatedly asserted that all was not well on our border with China. This flew in the face of the governmental stance, even if the Prime Minister’s statement had to be edited for the official record. And never mind if subsequent developments confirmed that Chinese positions had shut off Indian access to territory they had traditionally patrolled.
Paranjoy Guha Thakurta has spent several decades covering crony capitalism and demonstrated that it is alive and flourishing. This does not square well with the posturing that the government has created conditions of Ease of Business for all. That particular metric, in any case, was destroyed by the World Bank, its author, accepting that it was both flawed, and rigged.
Swati Chaturvedi, one of our panelists, spent two years investigating the hate mongers on social media; their links with the BJP suggest that their attacks were not the spontaneous outpouring of troubled souls, but part of a highly coordinated and generously-funded political initiative.
“Why would the government want to tap into your phone?” I asked Swati.
For her sources. “I would die for my sources”, she said to loud applause.
I hope it never comes to that, but it is clear that our response to perpetual surveillance has to be perpetual vigilance. And that when the organs of governance have been suborned and enfeebled, it requires independent media channels and us citizens to step into the breach.
Mohit Satyanand
20th March 2022