THE Supreme Court has struck down section 66A of the Information Technology Act. Net neutrality has to be observed. But little progress has been made with curtailing the expansion of the state’s surveillance capabilities. The NDA government has on the contrary pledged to speed up the functioning of the Central Monitoring System(CMS) which is reminiscent of Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. The CMS gives the state the ability to hack and record phone calls as well as read private e-mails and multimedia messages. It was initiated after the Mumbai attacks in 2008 but had been halted since.
India is the second most intensely cyber-attacked country. Terrorism looms in every part of the country. In this context, electronic surveillance may be necessary. The CMS is justified on grounds of national security. But it also opens the door to pervasive online spying. Abuse is more likely to be prevalent allowing too much scope for bureaucratic snooping. The CBI and IB can make the most of it to their advantage but there are no laws to protect the privacy of data received. The CMS has been compared to the US National Security Agency’s Prism programme. A leak caused by the notorious Edward Snowden revelations had political consequences in the US, the UK and Australia. The phone tapping controversy which shook Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar’s government in the early 1990s with Rajiv Gandhi on the warpath and which sparked a row between Amar Singh and Sonia Gandhi later come to mind. Democracy should ensure individual and political privacy though not at the cost of national security.
