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 recentlyrecommended 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.
