God, Golem, UID: Singularity as an object in the mirror
"In societies of control the individual is doubled as code, as information, or as simulation such that the reference of the panoptic gaze is no longer the body but its [digital] double, and indeed this is no longer a matter of looking but rather one of data analysis." - B. Simon
Binu Karunakaran
Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram was right when he said the gravest threat to Indian democracy comes from within. There's a slight change though - the threat does not stem from the Maoists who are waging a war to ususrp state power by the year 2060. It comes from a super-panopticon project that aims to create a 12 digit UID/Aadhar number for the 1.2 billion citizens of India.
The UID/Aadhar, in reality a tracking, profiling and surveillance project fast-tracked post 26/11 attacks on Mumbai is being sold to us as an ICT panacea - a one-click fix for all the ills of a modern welfare state.
For Nandan Nilekani, the czar of India's silicon valley, who paratrooped straight from a corporate boardroom to the helm of the UIDAI and the UPA's neoliberal mandarins the UID project is nothing but the translation of the world into a problem in coding. The society re-interpreted as a cybernetic system with informational flows as control loops. A society subject to social and political control where privacy and dissent will remain - to borrow a phrase from Rondald Rumsfled - known unknowns.
It is to hide this real and devious intent that the UIDAI sings a lullaby of welfare and shows us its silicon (forgive the pun) mammaries. Who wouldn't love a technology that will plug the leaks in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and optimise the PDS delivery of food grains to the country's poorest of poor. All by de-duplication of identities of the 'fraudulent' Indian citizens, a good 37.2 per cent of population according to the Planning Commission falls under the Below Poverty Line (BPL).
Democracy can now cut the long story of its upstaging short. Why wait till 2060 for the gun-
toting Maoists if you can cut five decades of crap with the UID that will roll out in early 2011? A bloodless coup in the digital realm.
The birth of UID also mean that the singularity so far discussed in the realm of science fiction is already here. Not the technological singularity of domination by a super-human intelligence, but a panopticon singularity described by Charles Stross, that arises from a situation in which the human behaviour is deterministically governed by processes outside their control. With the advent of the UID, citizens will cease to be individuals and their relation with the state will be drastically altered forever. From individuals with power over our destinies we will turn into dividuals in perpetual cybernetic slave mode. Our'databased selves' acting as our body doubles conditioning our behaviour in realtime and transforming our physical selves into zombies.
The metaphors of Orwellian Big Brother and Bentham's prison architecture pales in comparison. If in the Foucaultian vision of prison the object of surveillance was the physical body, in the panoptics of UID, the object of control is the digital representation of the body. It is no longer necessary to create a real cyborg - all you need is a virtual cybernetic double that can hold your biometric and other ID info and authenticate the Real You in all virtual and physical transactions.
UID should be opposed because it's an assault on our privacies which form the basis of
freespeech, autonomy and personal dignity. Privacy is a solemn zone and a powerful right by which we form opinions and express them fearlessly. We concede in private, what cannot be said in a public sphere - often political opinions and radical thoughts germinate within the four walls of a room. Journalists know the volatile power of information that is shared in private conversations with bureaucrats and politicians and of the solitary acts of whistle blowers - all which help democracy to flourish.
The UID seen in the context of its linkages with the National Population Register and the NATGRID that involves sharing of information by 11 agencies which run over 20 different databases, ranging from IT returns to bank accounts, and telephone records to internet search histories is sure to undermine democracy by infringing on our privacy in a way not visualised before. When the row over illegal phonetapping by NTRO surfaced recently the opposition was indignant. If a foxy Rs.7 crore sophisticated snooping instrument can unnerve them what about the consequences of the UID whose potential for datamining and human rights infringement cross every imaginable threshold?
In his essay Future Map US born theorist Brian Holmes quotes from scientist Norbert Wiener's seminal work God & Golem, Inc.: “Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?” The question we need to ask Nandan Nilekani and the UPA government is the same.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Monday, August 24, 2009
India 's UID And The Fantasy Of Dataveillance
The perils of establishing nationwide identity systems have always been a hot topic of debate in countries that attach great value to privacy and human rights of its citizens. Plans to launch national ID cards have met with stiff opposition in UK, which announced the final design of its card in end of July 2009. The United States Senate too is getting ready to debate the PASS ID bill, a renamed version of George Bush regime's REAL ID that will bring in a national ID through the backdoor.
Compare this with the scenario in India where the UPA government is pushing ahead with a national ID program through the Unique Identity Development Authority of India (UIDAI), a body created blatantly bypassing the authority of parliament. And there is not even a whimper of protest from civil society groups or politicians. The government presumably does not want to lose time on creating consensus or engage in a national debate on a project which has irrevocable implications on data security and privacy of individuals. The government knows that no questions on its limit of stupidity will be raised because the whole business has been outsourced to a CEO with brand equity called Nandan Nilekani. Now we hear that the illegitimate UIDAI will be made legitimate by an Act of Parliament - that loud thumping of desks drowned by the blabbering of many tongues.
According to one estimate Rs. 150,000 Crore (US$ 30.9 bn) of taxpayers’ money will flow out into the gargantuan task of making our lives similar to that of aquarium fish and no less secure. Imagine that kind of money and political will power going into healthcare and sanitation or basic education and poverty alleviation.
Show me your UID?
If media reports can be believed there won't be any human-readable intelligence loaded into the UID. It will be a random generated number (no physical card) that citizens can quote in dealings with government authorities, banking/taxation transactions or while interacting with e-governance applications. That would mean that personal information will exist only in a database and need to be paired with the UID when the situation demands. A unique number that will subsume our multiple and divisive identities, the mark of the perpetually wired beast
Some reports indicate having a UID might not be mandatory at all. But chances are that even if the UID is made voluntary the large inconveniences of non-participation will make it effectively mandatory.
The draft report on Personal Identification Codification (PIC) released by the Expert Committee on Metadata sheds some light on the data elements that would be stored in the database of the national identity system. The report says the objective of the PIC is to identify each and every person uniquely at the national level to ensure interoperability of information related to individuals collected by various govt/non government organisations. This throws up several questions: Will the government be the only authority which can use or request the UID? What information in those databases will be linked explicitly to other databases? Who has the authority to create this linkages and who all can access this information? Would the people who use the UID for various transactions be informed of the algorithms used to analyse their data. Will the data collected stored forever? Article 20, clause 3 of the Indian constitution states that "No person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself." Will data records generated by the UID be used against the accused in a court of law? There is not much clarity on this as the confidentiality level of data elements (open to all, open only to security agencies/NGOs) are yet to be finalised.
But the security agencies will definitely have a say on this. They would be specifically interested in Data mining, a process that involves the use of mathematical analytical tools to detect patterns in large sets of data with the purpose of predicting certain kinds of behaviour, such as the propensity to engage in criminal activity or to purchase particular consumer goods. They would also be looking at data matching - the technique of comparing different databases so as to identify common features or trends in the data.
Oxford dictionary defines Function Creep as the way in which information that has been collected for one limited purpose, is gradually allowed to be used for other purposes which people may not approve of: The Social Security Numbers (SSNs) in the US, initially designed as only for administering social security benefits are now a common element in public and private sector databases, allowing for easy sharing and correlation of disparate records. In India the electoral ID cards currently fulfill a similar role. UIDs in the future might become mandatory when you apply for a cell phone connection, book an airline ticket or make a hotel reservation. The existence of common cross-references will make it easy for anyone setting out to create linkages between different sets of information that exists in a database.
How personal is your mobile number?
An alarming feature of the UID, if the PIC document is to believed is the proposal to include mobile phone and landline numbers as a data element for identification. Most telephone companies and ISPs store records of customers' telephone calls and it is now easy to map movements of a cell phone user by reading the way it locks with towers. A plan to centralise communications data in a government database will make it amenable for datamining for unusual patterns of behaviour. More than terrorists, in a country like India where the security agencies are known to toe the ruling party line, such facilities would be used to target political adversaries. More such hair-rising ideas are being researched by the government including conversion of Unique Identity Number (UID) into your very personal mobile number.
In the words of C-DOT Executive Director P.V. Acharya: "What we have thought is why not have one unique number associated with the person like the social security number in US or the UID. So that unique number we can use for the purpose of mobile communications also."
There are other worrying factors in the Personal Identification Codification like the inclusion of occupation and suffix (titles) code that speaks of a built-in class bias. The document envisages unique codes for all citizens - legislators to senior officials, corporate managers to office clerks and farm labourers to technicians. The suffix code according to the report will be used to identify titles bestowed by the state - Bharat Ratna, Padam Vibhushan, IAS and IFS. What could be the need for including census data relating to your status in society as an identification element? Will not this give rise to a situation where citizens will be discriminated against. How would an ordinary traffic policeman searching your ID papers in a highway react when he comes to know that you are an IAS official?
Annoyingly the PIC report depends on dubious online sources for defining its metadata elements - blogs and online dictionaries. For eg: Finger Print is defined by a definition copy pasted from an obscure website ppsblogs.net/crimescene/files/2007/06/forensics-terms.doc. I am not implying that the given definition is any way incorrect. Only that the task assigned to them deserves a bit more seriousness than a high school home assignment.
Digital sovereignty
Identity, security and privacy are terms that represents highly complicated, nuanced and deeply philosophic issues. The UID project itself deals with digital sovereignty of India and the privacy and dignity of its citizens. The project now certain to be linked to India's multi-billion dollar e-governance program should also be viewed in the context of ongoing tussle between votaries of 'multiple-standards' (read proprietary software) and 'single standard'(read open source).
Pressure is on the government from the IT industry lobby to go in for 'reasonable and Non Discriminatory (RAND)' terms and multiple standards. If accepted this will lead to multiple, proprietary standards. In a meeting held in June 2009 Nasscom pleaded the case of 'multiple' standards, while the Department of Information Technology (DIT), was of the view that 'complete interoperability could possibly be achieved only through single standard.' But statement made by the DIT secretary during the meeting also hints at a possibility of ensuring interoperability through multiple standards in consultation with Industry.'
Database state and the right to Information Self-determination
In 2006 a Congress MP from Maharashtra Vijay J. Darda introduced an obscure piece of legislation in the Rajya Sabha. Though limited in scope and feeble in approach, The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2006 was an attempt to engage some of the dangers posed by the modern database state. The bill seminal in many ways is still gathering dust tucked deep inside the file of still pending bills in Rajya Sabha. One of the sections of the Bill read: The personal data of any person collected by an organization whether government or private, shall not be disclosed to any other organization for the purposes of direct marketing or for any commercial gain. The personal data could be disclosed to voluntary or charity organizations only after obtaining prior consent of the person.
Such a clause would have defeated the very purpose of data protection bill because a very thin line separates the modern NGOs from Corporate houses. The distinction between public sector and private databases are now increasingly blurred. We are also living at a time when services are increasingly being provided through public-private partnerships and joint ventures.
The newly amended IT Act has some provisions that deals with data protection but it is not clear if they can tackle issues of privacy thrown up by the sensitive nature of personal information coded in an Unique ID that can be mapped or mashed up in the realm of cyberspace. The section 43A states that if a “body corporate” possessing, dealing or handling any “sensitive personal data or information” in a computer resource which it owns, controls or operates is negligent in implementing and maintaining “reasonable security practices and procedures”, and thereby causes wrongful loss or wrongful gain to any person, this "body corporate" will become liable to pay damages as compensation to the affected person.
Vijay Darda's Bill for the first time in India was talking about the right of an individual to decide on what information about self should be communicated to others and under what circumstances. The right of Informational Self-determination is considered crucial with regard to the protection of privacy of an individual in the age of internet and real-time updated computer databases which makes total surveillance possible.
The term was first used in the context of a German constitutional ruling relating to personal information collected during the 1983 census. The German Federal Constitutional Court ruled: “[...] in the context of modern data processing, the protection of the individual against unlimited collection, storage, use and disclosure of his/her personal data is encompassed by the general personal rights of the [German Constitution]. This basic right warrants in this respect the capacity of the individual to determine in principle the disclosure and use of his/her personal data. Limitations to this informational self-determination are allowed only in case of overriding public interest.”
A 2009 report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd on the perils of the British Database State analysed 46 UK government databases and found that only six of them have a proper legal basis for any privacy intrusions and are proportionate and necessary in a democratic society. It found that nearly twelve of them are illegal under human rights and data protection law and should be scrapped or substantially redesigned. The remaining 29 databases were recommended for an independent review because of significant privacy concerns.
It would be an absolute misadventure on part of India, which lacks even basic legislation to protect the personal data of its citizens, and a climate for informed debate on the ethical and moral implications of the UID project to play into the hands of a few dataveillance fantasists.
Compare this with the scenario in India where the UPA government is pushing ahead with a national ID program through the Unique Identity Development Authority of India (UIDAI), a body created blatantly bypassing the authority of parliament. And there is not even a whimper of protest from civil society groups or politicians. The government presumably does not want to lose time on creating consensus or engage in a national debate on a project which has irrevocable implications on data security and privacy of individuals. The government knows that no questions on its limit of stupidity will be raised because the whole business has been outsourced to a CEO with brand equity called Nandan Nilekani. Now we hear that the illegitimate UIDAI will be made legitimate by an Act of Parliament - that loud thumping of desks drowned by the blabbering of many tongues.
According to one estimate Rs. 150,000 Crore (US$ 30.9 bn) of taxpayers’ money will flow out into the gargantuan task of making our lives similar to that of aquarium fish and no less secure. Imagine that kind of money and political will power going into healthcare and sanitation or basic education and poverty alleviation.
Show me your UID?
If media reports can be believed there won't be any human-readable intelligence loaded into the UID. It will be a random generated number (no physical card) that citizens can quote in dealings with government authorities, banking/taxation transactions or while interacting with e-governance applications. That would mean that personal information will exist only in a database and need to be paired with the UID when the situation demands. A unique number that will subsume our multiple and divisive identities, the mark of the perpetually wired beast
Some reports indicate having a UID might not be mandatory at all. But chances are that even if the UID is made voluntary the large inconveniences of non-participation will make it effectively mandatory.
The draft report on Personal Identification Codification (PIC) released by the Expert Committee on Metadata sheds some light on the data elements that would be stored in the database of the national identity system. The report says the objective of the PIC is to identify each and every person uniquely at the national level to ensure interoperability of information related to individuals collected by various govt/non government organisations. This throws up several questions: Will the government be the only authority which can use or request the UID? What information in those databases will be linked explicitly to other databases? Who has the authority to create this linkages and who all can access this information? Would the people who use the UID for various transactions be informed of the algorithms used to analyse their data. Will the data collected stored forever? Article 20, clause 3 of the Indian constitution states that "No person accused of any offence shall be compelled to be a witness against himself." Will data records generated by the UID be used against the accused in a court of law? There is not much clarity on this as the confidentiality level of data elements (open to all, open only to security agencies/NGOs) are yet to be finalised.
But the security agencies will definitely have a say on this. They would be specifically interested in Data mining, a process that involves the use of mathematical analytical tools to detect patterns in large sets of data with the purpose of predicting certain kinds of behaviour, such as the propensity to engage in criminal activity or to purchase particular consumer goods. They would also be looking at data matching - the technique of comparing different databases so as to identify common features or trends in the data.
Oxford dictionary defines Function Creep as the way in which information that has been collected for one limited purpose, is gradually allowed to be used for other purposes which people may not approve of: The Social Security Numbers (SSNs) in the US, initially designed as only for administering social security benefits are now a common element in public and private sector databases, allowing for easy sharing and correlation of disparate records. In India the electoral ID cards currently fulfill a similar role. UIDs in the future might become mandatory when you apply for a cell phone connection, book an airline ticket or make a hotel reservation. The existence of common cross-references will make it easy for anyone setting out to create linkages between different sets of information that exists in a database.
How personal is your mobile number?
An alarming feature of the UID, if the PIC document is to believed is the proposal to include mobile phone and landline numbers as a data element for identification. Most telephone companies and ISPs store records of customers' telephone calls and it is now easy to map movements of a cell phone user by reading the way it locks with towers. A plan to centralise communications data in a government database will make it amenable for datamining for unusual patterns of behaviour. More than terrorists, in a country like India where the security agencies are known to toe the ruling party line, such facilities would be used to target political adversaries. More such hair-rising ideas are being researched by the government including conversion of Unique Identity Number (UID) into your very personal mobile number.
In the words of C-DOT Executive Director P.V. Acharya: "What we have thought is why not have one unique number associated with the person like the social security number in US or the UID. So that unique number we can use for the purpose of mobile communications also."
There are other worrying factors in the Personal Identification Codification like the inclusion of occupation and suffix (titles) code that speaks of a built-in class bias. The document envisages unique codes for all citizens - legislators to senior officials, corporate managers to office clerks and farm labourers to technicians. The suffix code according to the report will be used to identify titles bestowed by the state - Bharat Ratna, Padam Vibhushan, IAS and IFS. What could be the need for including census data relating to your status in society as an identification element? Will not this give rise to a situation where citizens will be discriminated against. How would an ordinary traffic policeman searching your ID papers in a highway react when he comes to know that you are an IAS official?
Annoyingly the PIC report depends on dubious online sources for defining its metadata elements - blogs and online dictionaries. For eg: Finger Print is defined by a definition copy pasted from an obscure website ppsblogs.net/crimescene/files/2007/06/forensics-terms.doc. I am not implying that the given definition is any way incorrect. Only that the task assigned to them deserves a bit more seriousness than a high school home assignment.
Digital sovereignty
Identity, security and privacy are terms that represents highly complicated, nuanced and deeply philosophic issues. The UID project itself deals with digital sovereignty of India and the privacy and dignity of its citizens. The project now certain to be linked to India's multi-billion dollar e-governance program should also be viewed in the context of ongoing tussle between votaries of 'multiple-standards' (read proprietary software) and 'single standard'(read open source).
Pressure is on the government from the IT industry lobby to go in for 'reasonable and Non Discriminatory (RAND)' terms and multiple standards. If accepted this will lead to multiple, proprietary standards. In a meeting held in June 2009 Nasscom pleaded the case of 'multiple' standards, while the Department of Information Technology (DIT), was of the view that 'complete interoperability could possibly be achieved only through single standard.' But statement made by the DIT secretary during the meeting also hints at a possibility of ensuring interoperability through multiple standards in consultation with Industry.'
Database state and the right to Information Self-determination
In 2006 a Congress MP from Maharashtra Vijay J. Darda introduced an obscure piece of legislation in the Rajya Sabha. Though limited in scope and feeble in approach, The Personal Data Protection Bill, 2006 was an attempt to engage some of the dangers posed by the modern database state. The bill seminal in many ways is still gathering dust tucked deep inside the file of still pending bills in Rajya Sabha. One of the sections of the Bill read: The personal data of any person collected by an organization whether government or private, shall not be disclosed to any other organization for the purposes of direct marketing or for any commercial gain. The personal data could be disclosed to voluntary or charity organizations only after obtaining prior consent of the person.
Such a clause would have defeated the very purpose of data protection bill because a very thin line separates the modern NGOs from Corporate houses. The distinction between public sector and private databases are now increasingly blurred. We are also living at a time when services are increasingly being provided through public-private partnerships and joint ventures.
The newly amended IT Act has some provisions that deals with data protection but it is not clear if they can tackle issues of privacy thrown up by the sensitive nature of personal information coded in an Unique ID that can be mapped or mashed up in the realm of cyberspace. The section 43A states that if a “body corporate” possessing, dealing or handling any “sensitive personal data or information” in a computer resource which it owns, controls or operates is negligent in implementing and maintaining “reasonable security practices and procedures”, and thereby causes wrongful loss or wrongful gain to any person, this "body corporate" will become liable to pay damages as compensation to the affected person.
Vijay Darda's Bill for the first time in India was talking about the right of an individual to decide on what information about self should be communicated to others and under what circumstances. The right of Informational Self-determination is considered crucial with regard to the protection of privacy of an individual in the age of internet and real-time updated computer databases which makes total surveillance possible.
The term was first used in the context of a German constitutional ruling relating to personal information collected during the 1983 census. The German Federal Constitutional Court ruled: “[...] in the context of modern data processing, the protection of the individual against unlimited collection, storage, use and disclosure of his/her personal data is encompassed by the general personal rights of the [German Constitution]. This basic right warrants in this respect the capacity of the individual to determine in principle the disclosure and use of his/her personal data. Limitations to this informational self-determination are allowed only in case of overriding public interest.”
A 2009 report commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust Ltd on the perils of the British Database State analysed 46 UK government databases and found that only six of them have a proper legal basis for any privacy intrusions and are proportionate and necessary in a democratic society. It found that nearly twelve of them are illegal under human rights and data protection law and should be scrapped or substantially redesigned. The remaining 29 databases were recommended for an independent review because of significant privacy concerns.
It would be an absolute misadventure on part of India, which lacks even basic legislation to protect the personal data of its citizens, and a climate for informed debate on the ethical and moral implications of the UID project to play into the hands of a few dataveillance fantasists.
Monday, March 23, 2009
BJP’s IT Vision: The discreet charm of techno-Hindutva
In June 2007 the Indian Express reported that the Shiv Sena (SS) is planning to build a software to monitor abusive communities on the popular social networking site Orkut. One doesn't know whether the Shiv Sainiks made use of any web technology when they singled out and slapped a criminal suit on a teenaged computer science student from Kerala for letting anonymous users post defamatory comments against Shiv Sena in a community he created in Orkut.
But one thing can be confirmed: The existance of saffron cyber vigilantes crawling the internet for every bit of ideologically inimical political kilobyte that lies buried in blog comments or community discussion threads. Perfect virtual partners for the street lumpens who beat up pub-going women or girls who dare talk to Muslim boyfriends.
The crime of Ajith D who now faces charges of criminal intimidation and hurting religious sentiments in a Mumbai court (his appeal for quashing criminal complaint was dumped by the country's apex court).
There are several issues here that concerns not only the freedom of speech but also the quality of democracy as reflected in our participation in the information society through the medium of Internet. The colour of content, the ideological orientation of communities in the Indian cyber-landscape is showing a definite tilt towards politics of Hindutva. Hundreds of ethnical and racially abusive comments are posted in web discussion forums daily and any content/article that touches Hindu nationalism brings in armies of dogged cyber flame warriors.
The political activism of Shiv Sainiks in Orkut, which tops the list of social networking sites in India with 12.8 million unique vistors is only a pointer to a larger Hindutva project that aims to hijack the cyberspace for its political ends.
In the past Shiv Sainiks have done everything from vandalising cyber cafes to blocking entire web communities for hosting 'disparaging and objectionable' content. But if you search for Shiv Sena in Orkut you will find dozens of Shiv Sena communities along with anti-Shiv Sena sites. Interestingly the ant-SS kept mostly alive by Hindu's who may be supporters of BJP but can't stand the Maratha nationalism.
The Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh has been in Orkut since June 2005 and currently has some 45,565 members. A well organised community which also has the technical ability to provide members with SMS update. The VHP at the time of writing this article had some 11,563 members. The BJP supporters group also in Orkut has a strength of 21,023. The National Development Front (NDF) currently known as the Popular Front of India (PFI), a political party suspected of harbouring Islamist agenda has 545 members.
For the comfort of the Left there's an unofficial CPI(M) community with 619 members which suffers from lack of any active debate and entry of fake profiles who carry out ideological sabotage. If you look at Orkut communities little more closely you will find it a virtual forest of fake profiles and pseudo communities. The profile of Praveen Togadia for example lists Dawood Ibrahim as a community that he joined.
The activism of Sangh Parivar's cyber sympathisers should be read together with the massive online campaign that the BJP has unleashed through the Advani cult website www.lkadvani.in and the www.bjp.org. The newly released and much-hyped IT Vision Document of the party establishes a broader theoretical framework for cyber politics.
It is easy to view the BJP's new IT vision document in the perspective of techno-nationalism, where public policies that target strategic industries (in this case the IT industry) are given governmental support. The party's open support for Free and Open Software (FOSS) and the promise to bring about standardisation in open source computing has been generally welcomed by the Indian Freedom Software community that prides itself on its stand against the greed of techno-capitalism.
As a party with a prounounced techno-ideological goal of becoming the most high-tech political outfit, the BJP is ensuring that its action matches the words by moving its entire IT infrastructure into the realm of Open Source - In the words of Prodyut Bora, the national convenor of the BJP's Information Technology cell: to create an entire enterprise IT ecosystem using only FOSS. So the party uses OpenVZ for Server Virtualisation, Qmail and Squirrelmail for emails, Ubuntu interface for desktops and Joomla for web content management.
The BJP is miles ahead of its political competitors when it comes to thought and action on the possibilities of harnessing the possibilities that the information society and the discreet charm of the power that it provides.
To be fair on the BJP the IT Vision document is not short on great/grandiose ideas (even if some of them looks recycled) that can tranform our nation like a national digital highway, unrestricted VoIP, a special rural IT infrastructure christened Digital Gram Sadak and a programme to help the marginalised sections of people enjoy fruits of IT-enabled development. Also clubbed together are techno-nationalist concerns reflected in the promise to promote the domestic IT hardware industry and the domestic hosting industry. The party promises that it will make India equal to China in every IT parameter in five years.Though one is not very clear whether the IT parameter also includea the level of freedom that the country's cyber dissidents and netizens are currently enjoying.
All this is well and good and reveals the Sangh Parivar’s bleeding liberal info-tech heart.
But read it closer and you cannot but arch your eyebrows. The BJP wants to set up an independent body - Digital Security Agency exclusively for cyber warfare, cyber counter terrorism and the cyber security of national digital assets. One can understand the cyber counter-terrorism and cyber security part of the declaration. But what is cyber warfare? Did they mean to say counter-cyber warfare and suffered a Freudian keyboard slip? No sane country in the world is likely to set up a body for Cyber Warfare - the unofficial stink job of spy agencies and misguided techno-Jihadi's.
Then there is the new technology subdomain to bolster BJP's ideological backbone of cultural nationalism. The use of IT to protection of India's priceless cultural and artistic heritage. Good so long as it is used to digitise ancient text archives, document artforms and give fillip to dying languages. Scary when you think of the potential to be used by self-imposed guardians of culture, muzzle free press, gag bloggers and other cyber dissidents.
The pivot of this digital revolution will be a Multipurpose National ID Card that will integrate all identities (Electoral ID, PAN and Driving License) into one common identity: Citizen Identification Card. The project which was the brain child of NDA's Obsessive Compulsive Neurosis with our nationalistic identity and disregard for citizen's privacy. The vision document claims that the project has been dumped by the UPA government. But the claim is far from true. The UPA set up the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI) in January this year.
The BJP now says it will combine the offices of the Registrar General of the Census of India and that of the UIAI to create a Citizenship Regulatory Authority of India (CRAI) which would maintain the National Register of Citizenship. The CRAI would have a 24x7 Online presence and enable government, law enforcement and ‘authorised’ private institutions to let their computer systems 'look up' the MNIC database in realtime. Leave the government institutions, but who is going to ‘authorise’ private institutions to run a check on our privacy?
"The amended Citizenship Act would make it mandatory under the law for all citizens to acquire an MNIC and parents of newly born infants would have to apply for one for their child, immediately after the baby's birth," says the vision document. I hope there will be some realistic time to cut the umbilical cord or tie a nappy.
But one thing can be confirmed: The existance of saffron cyber vigilantes crawling the internet for every bit of ideologically inimical political kilobyte that lies buried in blog comments or community discussion threads. Perfect virtual partners for the street lumpens who beat up pub-going women or girls who dare talk to Muslim boyfriends.
The crime of Ajith D who now faces charges of criminal intimidation and hurting religious sentiments in a Mumbai court (his appeal for quashing criminal complaint was dumped by the country's apex court).
There are several issues here that concerns not only the freedom of speech but also the quality of democracy as reflected in our participation in the information society through the medium of Internet. The colour of content, the ideological orientation of communities in the Indian cyber-landscape is showing a definite tilt towards politics of Hindutva. Hundreds of ethnical and racially abusive comments are posted in web discussion forums daily and any content/article that touches Hindu nationalism brings in armies of dogged cyber flame warriors.
The political activism of Shiv Sainiks in Orkut, which tops the list of social networking sites in India with 12.8 million unique vistors is only a pointer to a larger Hindutva project that aims to hijack the cyberspace for its political ends.
In the past Shiv Sainiks have done everything from vandalising cyber cafes to blocking entire web communities for hosting 'disparaging and objectionable' content. But if you search for Shiv Sena in Orkut you will find dozens of Shiv Sena communities along with anti-Shiv Sena sites. Interestingly the ant-SS kept mostly alive by Hindu's who may be supporters of BJP but can't stand the Maratha nationalism.
The Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh has been in Orkut since June 2005 and currently has some 45,565 members. A well organised community which also has the technical ability to provide members with SMS update. The VHP at the time of writing this article had some 11,563 members. The BJP supporters group also in Orkut has a strength of 21,023. The National Development Front (NDF) currently known as the Popular Front of India (PFI), a political party suspected of harbouring Islamist agenda has 545 members.
For the comfort of the Left there's an unofficial CPI(M) community with 619 members which suffers from lack of any active debate and entry of fake profiles who carry out ideological sabotage. If you look at Orkut communities little more closely you will find it a virtual forest of fake profiles and pseudo communities. The profile of Praveen Togadia for example lists Dawood Ibrahim as a community that he joined.
The activism of Sangh Parivar's cyber sympathisers should be read together with the massive online campaign that the BJP has unleashed through the Advani cult website www.lkadvani.in and the www.bjp.org. The newly released and much-hyped IT Vision Document of the party establishes a broader theoretical framework for cyber politics.
It is easy to view the BJP's new IT vision document in the perspective of techno-nationalism, where public policies that target strategic industries (in this case the IT industry) are given governmental support. The party's open support for Free and Open Software (FOSS) and the promise to bring about standardisation in open source computing has been generally welcomed by the Indian Freedom Software community that prides itself on its stand against the greed of techno-capitalism.
As a party with a prounounced techno-ideological goal of becoming the most high-tech political outfit, the BJP is ensuring that its action matches the words by moving its entire IT infrastructure into the realm of Open Source - In the words of Prodyut Bora, the national convenor of the BJP's Information Technology cell: to create an entire enterprise IT ecosystem using only FOSS. So the party uses OpenVZ for Server Virtualisation, Qmail and Squirrelmail for emails, Ubuntu interface for desktops and Joomla for web content management.
The BJP is miles ahead of its political competitors when it comes to thought and action on the possibilities of harnessing the possibilities that the information society and the discreet charm of the power that it provides.
To be fair on the BJP the IT Vision document is not short on great/grandiose ideas (even if some of them looks recycled) that can tranform our nation like a national digital highway, unrestricted VoIP, a special rural IT infrastructure christened Digital Gram Sadak and a programme to help the marginalised sections of people enjoy fruits of IT-enabled development. Also clubbed together are techno-nationalist concerns reflected in the promise to promote the domestic IT hardware industry and the domestic hosting industry. The party promises that it will make India equal to China in every IT parameter in five years.Though one is not very clear whether the IT parameter also includea the level of freedom that the country's cyber dissidents and netizens are currently enjoying.
All this is well and good and reveals the Sangh Parivar’s bleeding liberal info-tech heart.
But read it closer and you cannot but arch your eyebrows. The BJP wants to set up an independent body - Digital Security Agency exclusively for cyber warfare, cyber counter terrorism and the cyber security of national digital assets. One can understand the cyber counter-terrorism and cyber security part of the declaration. But what is cyber warfare? Did they mean to say counter-cyber warfare and suffered a Freudian keyboard slip? No sane country in the world is likely to set up a body for Cyber Warfare - the unofficial stink job of spy agencies and misguided techno-Jihadi's.
Then there is the new technology subdomain to bolster BJP's ideological backbone of cultural nationalism. The use of IT to protection of India's priceless cultural and artistic heritage. Good so long as it is used to digitise ancient text archives, document artforms and give fillip to dying languages. Scary when you think of the potential to be used by self-imposed guardians of culture, muzzle free press, gag bloggers and other cyber dissidents.
The pivot of this digital revolution will be a Multipurpose National ID Card that will integrate all identities (Electoral ID, PAN and Driving License) into one common identity: Citizen Identification Card. The project which was the brain child of NDA's Obsessive Compulsive Neurosis with our nationalistic identity and disregard for citizen's privacy. The vision document claims that the project has been dumped by the UPA government. But the claim is far from true. The UPA set up the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIAI) in January this year.
The BJP now says it will combine the offices of the Registrar General of the Census of India and that of the UIAI to create a Citizenship Regulatory Authority of India (CRAI) which would maintain the National Register of Citizenship. The CRAI would have a 24x7 Online presence and enable government, law enforcement and ‘authorised’ private institutions to let their computer systems 'look up' the MNIC database in realtime. Leave the government institutions, but who is going to ‘authorise’ private institutions to run a check on our privacy?
"The amended Citizenship Act would make it mandatory under the law for all citizens to acquire an MNIC and parents of newly born infants would have to apply for one for their child, immediately after the baby's birth," says the vision document. I hope there will be some realistic time to cut the umbilical cord or tie a nappy.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Manichean echoes: Terrorists as sub-human
Lex non distinguitur nos non distinguere debemus
(The law does not distinguish and so we ought not distinguish)
Maintaining propriety in public speech is one of the key canons of judicial ethics. Propriety demands that judges desist from airing their views on issues that are sub judice, controversial or that are likely to be adjudicated by themselves or other courts.
While the honourable udges cannot be denied the right to privately hold views, secretly wear ideological and political biases and feel frustrations like that of an ordinary citizen, decorum demands they resist the temptation to air them in public forums.
Lordships should remember that words coming out of their mouth, both inside the sanctum sanctorum of justice and outside carry more weight than that of an ordinary official. They just cannot afford to be frivolous in the use of words. More so at a time when Indian democracy is facing threats from perpetrators of terrorism and the questionable means the state wants to employ in its fight against the menace through enactment of draconian laws and encounter style executions.
The opinion expressed recently by one of the senior judges in the Supreme Court, shows that the judiciary too has started to feel the pressure imposed by politicians who feed the rhetoric on terror as a means to garner votes and a society that feels terrorised in the absence of security. Such thoughts render the concept of fair trial invalid. The fact that such a statement came from top echelons of our judiciary means that list of worries of India’s civil society is a growing list.
According to the learned Judge, who sits in the Constitution bench and has co-authored books that analyse threadbare the Article 21 (Right to life and liberty under the Constitution: a critical analysis of Article 21; Publisher: Bombay : N.M. Tripathi, 1993) a terrorist is not fit to be called a human. "He's an animal and what is required is animal rights," quipped Justice Arijit Pasayat, No 3 in the court by seniority, while speaking at a seminar on 'Investigation and Prosecution of Offences relating to Terrorism', organised by Indian Law Institute in New Delhi.
According to a Times of India report he also poured out 'anguish and pain at the current trend of crucification of police officials by so-called human rights groups for every perceived fault in any police operation against terrorists. "Today we are concerned with the rights of the terrorists but we are unmindful of the plight of the victims of terrorism. How many protest marches have been organised seeking to highlight the plight of poor daily wager bystanders, with whose death his family leads a life of extreme penury?" Pasayat said continuing his broadside against rights activists. The Judge also made allusions to the Batla House encounter and the case of Mohammed Afzal whose mercy petition is still pending before the President of India.
Joining him in the tirade was Solicitor General G.E. Vahanvati who said lot of “noise” being made for the nabbed Mumbai terrorist Ajmal Kasab's right to defence.
Now contrast this with what Supreme Court Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan had to say on December 13, 2008 while addressing the inaugural session of the international conference of jurists on 'Terrorism, Rule of Law & Human Rights' in New Delhi:
Adherence to the constitutional principle of ‘substantive due process’ is an essential part of our collective response to terrorism. As part of the legal community, we must uphold the right to fair trial for all individuals, irrespective of how heinous their crimes may be. If we accept a dilution of this right, it will count as a moral loss against those who preach hatred and violence. We must not confuse between what distinguishes the deliberations of a mature democratic society from the misguided actions of a few.
No one expects the entire colloquium of judges to speak in one voice. It’s perfectly acceptable that Judges differ in opinion, but when the brightest legal minds of the country begin to deviate from the spirit of the Constitution and the accepted and revered statutes of International Human Rights covenants one feels jittery.
Justice Pasayat exhibited a perverse sense of justice, and a pathetic sense of humour when he dubbed terrorists as animals and said shockingly tongue-in-cheek that they require animal rights. The words must have been uttered in a moment of emotional outburst, but it certainly exposed the ideals that guide his current judicial philosophy.
What message would it be sending to Judges of lower level courts waiting anxiously for guidance in hundreds of human rights/terrorism related cases and police officials looking for the slightest excuse to disentangle their actions from the scrutiny of fundamental rights.
Lordships should know that in the fight against terrorism, an error made by a judge who circumvents the due process of law is greater than omissions and commissions committed by other branches of democracy. Only the judiciary holds the power to scrutinise the action of the executive and the legislature and order a correction of course if they have erred.
The role of a Supreme Court Judge in a democracy is two-fold, writes Aharon Barak in 'The Judge in a Democracy' - to bridge the gap between law and society, and to protect democracy and its constitution.
There are no shortcuts here. No 'state of exception' that allows skipping the due process of law because the times are different. Once the threat of terrorism passes and peace returns judges will not be able to wish away the terrible consequence of their actions.
Related links: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Can_rights_apply_to_terrorists_who_kill_innocents_asks_SC/articleshow/4043724.cms
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/human-rights-terrorists-are-animals-we-nee.../416004/
(The law does not distinguish and so we ought not distinguish)
Maintaining propriety in public speech is one of the key canons of judicial ethics. Propriety demands that judges desist from airing their views on issues that are sub judice, controversial or that are likely to be adjudicated by themselves or other courts.
While the honourable udges cannot be denied the right to privately hold views, secretly wear ideological and political biases and feel frustrations like that of an ordinary citizen, decorum demands they resist the temptation to air them in public forums.
Lordships should remember that words coming out of their mouth, both inside the sanctum sanctorum of justice and outside carry more weight than that of an ordinary official. They just cannot afford to be frivolous in the use of words. More so at a time when Indian democracy is facing threats from perpetrators of terrorism and the questionable means the state wants to employ in its fight against the menace through enactment of draconian laws and encounter style executions.
The opinion expressed recently by one of the senior judges in the Supreme Court, shows that the judiciary too has started to feel the pressure imposed by politicians who feed the rhetoric on terror as a means to garner votes and a society that feels terrorised in the absence of security. Such thoughts render the concept of fair trial invalid. The fact that such a statement came from top echelons of our judiciary means that list of worries of India’s civil society is a growing list.
According to the learned Judge, who sits in the Constitution bench and has co-authored books that analyse threadbare the Article 21 (Right to life and liberty under the Constitution: a critical analysis of Article 21; Publisher: Bombay : N.M. Tripathi, 1993) a terrorist is not fit to be called a human. "He's an animal and what is required is animal rights," quipped Justice Arijit Pasayat, No 3 in the court by seniority, while speaking at a seminar on 'Investigation and Prosecution of Offences relating to Terrorism', organised by Indian Law Institute in New Delhi.
According to a Times of India report he also poured out 'anguish and pain at the current trend of crucification of police officials by so-called human rights groups for every perceived fault in any police operation against terrorists. "Today we are concerned with the rights of the terrorists but we are unmindful of the plight of the victims of terrorism. How many protest marches have been organised seeking to highlight the plight of poor daily wager bystanders, with whose death his family leads a life of extreme penury?" Pasayat said continuing his broadside against rights activists. The Judge also made allusions to the Batla House encounter and the case of Mohammed Afzal whose mercy petition is still pending before the President of India.
Joining him in the tirade was Solicitor General G.E. Vahanvati who said lot of “noise” being made for the nabbed Mumbai terrorist Ajmal Kasab's right to defence.
Now contrast this with what Supreme Court Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan had to say on December 13, 2008 while addressing the inaugural session of the international conference of jurists on 'Terrorism, Rule of Law & Human Rights' in New Delhi:
Adherence to the constitutional principle of ‘substantive due process’ is an essential part of our collective response to terrorism. As part of the legal community, we must uphold the right to fair trial for all individuals, irrespective of how heinous their crimes may be. If we accept a dilution of this right, it will count as a moral loss against those who preach hatred and violence. We must not confuse between what distinguishes the deliberations of a mature democratic society from the misguided actions of a few.
No one expects the entire colloquium of judges to speak in one voice. It’s perfectly acceptable that Judges differ in opinion, but when the brightest legal minds of the country begin to deviate from the spirit of the Constitution and the accepted and revered statutes of International Human Rights covenants one feels jittery.
Justice Pasayat exhibited a perverse sense of justice, and a pathetic sense of humour when he dubbed terrorists as animals and said shockingly tongue-in-cheek that they require animal rights. The words must have been uttered in a moment of emotional outburst, but it certainly exposed the ideals that guide his current judicial philosophy.
What message would it be sending to Judges of lower level courts waiting anxiously for guidance in hundreds of human rights/terrorism related cases and police officials looking for the slightest excuse to disentangle their actions from the scrutiny of fundamental rights.
Lordships should know that in the fight against terrorism, an error made by a judge who circumvents the due process of law is greater than omissions and commissions committed by other branches of democracy. Only the judiciary holds the power to scrutinise the action of the executive and the legislature and order a correction of course if they have erred.
The role of a Supreme Court Judge in a democracy is two-fold, writes Aharon Barak in 'The Judge in a Democracy' - to bridge the gap between law and society, and to protect democracy and its constitution.
There are no shortcuts here. No 'state of exception' that allows skipping the due process of law because the times are different. Once the threat of terrorism passes and peace returns judges will not be able to wish away the terrible consequence of their actions.
Related links: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Can_rights_apply_to_terrorists_who_kill_innocents_asks_SC/articleshow/4043724.cms
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/human-rights-terrorists-are-animals-we-nee.../416004/
Friday, January 30, 2009
Why Barkha Dutt should walk the talk?
Writing her Independence Day-eve Khaleej Times column in 2007, on the government plans to muzzle electronic media through creation of a content code, journalist Barkha Dutt rued that the irony is entirely befitting. She was talking about the move to strangle her fraternity into silence, just as India marked 60 years as an independent, secular democracy.
Arguing the case for a responsible media that will adopt standards of self-regulation as against the to-be-imposed ‘content code’, an ill conceived, insidious and dangerous piece of legislation, she said: We need to raise our standards to that level of accountability before we can get completely self-righteous. We need to tell the government to get out of our space. But we also need to be open to the same scrutiny we subject everyone else to.
Public memory is short and pardonable. But when activist-crusaders who profess ethical standards for others and prides themselves to be at the vanguard of media freedom suffer from selective amnesia, uncomfortable questions need to be asked. Especially at a time when the media in India is engaged in a tooth and nail battle against the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) ministry's move to enforce censorship through the backdoor.
Not more than two weeks ago the editors of India's top television channels got together to tell the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the draconian provisions in the proposed Cable Television Network Regulations (CNR) Act is a throwback to the era of emergency. Something that is purely unacceptable because it is aimed solely at subjugating the media to total government control. Madam Barkha Dutt as the Managing Editor of the fearless NDTV was one of the signatories of the letter.
And now we hear the news that this widely respected and equally ridiculed member of the journalistic community, who is supposed to protect the freedom of speech and expression as enshrined in the constitution has abused her position as the group editor of a media conglomerate to legally intimidate a hapless blogger and make him withdraw a post critical of her coverage of the 26/11 Mumbai attack.
What a shame!
And as Barkha wrote in her Independence Day-eve column, the irony couldn't be any less befitting.
The Netherlands based Indian blogger Chyetanya Kunte had to retract comments made on his/her blog http://ckunte.com in the post titled 'Shoddy journalism' against the NDTV Ltd and Barkha Dutt and tender an unconditional apology, presumably because of a threatening legal memo.
While Kunte himself has not made any mention that he was threatened with legal action by NDTV, the tone and legalese in the retraction statement posted in his website clearly point to the fact that it was done to save his skin and money.
Reading the google cache record of the now deleted post which touched Barkha's celebrity nerve, one is at pains to understand how a journalist schooled in Columbia and has won accolades for taking on rabid right-wingers, can display such arrogance, when faced with criticism. Kunte's opinion was not in any sense more vitriolic than that made by thousands of viewers who were hurt by the insensitive and lopsided coverage of the Mumbai carnage by various TV channels. Only two words - the use of 'idiot' as an adjective before the word journalist and 'shut-the-f***-up', a vulgar idiom for shut up - seems to be off the mark. Angry words that he wrote as he watched the ghastly events of Mumbai unfold in the television screen on November 27.
The criticism he levelled against Barkha – on the possible risk of loss of life of hotel guests and allegations of soldier deaths in 1999 Kargil operation - was backed by links to a Wikipedia entry and other media reports. It is perplexing why NDTV chose to go against a blogger who only acted well within the rights. The only possible explanation is that they wanted to make an example of him. You are not supposed to touch a 24/7 holy cow .
It's also a sad day for the media fraternity because Kunte was being threatened of libel for making legitimate criticism about an issue of public concern. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and the law of libel shouldn't be used to stifle expression of an opinion that could have taken the debate forward. Of all pillars of democracy the media should be the first to recognises this right. The one to raise the pitch to the shrillest level when someone’s right to free speech feels threatened.
The criticism and scrutiny that NDTV and Barkha is now being subjected to in the blogosphere for its alleged highhandedness is also a pointer to the fact that the mainstream media is clueless about the power and opportunity of social media. They need to understand that journalism as defined by large media houses has entered a period of declining sovereignty. While it's true that mainstream media has attempted to interact with and adopt certain features of the social media they seem to be generally wary of bloggers and their growing influence in the media ecology.
I would like to quote more of Barkha to prove the point that NDTV’s action is a misadventure that need to be corrected. Or else the entire media stands the risk of playing into the hands of those who aspire to stifle it.
Responding to the criticism levelled against the NDTV coverage of the Mumbai attacks Barkha wrote: I believe that criticism is what helps us evolve and reinvent ourselves.
I believe in Barkha. I hope she walks the talk.
Arguing the case for a responsible media that will adopt standards of self-regulation as against the to-be-imposed ‘content code’, an ill conceived, insidious and dangerous piece of legislation, she said: We need to raise our standards to that level of accountability before we can get completely self-righteous. We need to tell the government to get out of our space. But we also need to be open to the same scrutiny we subject everyone else to.
Public memory is short and pardonable. But when activist-crusaders who profess ethical standards for others and prides themselves to be at the vanguard of media freedom suffer from selective amnesia, uncomfortable questions need to be asked. Especially at a time when the media in India is engaged in a tooth and nail battle against the Information and Broadcasting (I&B) ministry's move to enforce censorship through the backdoor.
Not more than two weeks ago the editors of India's top television channels got together to tell the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the draconian provisions in the proposed Cable Television Network Regulations (CNR) Act is a throwback to the era of emergency. Something that is purely unacceptable because it is aimed solely at subjugating the media to total government control. Madam Barkha Dutt as the Managing Editor of the fearless NDTV was one of the signatories of the letter.
And now we hear the news that this widely respected and equally ridiculed member of the journalistic community, who is supposed to protect the freedom of speech and expression as enshrined in the constitution has abused her position as the group editor of a media conglomerate to legally intimidate a hapless blogger and make him withdraw a post critical of her coverage of the 26/11 Mumbai attack.
What a shame!
And as Barkha wrote in her Independence Day-eve column, the irony couldn't be any less befitting.
The Netherlands based Indian blogger Chyetanya Kunte had to retract comments made on his/her blog http://ckunte.com in the post titled 'Shoddy journalism' against the NDTV Ltd and Barkha Dutt and tender an unconditional apology, presumably because of a threatening legal memo.
While Kunte himself has not made any mention that he was threatened with legal action by NDTV, the tone and legalese in the retraction statement posted in his website clearly point to the fact that it was done to save his skin and money.
Reading the google cache record of the now deleted post which touched Barkha's celebrity nerve, one is at pains to understand how a journalist schooled in Columbia and has won accolades for taking on rabid right-wingers, can display such arrogance, when faced with criticism. Kunte's opinion was not in any sense more vitriolic than that made by thousands of viewers who were hurt by the insensitive and lopsided coverage of the Mumbai carnage by various TV channels. Only two words - the use of 'idiot' as an adjective before the word journalist and 'shut-the-f***-up', a vulgar idiom for shut up - seems to be off the mark. Angry words that he wrote as he watched the ghastly events of Mumbai unfold in the television screen on November 27.
The criticism he levelled against Barkha – on the possible risk of loss of life of hotel guests and allegations of soldier deaths in 1999 Kargil operation - was backed by links to a Wikipedia entry and other media reports. It is perplexing why NDTV chose to go against a blogger who only acted well within the rights. The only possible explanation is that they wanted to make an example of him. You are not supposed to touch a 24/7 holy cow .
It's also a sad day for the media fraternity because Kunte was being threatened of libel for making legitimate criticism about an issue of public concern. Freedom of speech is the foundation of a functioning democracy, and the law of libel shouldn't be used to stifle expression of an opinion that could have taken the debate forward. Of all pillars of democracy the media should be the first to recognises this right. The one to raise the pitch to the shrillest level when someone’s right to free speech feels threatened.
The criticism and scrutiny that NDTV and Barkha is now being subjected to in the blogosphere for its alleged highhandedness is also a pointer to the fact that the mainstream media is clueless about the power and opportunity of social media. They need to understand that journalism as defined by large media houses has entered a period of declining sovereignty. While it's true that mainstream media has attempted to interact with and adopt certain features of the social media they seem to be generally wary of bloggers and their growing influence in the media ecology.
I would like to quote more of Barkha to prove the point that NDTV’s action is a misadventure that need to be corrected. Or else the entire media stands the risk of playing into the hands of those who aspire to stifle it.
Responding to the criticism levelled against the NDTV coverage of the Mumbai attacks Barkha wrote: I believe that criticism is what helps us evolve and reinvent ourselves.
I believe in Barkha. I hope she walks the talk.
Thursday, January 1, 2009
India sleepwalks to total surveillance
It wasn't tough for a protagonist in a Kundera novel to figure out if he/she were living in a police state. Looking out of the apartment window they could see agents of the state keeping a watch over them from a car parked in the street round the corner. Sometimes shady characters broke in and rummaged through shelves looking for letters or diary notes. Their phones were wiretapped and there was absolutely no way of knowing if the friend they met for a drink last night was an informer or not.
It was our age of innocence and Kafka wasn’t thought to be a realist. Under repressive regimes people lived in constant fear, but the terror they felt and the machinery that enforced it was tangible.
Not any more. We live in a time when information about our personal lives and behaviour are being gathered, stored and shared by governments and multinational corporations on a scale that no one ever thought was humanly possible.
In the name of fighting terrorism governments across the world have been creating new regulations that infinitely augment the state power of surveillance with no meaningful public or parliamentary debate.
The Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2006 passed by the Indian Parliament recently allows the government to intercept messages from mobile phones, computers and other communication devices to investigate any offence. Not just cognizable offence, the kind you witnessed in Mumbai 26/11, but any offence.
Any email you send, any message you text are now open to the prying eyes of the government. So are the contents of your computer you surfed in the privacy of your home.
Around 45 amendments have been made to the original Act, which now treats both publishers of online pornography and its consumers on equal footing. A law so sweeping in its powers that it allows a police officer in the rank of a sub-inspector to walk in or break in to the privacy of your home and see if you were surfing porn or not. It’s the personal morality of the official that will decide whether the picture/content you were looking at was lascivious or appeals to prurient interest.
The amended Act also grants the state absolute power to block access to any website in the national interest. In short a total gag and surveillance act that doesn’t set any limits for law enforcers, or have inbuilt safeguards against misuse.
And if writing abstract legal language with hues of victorian morality can be considered an art form the architects of the new IT Act are nothing less than artists.
Thou shall not author a joke. Not even forward one
Any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or a communication device, — (a) any content that is grossly offensive or has menacing character; or (b) any content which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will... shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years and with fine.
Thou shall not surf Bollywood news
Whoever publishes/ transmits/ causes to be published/ transmitted in the electronic form, any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it, shall be punished on first conviction with imprisonment of either prescription for a term which may extend to two years and with fine which may extend to five lakh rupees and in the event of second or subsequent conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years and also with fine which may extend to ten lakh rupees.
Thou shall not watch porn
If the material is sexually explicit act or conduct then the punishment on first conviction is imprisonment which may extend to five years and a fine which may extend to ten lakh rupees. In the event of second or subsequent conviction imprisonment may extend to seven years and fine to ten lakh rupees.
But one has to admit that there is concern on part of the government on what could be the impact of the law on art and literature. So section 67 does not extend to any book, pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting, representation or figure in electronic form, provided it is in the interest of science, literature, art or learning or religion. That means M.F Hussein can't be framed under IT Act anymore, and that photos and videos are not considered art.
‘So what?’ is the familiar rhetoric. Why fear if you've got nothing to hide? Why should law abiding citizens be bothered about some 'inevitable invasion' into privacy in the wake of increasing terror attacks? After all the perpetrators of terror are known to use Internet and other modern communication tools to plan and execute deadly strikes like that happened in Mumbai.
There is only one answer and it is a Thomas Jefferson quote: Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
It was our age of innocence and Kafka wasn’t thought to be a realist. Under repressive regimes people lived in constant fear, but the terror they felt and the machinery that enforced it was tangible.
Not any more. We live in a time when information about our personal lives and behaviour are being gathered, stored and shared by governments and multinational corporations on a scale that no one ever thought was humanly possible.
In the name of fighting terrorism governments across the world have been creating new regulations that infinitely augment the state power of surveillance with no meaningful public or parliamentary debate.
The Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2006 passed by the Indian Parliament recently allows the government to intercept messages from mobile phones, computers and other communication devices to investigate any offence. Not just cognizable offence, the kind you witnessed in Mumbai 26/11, but any offence.
Any email you send, any message you text are now open to the prying eyes of the government. So are the contents of your computer you surfed in the privacy of your home.
Around 45 amendments have been made to the original Act, which now treats both publishers of online pornography and its consumers on equal footing. A law so sweeping in its powers that it allows a police officer in the rank of a sub-inspector to walk in or break in to the privacy of your home and see if you were surfing porn or not. It’s the personal morality of the official that will decide whether the picture/content you were looking at was lascivious or appeals to prurient interest.
The amended Act also grants the state absolute power to block access to any website in the national interest. In short a total gag and surveillance act that doesn’t set any limits for law enforcers, or have inbuilt safeguards against misuse.
And if writing abstract legal language with hues of victorian morality can be considered an art form the architects of the new IT Act are nothing less than artists.
Thou shall not author a joke. Not even forward one
Any person who sends, by means of a computer resource or a communication device, — (a) any content that is grossly offensive or has menacing character; or (b) any content which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will... shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years and with fine.
Thou shall not surf Bollywood news
Whoever publishes/ transmits/ causes to be published/ transmitted in the electronic form, any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or if its effect is such as to tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it, shall be punished on first conviction with imprisonment of either prescription for a term which may extend to two years and with fine which may extend to five lakh rupees and in the event of second or subsequent conviction with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to five years and also with fine which may extend to ten lakh rupees.
Thou shall not watch porn
If the material is sexually explicit act or conduct then the punishment on first conviction is imprisonment which may extend to five years and a fine which may extend to ten lakh rupees. In the event of second or subsequent conviction imprisonment may extend to seven years and fine to ten lakh rupees.
But one has to admit that there is concern on part of the government on what could be the impact of the law on art and literature. So section 67 does not extend to any book, pamphlet, paper, writing, drawing, painting, representation or figure in electronic form, provided it is in the interest of science, literature, art or learning or religion. That means M.F Hussein can't be framed under IT Act anymore, and that photos and videos are not considered art.
‘So what?’ is the familiar rhetoric. Why fear if you've got nothing to hide? Why should law abiding citizens be bothered about some 'inevitable invasion' into privacy in the wake of increasing terror attacks? After all the perpetrators of terror are known to use Internet and other modern communication tools to plan and execute deadly strikes like that happened in Mumbai.
There is only one answer and it is a Thomas Jefferson quote: Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Modi as Le Pen, critics as imbeciles
A day before India celebrates it's 58th Republic Day Gujarat will get to see a film that talks to them on what an ideal Chief Minister should be.
The movie directed by Ajisingh Jhala has been titled Gujarat No Nath (Lord of Gujarat) and stars Akhilendra Mishra in the role of Namo Narayan Jogi. (Now don't ask if L.K. Advani paid the director money for not naming it Bharath No Nath.)
But even before the lights go off and the titles for the tax-free psuedo-biopic begins to run, one can be doubly sure - the movie is going to be a Box Office hit.
Much like Narendra Modi himself whom the film intends to eulogise.
Much like Narendra Modi himself whom the film intends to eulogise.
There should not be any surprises here, for Modi is already a blockbuster flick in the Indian political theatre. A razzle-dazzle movie in which he plays the hero and the villain.
But it's also one that you cannot afford to miss, even if you hate the actor, because the movie is hugely popular.
Sugar-coated and compelling the Modi-movie however has lite-fascism as its virile core, which makes it irresistable for the Hindu urban middle class.
The cocktail Modi delivers is a perfect potion for a generation that is insecure about its identity and finds salvation in wealth creation.
The cocktail Modi delivers is a perfect potion for a generation that is insecure about its identity and finds salvation in wealth creation.
Ten years ago philosopher Jean Baudrillard lampooned the French political class for their impotence before Le Pen, an iconic rabble rouser of the far right.
The vitriolic essay 'A conjuration of imbeciles' drew parallels between the 'worthless' world of contemporary art and French politics.
The vitriolic essay 'A conjuration of imbeciles' drew parallels between the 'worthless' world of contemporary art and French politics.
Baudrillard argued that both the situations - the worthlessness of the contemporary art and the kind of politics that is rendered disfunctional when dealing with demagogues like Le Pen - are exchangeable and their solutions transferable.
If Narendra Modi can be imagined as the Indian equivalent of Le Pen then his critics belonging to the hues of Left and the Right can be truly dubbed as imbeciles.
The problem lies in the degeneration and the shift from traditional discourse and values these political spaces enjoyed.
While the Right in India was quick to compromise with the decay of its value system, flirted with totalitarianism and showed it's capability of being tempted easily by soft Hindutva, the Left were gradually deprived of its political energy.
The Left failed to move even an inch in the political scale, but instead shamelessly morphed into a 'moralistic law-making structure' - a 'representative of universal values' and the 'sacred holder of the reign of virtue'.
Baudrillard says when the traditional Left and the Right are deprived of political substance, the political moves to the far right. The only valid political discourse in such a scenario would that be of Le Pen/Modi. All the rest will be pedagogic and moral.
The more the Le Pen is antagonized by a moral coalition, which according to Baudrillard is a sign of political impotence, the more he enjoys the benefits of political immorality.
But what if the Le Pen did not exist? Baudrillard says it would become necessary for us to invent him. "If he were to disappear...we would be left struggling with our own racist, sexist, nationalist viruses".
The Le Pen according to Baudrillard is the perfect mirror of the political class which uses to conjure up its own evils, just like an individual who use the political class to cast away the corruption inherent in the society.
Which shows we are all one: screen and audience, the projector and the projected all fused into a movie.
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