Should Indians even be scared about privacy?
Secrets are told and heard with great delicacy. We learn to be decent and keep the secrets of others early in life. Do you remember the first secret you heard? It must have been as a child. Someone said they wanted to tell you something and for you to not tell anyone else.
Then laid down a card and left it to you to make the next move, not immediately but perhaps in the future when politics came to us. Honouring compacts says a lot about who we are as people.
It is a two-part undertaking. To listen and then keep shut. Keeping shut is a deliberate activity and little girls can be as bad at keeping a secret as grown men. But we learn the value of secrets early.
Allied to secrets is, of course, privacy. A secret is something that is kept, or meant to be kept, unknown or unseen by others while privacy is a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people. It is repugnant to be watched, especially when we don't know who is watching.
And as the most civil know, it is distasteful to pry. In losing secrecy or privacy you risk losing jurisdiction over your thoughts and actions. We are, after all, not just what we are, but also what we hide.
You be Big Brother
A Hamburg-based development team’s game Orwell is a great tour into our behaviour online and the way modern governments control societies. It is a single-player game in which you are an operative for the authorities of a paranoid state that maintains a repository of data files on each citizen on a database named, cruelly, Orwell after the journalist-author and champion of free speech and liberty.
The country, simply called The Nation, is seeing a period of peace but also a peak in public fears of terrorist attacks. It is our world, an age of paranoia and Edward Snowden’s leaks.
The Nation’s government’s priority is to maintain order by as heavy a hand as possible but whose main weapon is snooping.
The game opens with you accepting a job as a Stasi-like agent who has been given access to the Orwell app that has "ports", which will store all your suspects' information including IM and social media updates, and personal and biometric information.
You then witness a scene of cosmopolitan tranquillity in a cold country where people sip lattes at sunny waterside cafes. This is a fine public square or uptown marketplace of Bonton, capital of The Nation, where a bomb goes off. It is assumed to be a terrorist attack though no organisation has taken responsibility for it.
A suspect is rounded up, a blue-haired woman called Cassandra Watergate and she is your only lead because she is spotted on a camera near the bombing.
As a snoop you learn to grapple with information and data tools, both ordinary — like newspaper reports and social media — and extraordinary, like Orwell. It is up to the player to decide what is relevant from the sea of digital matter and put it on Orwell with the knowledge that information once entered on Orwell, will never be deleted.
We form our impressions — the blue hair, an assault charge at a demonstration and loose affiliations with some political groups, impressions from photographs and conversations online, a credit card that belongs to someone else. This is how stop-and-search policies work — on people’s everyday behaviour and appearance.
You flag her as a thief and a dissident. Only to later realise that while she is jailed for the bombing, another bombing takes place elsewhere in the city and well, she is acquitted. And the credit card which you flagged her for, you later find out belongs to a lover.
There is no doubt that The Nation is under threat but this game is a good demo of how, today, security in countries works like a dragnet victimising innocent people.
Cassandra may be annoying and hanging out with people more dangerous than her but she is not a criminal. And you as a player were wrong and jailed the wrong person. Her every trait, in any case, may change as she gets older but will remain forever in the soulless system, and so will her criminal charges.
Anyway, as the game continues you learn online posts made a little irresponsibly could affect our lives in the future. Bits of unconnected information can be put together to make dangerous connections. And unlike in Orwell’s 1984 where authorities pried, we are willingly giving away information about ourselves.
This game, a sim, is trying to bring you to the realisation that incautious online behaviour is not benign and constant surveillance is real, though unwelcome.
While we think our Facebook, LinkedIn and Tinder profiles are separate, they are actually being read as one, by algorithms and real humans.
How to build a prison
An 18th century English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, designed a model prison, the panopticon, which was built in such a way that the inmates could be seen, and therefore, watched at all times, by a central watchman who remained invisible to them. This feeling of being monitored was an infliction that gave rise to a lingering self-vigilance.
As the watchmen, stationed in a tower could not be seen, they didn’t need to be around at all times, effectively leaving the watching to the watched, said Bentham.
This prison though never built, was recreated by many science fiction writers as architectural and symbolic representations, which were used to observe and normalise human beings and suppress seditious thoughts in dystopian futures. Mass surveillance systems make prisoners of us under one centralised watchman. And even if it isn’t a human being — though it may be — it is still ghastly.
It is intolerable that when most countries of the civilised world are re-looking at their privacy and data protection laws in the internet age, we are, to borrow the ex-UK information minister Richard Thomas' words, “sleepwalking into a surveillance society” where we do not know who is watching us and for what.
In India we are not sleepwalking as falling over ourselves to enrol, even as the Supreme Court has tens of cases to resolve that challenge this scheme of mass surveillance for its privacy-related shortcomings, a job seen fit for nine senior chief justices.
The SC is so far clear that the Aadhaar scheme is NOT mandatory and says cardholders must give consent before agreeing to let anyone (else) be privy to their information.
Yet, various government agencies have already been delegated responsibilities for enrollment, authentication, and sharing of biometric information with any corporate entity that signs up. And there is no limit to how long this information can be held, nor is there an exit option. We are being sold as numbers and there are people looking to buy.
Why have — and the reported numbers vary from 90 to 125 crore Indians — already signed up? Are they zombies?
Countries like the UK, Australia and Hungary, all planned national ID card systems, but abandoned the schemes as they realised privacy was too precious a concern to be tossed aside.
Indian citizens are getting mixed signals as Aadhaar numbers are being used at banks, LPG agencies, by private telecom companies and for filing tax returns.
These scandalous procedures were underway by November 2014. Central agencies pressed on with the scheme in a legal vacuum and found it easy to pass on information before the Aadhaar Bill was even heard in Parliament in March 2016. And surely if it was run before the rules were made it should be abolished or put on hold?
Internet specialists and advocates of internet freedom and lawyers say the national ID scheme treats privacy as a non-issue. Obviously as many bodies already have access to Aadhaar’s database, this is true.
Information is being shared with any corporate or government entity that signs up, paying no heed to concerns from respected judicial and legislative quarters. Surely, this is illegal?
How did we get here?
The scheme had its beginnings in 2006 and accumulated muck as it moved through the legislative halls of the country. It was originally to be run as an ID card scheme for families which lived below the poverty line, an innocent enough motive, but it meant profiling only the poor biometrically which was discriminatory, some said.
Things changed when the Congress-led UPA government had the biometric-assisted Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) join up with the National Population Register (NPR), the agency that runs India’s amazing census but stays out of everyone’s business otherwise. Aadhaar is an Orwellian nightmare and has its jargon. It uses agricultural metaphors for its fecundity. If "organic seeding" is the process of identifying someone with a Unique Identification (UID) number, based on biometric information, "inorganic seeding", allowed under Aadhaar rules, is such identification done without any involvement of the cardholder at all.
This can be done by an algorithm, or manually at a government agency or by a corporate body without the ID number holder ever knowing.
How did corporates get hold of our information? The government gave it to them. Scores of government agencies have been delegated responsibilities for enrollment, authentication, and sharing of biometric information. The UIDAI website offers online applications to any private player who wishes to be an AUA — an Authentication User Agent — which seeks to carry out authentications.
We are on sale
Former Karnataka High Court judge Justice Puttaswamy, one of the many petitioners against Aadhaar, says crores of public money has been poured into the scheme “illegally” without ensuring privacy and data-protection checks. This has to stop. This is not a balanced way forward.
In an interview with The Hindu, the 88-year-old judge-turned-litigant said this was the first time in his legal career, spanning five decades, that he felt the need to petition the courts.
The Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill is about as "targeted" as broken egg yolk on toast. There is nothing surgical about its strike.
The ID scheme since its earliest inception — even as Congress’ 2010 National Identification Authority of India (NIAI) Bill — had no underlying understanding of the right to privacy, nor was it ever tested for it.
Can individual control be prioritised over data? Will we be asked before our details are passed on to other government or corporate agencies, and can we say no?
Under which circumstances will our details be shared with a third party? When things go wrong, whom do we call? Is there accountability, a means of redress, correction? For instance, the Act does not say how a cardholder can raise an issue, only the UIDAI can make complaints.
We are left asking questions in a legal and ethical vacuum.
Playing dodgeball
Aadhaar has already seen some dodgy lawmaking in its wake.
It was an old strategy the BJP employed when it took the Aadhaar bill to the Lok Sabha as a money bill and raised a few parliamentary eyebrows. The draft bypassed the objections made by the Rajya Sabha whose decisions on finance bills are dispensable, and which was always critical of Aadhaar.
Congress leader, Jairam Ramesh hit the Supreme Court challenging the fairness of the Speaker’s certification of the "money" bill. But it was seen as binding. He also proposed in Parliament that a person be allowed to opt out of the scheme (and delete their biometric and demographic information). His proposal was rejected.
Finance minister Arun Jaitley, said the Congress, too, in the 1980s brought legislations relating to juvenile justice and workman injury compensation as — equally tenuous — money bills, and in any case, it was for the speaker to take the final call on its certification as a finance bill and she had agreed.
So screw you. The whole thing was shrugged off even as critics raved and ranted.
A week later the Lok Sabha passed the bill to the Rajya Sabha which returned it with recommendations, that were, as expected, ignored. From the introduction of the bill in the lower house on March 3 to the making of the act took 22 days.
Boiled like frogs
But we are slowly being boiled to death like dim-witted frogs. A major dominant argument against the card is whether someone who does not have an Aadhaar card should “suffer” — or be excluded from drawing state benefits — and not that the opposition to the new scheme is down to it being vague, dangerous and insecure for any citizen.
This matter does not concern only the elite, it concerns all of us and your children (I don’t have any).
We must know who is watching us, which information they record and that the watchers are adequately controlled by the law. At present they are not.
If the Aadhaar card is really just a means to distribute fairly and efficiently things the government owes as services to this country’s people, its actions are contradictory.
Will we just let them steamroll their soulless scheme into our private lives?
We put our faith in the government but this is a time when we really must question and doubt the government’s motivations.