 So the state's adoption of intrusive technology and threats to democracy, it's a really daunting kind of a mouthful, it's a long sentence, and what's scary is that how true each and every bit of it is. Among the saddest stories of last year, there've been plenty of bad stories that came our way in 2021, but one really sad story has been the sharp decline in democratic values in India, and as kind of actually calculated by people on the outside watching in, you have Freedom House, which declared India as partly free. We had VDEM, the respected Swedish Institute, which called India an electoral autocracy now. So they even did away with the word democracy. International idea of which India is a founding member ranked India's freedoms currently at the same level like which they were in 1975, which is when a formal emergency was in place. But amidst all this bad news, one kind of creeping news, which really did not make it as much as it should have, was the fact that there was another index which said very clearly that India, the world's largest democracy, is also among the biggest surveillance states. The country ranks behind only Russia and China when it comes to surveilling its citizens. And this was something that you don't normally kind of expect because a lot of us kind of go by the open, raucous, vibrant democracy, phasers that are used so insistently, casually and warmly. But it actually conceals a great kind of a surveillance that's going on now, which is really important to get a grip on. So my hypothesis is really to look at this whole creeping up surveillance, particularly through various kinds of technologies and laws that India is using in three different categories. So I wish to kind of talk about first, what I term as big fish surveillance, number two, the small fish surveillance, and number three, the real dark hole. So it just kind of, I think, teases out the big S-word of surveillance. And I hope to be able to make some sense of this in my session today. As far as big fish surveillance goes, you have to just look as far as the results of a global wide investigation, the Pegasus Project that spoke of the use, the pervasive, invasive use of Pegasus and Israeli cyber weapon. It's a weapon, it's a cyber weapon, spyware, which is sold only to governments and India figures high in the list of its application according to this international investigation. We must always remember that the Indian government has never denied using Pegasus. There are no investigations it has ever put in place ever since this issue came to light in 2019. So effectively, they never said, no, we're not using Pegasus or it's wrong to use Pegasus. So the first of my three issues, the big fish surveillance and its impact on democracy has to do with how Pegasus has been used. There's a wide cast of characters over whom this cyber weapon has been deployed. It consists of election commissioners, a Supreme Court judge, top heads of political parties, an election strategist, enforcement director, officials, CBI heads, journalists, NGOs, doctors, epidemiologists, lawyers, you name it. A whole cast of characters. The first thing where surveillance, I think damages democracy and we need to pay attention to this is political players. It transpired that through Pegasus, political players, the foremost opponent of the BJP, the Congress Party's former president, MP, Raul Gandhi, two of his phones and phones of five others in a social circle who are not in public life were on the snoop list. A leading election opposition strategist Prashant Keshore was there in Karnataka phones used by senior members of the Janta Dal S and the Congress government and their aides were likely hacked by a head of the BJP ending up toppling the government. In Assam, two important political figures opposed to the controversial citizenship amendment act had their numbers on the list for possible use. So what does that do when important political players or participants in democracy are being ostensibly surveilled and their phones have been hacked by this weapons grade spyware? Well, it destroys the level playing field which is the basis of democracy. It gives the ruling party a symmetric amount of information and direct intelligence on its political rivals. So there is no sense of equality between people who are going to polls which destroys a basic premise of liberal democracy. Let's look at the second cast of characters Pegasus decided to be deployed on and these are independent institutions. What is a democracy but for independent autonomous institutions which kind of are the bulwarks of it all which make the system work. We had the story of an election commissioner who at that time was of course to be the next chief of the election commissioner of India and he found that he was on the Pegasus snoop list. He was the only one of the three in the commission at the time in 2019 who found certain statements by the prime minister during the 2019 general election campaign as violative of the model code of conduct. He was under Pegasus, the journalist who reported on the commissioner's objections and made this information public was on the snoop list as was a member of civil society, a prominent election watchdog who is known to not take things lying down. So these three kind of characters who intimately had to do with the business of running autonomous elections were on the Pegasus list. But wait, we found that one Supreme Court judges or sitting Supreme Court judge is number was on that list. A former chief justice of India was plagued by charges of sexual harassment and the Supreme Court staffer who level those objections people connected to her 11 numbers of people connected to her were on the surveillance list and lo and behold, by a very, very deep coincidence, after the sexual harassment case was put away under somewhat strange circumstances, the chief justice went on to give decisions that seem to be all pro-executive. It just happens that they were. It was the Ayodhya judgment, the fate of election laws relating to electoral bonds, the Raphael fighter jet deal and Kashmir's habeas corpus cases. And then after four months, this chief justice of India becomes a nominated Rajesh Saba MP. There were others on this list, which consisted of top honchos of the CBI. There was a war in the CBI going on at that time, a kind of interagency war which had political connotations, an enforcement directorate official who was looking at very sensitive cases. A whole list of police officers who were manning controversial and political cases were on this Pegasus list. What does that do? What that does, if the first of going after political players hacks into the level playing field, this of course does that, but it also provides government with masses amount of private information, a lot of private personal information about these people that exists, which they can use to blackmail, bully and target those who are heading the independent institutions. I mean, just as an example, one of the people being surveilled a fairly independent minded, supposedly at that time an enforcement directorate official has just taken VRS. In fact, his whole family was under surveillance, but he's just taken VRS and he's said to be contemplating, contesting on a BJP ticket in the forthcoming new people and enforcement directorate official and licks on the most high file cases, most high profile cases. The third is of independent journalists, academics, NGOs and other civil society agents under surveillance. This is not very simple at all because what is a democracy, but for NGOs, independent people who come, who are not possibly parts of formal structures or pillars of democracy, but they are part of very important voices and conveyor belts. They are people who convey information from bottom up, who keep vital feedback loops in a democracy alive. And once they are under surveillance, if Bhagat Deep Kang is under surveillance, if independent journalists, editors independent portals, other journalists making important points and who are dissenters who do not necessarily just take a pro-government line. If they are under surveillance, what do you do? You push the chilling effect or comes in, creeps in. And number two, again, information gathered about their personal lives, about their private lives can be used in ways in which they can be compromised, they can be bullied and blackmailed. I'll just give you one example about a Moroccan historian called Mati Munjib. He was targeted using Pegasus. This has also been unveiled by the same international consortium which called Project Pegasus. What agencies in Morocco did was gathered enough evidence about his private life over a year. And then armed intelligence agents raided his home at 9 a.m. one morning and found him and a female friend in the bedroom together. They stripped him naked, arrested him for adultery, which is a crime in Morocco and he spent 10 months in a Casablanca prison. So what you do is you're able to render private personal information and in such a way use it to completely render important vital players of democracy voiceless. So in this sort of big fish surveillance that this government has never denied the undertaking on all these people renders the level playing field inactive. What it does is compromise or have the capacity to compromise independent institutions which make which are really the nuts and bolts of a functioning democracy. They render them inoperational. And number three, absolutely shall we say throttles independent voices and gets people who are important civil society participants, activists, doctors, et cetera silences them either by scaring them as you know that they're being surveilled or finds out so much about them that you're able to choke their voices and fundamentally compromise democracy. That's your big fish surveillance field. A second thing which this government has been doing has been the small fish surveillance. I call this small fish because it's not as if the people they're surveilling are small but people generally, you know what have I done which is, you know why should I, I've gone for a movie I've had a pizza, these are my habits it's my sexual orientation. This is who I vote for. How does it matter if it gets anonymized and used? Well, we know what surveillance Big Tech has been up to. With surveys and snoops on ordinary citizens it gathers all kinds of data on its users their views, location, political and sexual orientation their weaknesses, strengths massive data is at their command. So while I think I'm nothing to hide taken together the summation of all this information from anonymous people from just ordinary, you know voter citizen of India that Big Tech gathers it has huge potential to allow them to put out personalised political ads to essentially divide the electorate to divide them and therefore subvert democracy because you polarise people by personalising things you destroy the basics of democracy. There's a lot that has been written on this and it's clearly a well established fact that Big Tech is able to do that. But where does the Indian government come into all this? Well, what the Indian government has done is contrary to what governments in Europe are doing even in the USA what governments are doing there's no clear relationship of accountability that has been demanded of Big Tech. There is a very neat carrot and stick sort of a passive aggressive relationship with Big Tech. So you kind of have the IT rules where you are mounting this that there is all this pressure on Big Tech to conform but what you also do is make clear that you'll be okay if you know maybe data is shared with these are unknown backroom deals that governments may be having with Big Tech because of this policy. And I say this not because I charge a big conspiracy of the central government being in cahoots with Big Tech but the Wall Street Journal and number of reports have come in which speak of how particularly Facebook the behemoth among Big Tech has been quite kind on the BJP and on the ruling party and has allowed a lot of their posts even if they violate a lot of things that Facebook follows online which it says it follows in other countries and certainly in the USA but they've allowed them to be on so they've been kinder to the BJP even by the looks of it by open available data would suggest that and we have no idea about what the backroom deal is at the back of all this is it to allow Big Tech to make money while they are kind of just dealt with in this with the help of IT rules and so the government is able to combine all the data that it gets from Big Tech along with new rules it has now put in place which is a linking Aadhar with your voter ID and a personal data protection bill which only protects governments and not the average citizen it just allows government to be immune from all regulation on how personal data is collected so by gathering masses of bytes of data of the small fish it is able to actually make sense of the electorate in the way it wants to and slice and dice it and potentially be a threat to democracy in ways that we cannot even imagine now if it has the entire data set from Big Tech and from its own recently really prohibitive and narrowing rules such as tying up election Aadhar with the voter ID then you have a case of surveillance which completely just it's almost as if the hatch is just closing in on you so though small people, small people think that their data doesn't matter but all of this put together gives people who are collecting this, surveilling this an enormous amount of control and a hold on who they are governing and there is no question of a level playing field it distorts democracy beyond comprehension the third what I'd like to believe the third way in which government is going around using surveillance to damage is probably the most sort of is probably the scariest and it's half proven but you just have to look at whatever is available in public domain and how it's being handled to get very scared and very worried about it this is what I call the dark mode way the third way in which surveillance is being used to kind of distort democracy the Bhima Kori Gao case, the BKC case the BK16 as they were called and then the BK15 after the 87 year old Jesuit priest died, there are BK15 this is almost like the canary in the coal mine of India's democracy and we should really care about how that canary is doing the canary in the coal mine is often the canary in the coal mine which if it starts feeling ill earlier people would go and pump in more oxygen to improve the quality of oxygen in the shaft that was the idea that you use the canary in the coal mine to tell you about the health and the wholesomeness of the mine and we should really worry about BKC about lawyers, academics, priests, dissenters, authors being in jail for more than two years two years in a lot of cases without the trial even starting but what to, so this is just another case but what do several of them and their lawyers have in common? Well, they were surveilled via Pegasus before their arrest at that time when their names came forward when some of their lawyers names came forward they were just ordinary lawyers in small towns but it's so transpires now that Pegasus was on their phones before they were arrested and the darker side which is what really makes this kind of surveillance dark mode is what the Washington Post reported in February this year the 10 letters had been deposited on the laptop by clearly a powerful hacker on the laptop of Rona Wilson a daily base rights activist and then another 22 sets of documents were loaded on his laptop it was established by Arsenal a digital forensics firm which is based in Massachusetts USA a respectable firm it has actually looked at two reports and it has concluded that files were planted on the laptop of Rona Wilson and it is on the basis of those very files planted it would appear that Rona Wilson is serving a jail sentence and under the most stringent laws of India so we don't really know because the matter is still to be heard in the Mumbai High Court and they've been to appease I think there's not been a substantive hearing of the matter but to think that it's not just surveillance but somebody, some very powerful hacker has been able to deposit 32 files on the laptop of Rona Wilson and there he is behind bars and for a long time and under the most stringent kind of laws so other than losing this time we've lost Rona Wilson we've lost 14 of these people as being symbols of people who comment on democracy who take positions on democracy who are articulate who can see things who are not known to be supporters of government being put out of action so that's one way in which surveillance can go in and directly attack democratic rights of people their rights but beyond BK15 this speaks for all of us for 1.4 billion for whose rights these people have stood for so I think the kind of scenario that in India we worry about now about surveillance and how states surveillance through use of intrusive technology is kind of marriage with laws and its own data collection its treatment of big tech poses a severe challenge to India so while you have the sort of Turkish business what Turkey does with its internet we have Russia doing its own little it has its own little room and how it functions we have China, the Chinese firewall is discussed but I think India is very sophisticated and very dark surveillance scenario should leave us all worried because it's all happening in the name of democracy in the happening of laws that are clearing parliament and it damages democracy in ways that we can no longer say that how does it matter as apparently the Google founder Eric Schmidt once sort of almost mocking at people who worry about privacy said that if you don't want people to find out you need not be you know you shouldn't be doing something or worse to that effect well as somebody said that most people who say things like it doesn't matter what I do is all in the open why should I care but then the same people get very worried when I ask them to take all their clothes off so I think to not recognize what is private what is personal would be to ignore one of the biggest perils on India's democracy it's a long shadow and we need to really be vigilant and the first step towards being vigilant about it and being able to roll it back is to be really to really understand how it's not just someone else's phone that's being hacked it's not just Facebook some random information that's going out all of this added together the surveillance of big fish surveillance of small fish and dark mode surveillance ought to concern us a lot