 You are watching NewsClick. I am Anandya Chakravarty and I am going to talk about of course Pegasus. The Pegasus Snoop Gate where Neta's opposition leaders, bureaucrats, activists, journalists who targeted their phones hacked and we don't know what information was taken out of it. Who did it? I am not getting into that. But let's start with one particular point and that is look at this. The Pegasus project involved 17 news organizations across the world. Journalists from these 17 news organizations have been working very hard for the last several months to track down people who were targeted by this Israeli software. And remember this Israeli software, the company claims is sold only to governments and state actors, no one else. So whoever used it is most likely a state actor. Which state? Which country? I am not going into that. That is for the investigators to find out if there is ever an investigation into this. However, the point is out of these 17 organizations there is not one mainstream Indian news organization that was included. The news organization that Indian news organization which is part of it is an independent website, The Wire. And one particular reason it got into the process was because The Wire's editor, Siddharth Vardarajan was one of those who had been targeted by this particular Pegasus software. So they got into that. But think about it. In the past we have had WikiLeaks, US WikiLeaks, we have had the Swiss Bank accounts and mainstream Indian news organizations were involved in this process. Out of these 17 news organizations we have big names globally. We have Washington Post, one of the big newspapers of the world. We have Haaretz of Israel. We have The Guardian in the UK. We have Le Mans in France. We have one of the top newspapers in Germany. But in India, not a single big newspaper or news organization TV channel was included in this. This tells you what global, the journalistic community, the news gathering community which does journalism, which is speaking truth to power, exposing the way in which power operates, what they think of Indian news organization that they were not even asked to participate in this process. And if they were asked, they clearly did not agree to do it. So this tells you about the state of news media in India. And in a sense this also leads us to the second part, which is surveillance. I have often said that one of the biggest reasons that India's news media is so timid right now that it does not take up this massive case. Think about it. This is almost like what happened in the US Watergate, the Watergate scandal. It's almost like that, where the opposition was being spied upon by this sitting president. Here we don't know who did it, but we know that Rahul Gandhi's phones and his associates phones, Prashant Kishore who was working for Mahavata Banerjee, his phones, they were all targeted. And yet not a single Indian news organization thinks, or any news editor, thinks it is important or worthwhile to take this up as a story and to investigate it. Well, the reason for this is partly because today news media is corporatoned. I know I keep saying this, it is corporatoned and it's very easy to lean on corporates. Because every day to do business in India and probably everywhere in the world, you constantly break rules. It is extremely easy for any agency to send a notice and say your production in this particular factory is being shut down because you violated rule number so and so, and it's a huge loss of business. An income tax notice or an ED notice to the company is unnecessary hassle. The stock price falls, you have huge legal expenses. As soon as corporates or big companies begin to own media houses, they become vulnerable to state action, very easy to handle them. They're no longer independent. Number two, number two is that when corporates own media houses, they essentially represent power because corporates are part of the ruling elite, the ruling class which basically determines state policy. So it is in their interest to keep running the state as it is, to reproduce the system of power as it is. And that is why corporate ownership of news media which has happened in various ways, either directly or through the extensive dependence that news media has on advertising, has made it timid, easy to manipulate and in general in favor of power. It does not speak truth to power, it essentially bats for power. Now that is one of the crucial reasons and that becomes even easier when the state undertakes surveillance. When the state snoops on you, why does it become easy? Because let's admit, all of us in our life have vices, they're not illegal, they're just things that we don't want people to know. We have a public image, maybe even with our families, but our private persona, whether within our family, with our friends or within ourselves, is slightly different. Sometimes there are vices which we don't want even our family members to know or our friends to know. We might have cracked a few jokes which are of color. They might be on WhatsApp, we share jokes which are politically incorrect. When it becomes public, it is something that can be used against us, to malign us. So our private lives, that is one key reason that our private lives are private because whatever we don't want to make public often is things that we don't want to be used against us in the public. Because if our friends know something about us, they see it in the context of the person, they laugh at it or understand it. But when people who do not know us, they get access to our private information, then they can judge us and compartmentalize us. And in this new world, literally cancel us. So therefore, private lives are always, always going to be susceptible to manipulation. And that is why surveillance becomes, surveillance and snooping becomes such a big danger. Because it's an easy way to blackmail people, it's an easy way to make people fall in line. And it can be anyone, it can be a top babu, a big corporate, it can be someone sitting at the top of a state institution, who might be very honest and suddenly you find something that they don't want to be made public. It might not be illegal, it might just be something that they find embarrassing. And it is very easy to use it against them to make them fall in line. And that is one of the key ways in which surveillance works. It is not just to find out what people are doing. It's also to use it against them, blackmail them and then make them support those in power, whether it's the government, whether it is state policy, whether it is any institution that upholds and runs systems. So that is one of the biggest reasons why surveillance is dangerous. That is why we must have our own privacy. It is not just that I don't want you to know my birthday. That is not the point. The point is I don't want you to know my birthday because I don't know how you're going to use it. That is all there is to it. So when the state uses any state actor, uses this kind of technology to snoop on its people, it essentially is able to control them. It is literally what was there that George Orwell called Big Brother is watching you. It is constantly watching you. In Michel Foucault's celebrated book Discipline and Punish, which is somewhere behind me right now, he spoke about the panopticon, the model of the prison, whether watchtower right in the middle and cells around it. The prisoners cannot see who is in the watchtower. They don't know if there's really a person inside the watchtower because that watchtower can always surveil them, can always watch them. So the prisoners automatically believe that someone is watching them, whether there's someone watching them or not. This is what makes them discipline themselves, fall in line. The idea that someone is always watching them. Modern societies in some ways are like that panopticon. We know that all the time the law, the systems are watching us, institutions are watching us. We always fall in line. If we are working in a particular place, we are very careful as to what we do. We follow traffic rules because we know we might be watched, there might be a chalan. So we are always being watched. When that intrusion takes place directly into our private lives, then all our freedom goes. And no amount of rights that you have can be exercised when our private lives can be used against us to make us do things that we do not want to do. And this is one of the crucial reasons why surveillance of this kind is so dangerous. The crucial reasons why people are fighting for privacy. When your data is in the hands of corporates, it is dangerous of course because they can use it. But when it is in the hand of the state, then the state can use it to punish you in any way they want. And software like Pegasus is even more dangerous because it is done in a way in which things can be planted against you which can make you look like you have violated laws. And you can end up in jail without doing anything at all, without having ever broken a law. These are the reasons why all of us needs to speak up. The media is not going to speak for you. It is compromised, it is being manipulated, it's not going to speak for you. If you don't speak for yourself, you are going to give up every right that you ever imagined. This is not about political parties. You might have a grudge against the 70 years the system that worked. You might have a grudge against it. But if you do not understand what is happening right now, then you are giving up everything that our national movement won for us. Which is the right to exist as individuals. That's the show today. I am sorry about this very impassioned show. Not much information but I think it is important for us to at times to take things not just as facts and analysis but also as matters where we have to be passionate and speak up and fight for our rights which are given to us by the constitution of India.