 Prasanna, I wanted to ask you this. Why is the judiciary so excited about this? Like we know that the judiciary was so excited about the e-codes project. I would say it did bring some transformation of getting out judgments in an easier way. Like you could go check the website and you get the judgment. But again, they know how to evaluate it. Like my own case in Kerala, I had to pay 2000 rupees to get the judgment because they wouldn't upload it because it's a very sensitive case. So there are ways they do it. They evaluate this accountability. But why is there so much excitement within the judiciary? Even though it's not the judiciary that is building it? Well, I mean, there is a short-form answer and there is a long-form answer. Short-form answer is that they've really not considered this judiciary. They think this is something that is going to increase their efficiency because generally there is so much criticism about how inefficient our judicial system is. So they say anything that promises to even correct that, I mean, there is a tendency to jump at those solutions. I believe when this gets considered judiciary, looking at what are all the problems and how it affects rights of people, the answer may be different depending on who the judge is and who the bench is and what their judicial philosophy that they bring to the table is and all of that. But as I said, and you know the President Chief Justice of India, he has talked about AI quite a bit and in fact trying to employ AI to solve various kinds of problems. So that's the thing. The tendency is that you have this problem, you have these mountains of cases that need to be closed soon and then you use something that promises to make your system efficient because there is a tendency to jump at that and say, this is something that we need to try out. And specifically during COVID times, because that seems to be the flavor of the season to see any tech solution. So he's welcome. Any solution is welcome whether it actually solves the problem or whether that is even a problem or what other problems that solution needs. Only has a question. Can you explain how vehicle data is being there in ICJS is different from a policeman asking the details against the vehicle number from a scene of crime. So the issue is not asking you details of where you were. So if you are an accused or if you're a suspect in a criminal case, they have every right part of the evidence act and part of I guess Krishna can tell you more about the legal side under the IPC to ask you details and you will have to submit it. But all of this is also when they ask you these details, they call you, they issue those notices. It's all democratic in nature. There is at some level both administrative and legal procedures that do take place and it's all on record. But what's happening in this scenario is there is no crime. Like if you look at the Telangana case, there is no crime. But they are stopping you on the streets because you look suspicious. You are heavily built. If you are heavily built, it's been a historic case in Hyderabad. If you look like a goon, you are a potential goon. So we will try to detain you, question you under the goon act or under the prevention detention principles of the goon act. So anyone who looks suspicious, I mean, if you look suspicious, if the police detain you and ask you to show your ID card, that's perfectly valid. But the issue is nobody trusts ID cards anymore because they have realized that ID cards can be gamed and they are like, no, we can't verify your ID card. Even the other cards that they said we will verify it because you all know what the problems are with verification around that. They stop trusting ID cards. So what they are essentially doing is they are like, we will extract information from the individual at the scene and we will try to determine who they are. It's nothing to do with us, individual trying to identify who we are to the police. It's the police trying to identify who you are. And in this process, if they have access to your vehicle details, it's just not that they can determine who you are. They can also determine your travel patterns and where you have been through because of all the CCTV networks that are being now converted. I haven't mentioned that, but essentially when you're talking about 360 degree profiles, it's not just criminal in nature. It's also your personal details that are becoming part of the system. I mean, I'm not even against this idea if you're trying to use this to solve a crime, but there is no crime here. The violation is you are getting access to my details without the crime. It's against the whole idea of the evidence act. You only ask evidence when there is a crime. Without a crime, this whole idea of preventive detention or preventing a crime is being sent overboard now with these databases. In the past, if you were someone who were supporting certain form of revolutionary ideas, you were detained for publishing a book or even conducting a meeting, conspiracy theories, all of that. You don't need any of those anymore for the preventive detention. All they have to do is that you have been at a particular location at a point of time, accidentally, where there was a crime. When they collect all the call data records, if there was a crime and they tried to trace who are the individuals at the crime scene, they're trying to obtain call data records to determine that. Now, by being part of these databases, they are able to determine every individual who was at a point of time at a particular location at the scene of crime. And you are now a suspect. And the burden to prove that you are not actually the one who has committed the crime is on you. It's no more on the police to determine that you are the one who has committed the crime to arrest you. You will have to go tell them that I was there because I was doing some other work. You will have to prove to the police official that you were in there to commit that crime at that point of time. So this inverses the relation between an individual and the criminal justice departments, whether it's the prisons or the police. Even if you're a journalist, say as a journalist, you go interview someone in the prison. You are now part of the network. You visited a criminal. And that is something serious because what's also happening is the idea of the criminal justice system was always on, okay, it should be rather it was never, it should be around reforms. Like you were trying to ensure that the individual who has committed a crime gets reformed when he stays his time in a prison and he comes back better back into the society. By essentially tracking every prisoner, past prisoner and even when he's on bail, by tracking all of his details, you're making it hard for an individual to be reformed because the moment there is a crime, in case of Hyderabad, the Hyderabad police goes and catches the nearest guy who's a past known criminal who's just out of the prison. And that sharing of this information and harassment that oh, you are the criminal, you are the potential accused is going to be a serious problem and it's just mere harassment of people and we've witnessed this at scale in Hyderabad, part of the pilots. Thankfully, they stopped because of some criticism from the public and nobody knows that this is happening, right? Especially the media. Whatever happened in Hyderabad is unknown. It's happening within Delhi. For example, Delhi already has this. So if you're talking about the recent Delhi protests and when you're talking about the facial recognition system, you're only looking at that but it's not just these facial recognition system of fingerprint systems. It's all the other databases that are being interlinked to this criminal justice system that become evidence and it's very easy to manipulate digital evidence, by the way. We are witnessing that. I mean, it's really easy to go change the latlong of my call data because to say that I was at a potential protest even though I was never. Like, how would you verify that the digital evidence that they have is accurate, right? Like, there is no law around all of this. This is just becoming part of the judiciary and the cases because the judiciary is actually recognizing the system without a law. Yeah, that's... Three or four points, Rohini. Yeah, go ahead, Rohini, if you want to follow up that question. Yeah, so everything that they get from this ICGS would now be part of circumstantial evidence or how does it play with... When he says it becomes digital evidence and they still have to put that together before they accuse somebody or just having... Yeah, I get your question. So I'll let you go four parts through this, right? One is how does any crime investigation work? First, there is a complaint. There is something that is initiated and you know, therefore, you're trying to pin down the responsibility for the crime to so many people if the identity of the accused is not known, et cetera, trying to see who did it. So normally, all of this data is collected by the respective people and it is kept in separate silos. Even to demand this data, you need to show you are actually investigating this crime for which you need this data. And then that data is provided to the police under a certificate under the Evidence Act, digital evidence. So this is... I am a responsible officer, for example, in Airtel. This is the call record data of this number that you have, that you have suspicion. This is how, typically, when there is a crime investigation happens. So where is the safeguard here against digital planting, et cetera, here? Let's see. The person providing this data, the Airtel officer is not part of the police force. So therefore, there's nothing, there's no reason to doubt his credential and he is issuing a certificate under his name, under the Evidence Act, under the oath. And therefore, there's nothing to disbelieve in. That corroborates the police theory that a particular person was there on the crime scene, et cetera. So you change this. So where there is real-time accumulation of lat-long data by the police, for instance, under the ICJS, there's still some doubt as to whether that is going to happen, but certainly the model suggested it will happen. If that is the case, so what happens is the... Everybody is effectively a suspect from day one for crimes that are created, committed now and for the crimes to be committed tomorrow and day after and next year, et cetera. So the police has all the information. So if there is a crime, if they want to link A to the crime, B for whatever reason, they can do it just by a switch in their database. And that is what the universe was saying. And whether we should distrust the police should distrust the police. The whole point of the criminal procedure court, the whole point of the criminal justice system, certainly in India is distrust of police, which is why your statements to the police are not admissible in court, even if you confess to your crime, which is the reason why that is... The distrust of police is certainly a key aspect of our criminal justice system and therefore you can't turn that on its head and say that's why do we need to distrust the police. Distrust the police is important. That's only in a process that has certainly distrusted the investigation authority. Only then when a person accuses this guilty of offense, then he is deemed to have received a fair trial under our system. That's one part. And the second part is this aspect of trying to pin down everybody as a suspect. So this came to be considered in our Adhar 5-judge judgment, so where if you recall, so Adhar linking for bank accounts was to be done for all bank accounts mandatory. So there were rules passed under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, the Prevention of Money Laundering Second Amendment Rules 2017 was passed and that is what made Adhar linking mandatory. So these rules were struck down by the Supreme Court precisely for this reason. It says it's disproportionate to say everybody is a money laundering. That kind of presumption itself is unconstitutional. You'll have to presume everybody to be innocent and do as unnonstrictive a measure as possible to be able to catch money launders. I mean that you don't have an effective method is not really an excuse for you to net everybody as though they are a suspect. So that's number two. The proportionality and whether you can even have this presumption of everybody being guilty or a suspect that itself is unconstitutional that is now settled. The third aspect she was very briefly touched upon where you say in our criminal justice system across the civilized world when you do a crime you do the time. That's the philosophy. But here what is the time? The time is I mean in our constitution it's punishment and it says so you don't get punished more than what the law had prescribed at the time you had committed the offense. If at a particular point seven years is the maximum punishment example for murder. Subsequently it is changed to life imprisonment. But when you committed a murder at a time when the punishment was merely seven years you can only be punished for seven years. That's actually an express guarantee under Article 20 of our constitution. You are not punished longer than what it was the prescribed punishment at the time you committed the offense. It's called exposed factor. No exposed factor guarantee. So here what happens is now because you now have this trail being followed. You've been traced throughout your life. Your time as I mean even if somebody is guilty of an offense under the act once he serves the sentence he is entitled under the law to start his life afresh. Nothing of that really should stick. So in fact if that sticks then really the punishment is not really what is prescribed under the law. You need to give that. So it's not really just reprobative as Srinivas put it. Of course that is there. But also because that's the guarantee that's the civilization that we give. Civilized society we don't punish for more than what is required what is prescribed under the law. So what is a punishment? Punishment when you say put somebody in jail what does it mean? You are effectively depriving that person of valuable rights under the constitution. You are depriving that person of free right to free movement. You are depriving that person of liberty. So similarly when you actually take away that privacy for entire life it is as good as life imprisonment because you are depriving the person of that right for the rest of this. So that's another aspect. So where it also is a violation of constitution if you are effectively storing the person's detail. Even if somebody is guilty of it you try and record that forever and use that and net him as a suspect for any further crime. So where in fact it's been there since time immemorial police stations I have what is called history sheeters. And now we also have people advancing this text offenders registry where anybody who has ever been accused of a sexual offence sexual harassment or sexual offence gets into this registry and therefore people it's there for people to look up and be careful about them or whatever. So even that again will be a violation of that guarantee under Article 20 of our constitution. Yeah. The issue there again is that you don't know if the guy again this is not to support any sexual offender but you don't know if there was a crime or if it hasn't been you don't know if he was a criminal or he's an accused he remains an accused forever because you don't know A that you're part of the system and you don't know if you can be you can get out of the system and this is very problematic especially for the LGBTQ community who are routinely harassed by the police in India. So it's there are challenges to these unilateral identification of the state of individual saying that this person is a sexual offender because he dresses as a transgender right like that can't be the basis but unfortunately that's the basis because we have seen enough police departments wrongfully accused of accused you of crimes and it's an harassment that's always been happening and the issue is we don't know to what extent these systems will enhance it further because you could be part of the systems and you would never know why you were part of the systems because you will never know you are you are already in the system because you all of you have a driver's license right like you are in the system and you never knew that you are in the system it was the case for Telangana individuals too right like we had no idea that the state has created this new disliking system based on facial recognition and the police and the reason we are discussing this now is also that because two days ago the parliamentary committee on personal data protection actually held a consultation with the officials from the MHA the reports from media and elsewhere from PTI I guess that the MHA NCRB registrar general of India they are all lobbying for them to be exempted and the exemptions are primarily for these national databases I mean in case of the registrar general of India it is for the national population register also which will be part of this like when you are talking about immigration data the immigration data comes from the registrar general of India as well it is all centralized at the MHA but what you are witnessing is inter departments within the MHA and outside are sharing this information and they all want exemptions for it the problem though is all of this needs a separate law in itself I mean that's the whole thing the fundamental right to privacy judgment talks about and even in case of the Aadha judgment it outrightly says that these idea of 360 degree profile itself is flawed because not only they say that Aadha cannot be used to build this system saying that if at all those systems will be built they are unconstitutional is what they form they become surveillance is what they recognize in their judgment okay I have one more and there is another question from Rahul do you know whether these systems databases logs when data was added altered who did it okay so essentially Rahul is asking me this like if someone in the police department does a search trying to identify me will there be a log in the police department they don't have to tell me necessarily but will there be a log when there was access to my information and whether that information was also changed so I was talking about the scenario right where someone could change my location data inside these databases and can accuse me as a potential criminal right most of those people who were arrested in the Bhima Gorek Kaun case were that essentially they were nowhere in Pune during the Bhima Gorek Kaun case but they are all like you guys orchestrated this you were the ones who plotted this you created unrest you were planning to kill the prime minister so the evidence can always be fabricated now if such a digital evidence was fabricated there is no way to know it because the logs are always with the with the government itself whether it's the MHA in this case or the other departments in case of Wahan it's the ministry of road transport and there has never been the concept of producing logs like in case of the other case I think that's the first time we saw that the UIDI CEO actually produced his logs from the UIDI system but he never had to do that it was a voluntary decision that he took to produce to the court that look this is what we collect but there is no requirement under the law to actually produce these because there is no law and also because we don't know we don't entirely know about how these systems are being made you don't know the accountability checks that exist in place right now I can tell you for sure that the Telangana systems have no account even in terms of technology it's the police who are always in control and you're looking at a very dystopian idea here when the police become the boss it's not just the minister or the judge essentially official representatives but it's actually the police who is going to rule the society and that's a very dangerous scenario that we need to watch also anyone else has any more questions okay I have to check other questions okay I don't think anyone else has any questions but okay if you we can end it here if you want to know more about the C anything that I said is actually taken from official documentations from the MHA from various departments police departments and it's all available in the registration page so if you have registered for this event on discussion on the Haskell website you can find all the presentation by the NIC to MHA you'll find RTI filings notations of MHA and you will also find couple of NCRP papers on this there is a paper where the NCRP actually one of the presenters actually talks about what the system is going to look like it's from the NCRP Journal of 2019 so where they only tell you to which is where I found out that they plan to integrate immigration and passport data into this so you can check those details but you can also join us on a public telegram group the link is t.me slash a.r.a.n.a k.w.a.r.a.n.a telegram.me slash k.w.a.r.a.n.a okay there is one question on the YouTube Satya Prashat he is asking does it make sense to have a central authority who is custodian of this data and claim laws around how and when access should be granted plus and now so if all of this is digital evidence how do you manage this I mean if you are entering to that phase of saying you will have to build such a system you will have to monitor everyone I don't think our laws would allow that so does it actually make sense to create such an authority to look at evidence no so that's effectively you are creating a single point of data bad technical architecture is also bad legal architecture in many ways you are effectively creating a single point of failure you are effectively creating a honeypot so that can effectively hack the entire process so why would you want to do that in fact in many ways how our evidence system works is to be able to corroborate everything in support of A saying it if he is able to get B to say the same thing C to say the same thing and B to say the same thing BC and D are effectively corroborating what A is saying but if you have everything as one central certifying authority what you are effectively saying you don't even need further corroboration you just accept whatever that one person says as an end all that is more than anything else that's imprudence if that is an evidence in fact you won't be able to even convince the magistrate or the sections judge that you have effectively proven that a particular person has committed a crime even if you create that one certifying authority so in fact it is in the interest of law enforcement that there are several authorities collecting their own data the usual course of business that they do for their purposes and if there is a crime that gets used on demand for the purpose of investigation of that crime in order to solve that in fact it is in the interest of both law enforcement and the citizenry to have it that way okay I have this question to you for recent judgment in the supreme court on the idea of electronic evidence that if electronic evidence is being collected from you unless you are provided with the certificate 65 B if I'm not wrong that evidence will not be considered to be judicial evidence at all now to what extent would that apply to the center system well so that's in fact I say that it would fall foul of the judgment where you say so this that judgment effectively says if you are collecting electronic evidence and say that this the contents the copies that are submitted to the court is actually the correct version of the electronic evidence that was as collected at the time it was collected so you say there has to be somebody responsible who was in charge of those copying systems and in charge of those systems that collected that to say yes this is in fact the correct copy of that original document that was collected so this is what the contents of the 65 B certificate included so we supreme court has had ups and downs in fact in Afzal Guru's case it held you don't need to collect that certificate contemporaneously if you have not collected that certificate it is alright at the time of trial you summon that officer and the officer is at that time at the later time able to confirm that the contents are in fact proven the copy actual copies of the original document that was collected at that time so this changed in Anwar Rusty's Bashi later on many years later in fact a a divya that you may want to know is that in Afzal Guru's case the question was about the call data records as you know in parliament attacks when the parliament of India was attacked all those gun-trotting terrorists who attacked parliament had been gunned down on the spot so in fact the whole thing of connecting the conspiracy to that event was call data records suggesting that Afzal Guru had been in touch with those who attacked in the parliament so these call data record word question in fact in my reading that was the only evidence that linked Afzal Guru to the parliament attack and those call data records the question before the court was whether those call data records were admissible in evidence in view of 65B because there was no 65B certificate that was validly obtained on the day so they said now we can summon at the time of trial even though I mean there was no valid 65B at the time you collected the evidence from telecom companies etc now we can summon those officers and let them certify that it was in fact this question of admissibility whether that kind of evidence without 65B certificate it came to be overturned so the Afzal Guru's case was expressly overturned after Afzal Guru had convicted and had also been executed by that time it was overturned in Anwar v. Bashi saying that 65B contemporaneously at the earliest has to be produced for the court so there was a confusion in the later case that said it was Anwar v. Bashi what is called Anwar v. Bashi was incorrectly explained in the later case that explanation has effectively been set aside now in the most recent judgment so the Anwar's position more or less is the same so in electronic evidence now 65B has to be croupleously followed at the time of evidence collection the police will also need to collect the 65B certificate from those authorities that give them data for instance now if there is a crime investigation if police are collecting call data records from your mobile service provider the mobile service provider they need to give the call data records and contemporaneously give the 65B certificate to the police the police failed to collect the 65B certificate the admissibility of that those call data records that later during the trial will be questioned I think, I mean I don't think any of that is actually signed cryptographically to say that the evidence wasn't changed but let's see how this will happen and how 65B gets implemented over time Rohini has one more question would there not be a way for police using it only access or enter information only in an investigation or a judge to access the info only if they enter the case number so the essential question is what kind of access limitations would exist I mean in terms of departmental access like the judiciary may not have access to my call data records but because this data is being centralized at the MHA and the NCRP the part of CCDNS so it's essentially an evolution of CCDNS this is an entire MHA database and it's the MHA which is giving access to the judiciary at the same time getting access to the court records but I don't think the judiciary, the MHA actually needs the court records that way it's more interested in personal information so the access limitations for MHA does not exist and that then their lobbying for there should be no limitations at all for the MHA part of the privacy data protection bill because if there are any restrictions or any oversight forget restriction even for all of this process there has to be an oversight by the judiciary on ICJS right even their lobbying against that like that's something that Justice Krishna committee proposed right there has to be some judge who has to authorize this access to this data there has to be a judicial procedure and that was overturned essentially by the Ministry of Information Technology part of the current bill and the joint parliamentary committee is also being lobbied to further bring it down to essentially ensure that MHA has no limitations and they could do whatever they want but unfortunately that's not how it should work so it's important that the data protection bill and joint parliamentary committee looks into a lot of these 360 degree profiles it's not just at the MHA because when you say exemptions for government it's not just for the Ministry of Home Affairs the exemptions apply to state governments and to other departments as well which are also trying to build larger other 360 degree profiles for welfare databases and the MHA benefits in all of this because they have unlimited access to all of these other databases as well so I think the larger issue is the structural dependence particularly it's grave for the judiciary to depend on a government of India system like this as it is our judiciary is dependent on the government of India for a lot of things that compromises their independence in many ways for example they are reliant for several things for administration they are reliant on the government of India when government of India is the largest we think it is before the supreme one great example also in fact if you see supreme court of India is theoretically independent of the government of India because they are both co-equal constitutional authority supreme court is arguably a higher authority than the government of India because it's also the guardian of the constitution but the supreme court website now the link is ci.gov.in right so it's effectively yeah so similarly so for all their IT reliant on government of India is a recipe for disaster for citizens if they say I mean as it is we are moving towards a place where whatever the government says is taken at face value without cross examination that is a major issue that we are facing with our constitutional adjudication and that is going to be aggravated if all our IT system that the judiciary uses are completely at the control at the back and collar particularly about the ministry like the minister of home and it's a structural issue it's not just a functional issue it's a structural issue in terms of I mean conspiracy MHA for all we know we know that I mean they may actually decide their duties perfectly well with no malice intended so no malafites there it's not just a functional thing it's a structural thing so if the that the judiciary to be independent of the government in as many ways as possible it's a structural goal it's a goal that we have and this is a significant setback and the issue in terms of this idea and models of these data papers so they all say or claim that they are the single source of truth so single source of truth is a information model that has kind of come up again through the state rest and data hubs at some level from Andhra Pradesh that's what I could track to but we really don't know but it's used everywhere now the NITIO they call it like the single source of truth for COVID whether you're COVID positive or not the single source of truth the MHA claims ICJS will be the single source of truth to identify a criminal in the justice system so everybody wants to propose their own single source of truth but all of the single source of truth for that to emerge they all need all of your personal information to build a perfect profile databases so and these 360 degree profile databases are emerging everywhere everyone sites our model is better than their model like the MHA's model is better than the Telangana State Police model or the department of rural department can say that look we have a better welfare model which is better but the end of the day the experimentation that's happening because of solutionism and protectionism and this whole idea of national security or whatnot is really concerning because you have agencies like the NIA the national investigation agency which is claiming they need all of this to basically track terrorists if you looked at the slides of ICJS you would see that NIA is mentioned now the NIA which is tracking the prime ministers threat to the prime minister going around the Makorilam case is unable to provide any evidence and the entire evidence for the case that they have is a lot of data bytes of digital evidence which which potential leads to that it has been planted the the questions on how much of the evidence is true or not so this is really challenging especially when UAPA is being imposed on everyone including for sending emails right so this is really problematic if they start trying to trace your web IPs and start trying to trace everything from ICJS and you become part of the criminal justice system just because you sent an email to the minister is really concerning so the amount of power that information is leading to these agencies is what that we are trying to question here yeah yeah I mean the single source of truth I mean the necessary implication is that you are erasing all other sources of truth you are eliminating all other sources of truth right either as gaslighting saying they are all false or just say I mean they are just not feasible to even collect that so that's it's yeah therefore there is I mean the deeply problematic even at that level at the level of