The proposal is not only a brazen infraction of fundamental rights but paves the way for the creation of a police state.
The government-run Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Limited (BECIL) has issued a request for proposal (RFP) for selection of an agency for setting up a social media communication hub. The idea is to create a “social media analytical tool” with an objective to “collect digital media chatter from all core social media platform”.
The analytical tool’s listening and responding capability shall extend to: Twitter, YouTube, Google +, Instagram, LinkedIn, Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest, Play Store, e-mail, news, blogs, forums and complaint websites.
This means the government will henceforth have the ability to access, analyse, eavesdrop, intercept, snoop and undertake surveillance on wholly private information of individuals without any authority of law. The scheme prescribed under the RFP is not only a brazen infraction of our fundamental rights under Part III of the Constitution but paves the way for the creation of a police state.
The nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court in the case of “K.S. Puttaswamy vs. Union of India” has emphatically held that a fundamental right to privacy would cover, “informational privacy which does not deal with a person’s body but deals with a person’s mind, and therefore recognises that an individual may have control over the dissemination of material that is personal to him. Unauthorised use of such information may, therefore, lead to infringement of this right”.
The rationale and objective of the government’s social media hub is contrary to the judgment of the Supreme Court wherein it was held that the “state must ensure that the information is not used without the consent of users and that it is used for the purpose and to the extent it was disclosed. Thus, for example, if posting on social media websites is meant only for a certain audience, which is possible as per the tools available, then it cannot be said that all and sundry in public have a right to somehow access that information and make use of it”.
The salient conclusions that emerge are that firstly such usage by another agency must have the consent of the user and secondly, it must not be used for any other purpose than for which it is authorised.
The government intends to adopt an analytical tool that will have the “ability to crawl the social media and the World Wide Web for data mining. Crawling will be comprehensive and will cover all major websites and social media handles”.
Needless to add, that such a far-reaching measure will be undertaken by the government without the users consent or authorisation. The said analytical/software tool is intended to perform as a search engine for the government. The scope of the social media communication hub will extend to carrying out a predictive analysis of what would be the headlines of major newspapers, channels, to discern the sentiments of the population with the objective as to how public perception could be moulded in a positive manner.
In other words, an agency of the state has been entrusted with doing personal and social profiling of 1.3 billion Indians at the expense of the tax payers. This unprecedented surveillance of citizens in the guise of promoting nationalistic feelings among the masses abridges every canon of our fundamental rights and the principles that govern an open and free society.
The relevant law that governs the interception of telecommunication and electronic messages by government agencies is the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885. Section 5 of the Act permits the government to order interception of messages only on the grounds of the sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of an offence.
The RFP issued by the present government is dehors the law of the land and is a scheme for creating an intrusive state that will interfere with every sphere of human activity. Any such attempt by the government will violate individual rights and appears to be undertaken to utilise such information for conditioning/influencing public opinion. Not only will this alter the level-playing field among political parties but will be an assault on our democratic principles.
Aadil Singh Boparai is a Supreme Court advocate.
I am quite sure we knew this was coming as George Orwell encapsulated the thesis at the heart of his novel, 1984 in 1944. The Information Age was getting too good to be true: the World on your palm; 24×7 connectivity; navigation; transactions and so on at the disposal of the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. All this had to come at a price, to primarily guard against misuse? We can’t have the Chitt and the Patt, can we?