From New Delhi to Patna, govt is watching your social media from 61 places

Law enforcement agencies are in the process of installing this 'strategic' tool to monitor social media activities at 59 more locations, shows RTI response

The Union Ministry of Home Affairs and several state police departments have installed, across 61 locations in the country, a “strategic tool” that mass monitors citizens’ social media activities, the government’s response to a Right to Information (RTI) query has revealed. Also, law enforcement agencies are in the process of installing this tool at 59 more locations.

The tool – Advanced Application for Social Media Analytics, or AASMA – has been developed by the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIITD). The information, accessed by Business Standard through an RTI application, shows that the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology paid Rs 12.3 million to IIITD to develop this software.

Publicly available information in official documents shows that AASMA can “24X7” crawl and analyse “live data” from “multiple social networks”, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google+ and YouTube. It can track individuals’ user profiles, posts and network of connections, and also gauge public “view and sentiments” on social media. It can identify “top users”, conduct “sentiment analysis” of their posts and categorise them into either “positive” or “negative.” AASMA can even track users’ devices and their locations and send “alerts” to authorities depending on the “criteria” set by them.

Earlier this year, a plan of the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to use a similar tool to monitor social media activities of citizens and gauge their opinions about government policies was challenged in the Supreme Court on the grounds of privacy violation. The government had to withdraw the plan after the apex court warned it could lead to India becoming a “surveillance state”.

The Information and Broadcasting ministry’s plan came to public scrutiny because the procurement of software and services for it was being done through an open-tender process. But AASMA is already being used and installed at interested law agencies on their request, away from the public glare.

According to the documents, law enforcement agencies monitor social media using AASMA to gather intelligence for preventing crimes and violent events like riots. Some security agencies have in the past claimed to crack crime cases by tracking social media activities of suspects.

The government has, however, never made public any procedure or rules followed to authorise such monitoring. It is not clear who is authorised to conduct the monitoring or address grievances of citizens if they are adversely affected by such monitoring. It is also not known where the data collected from such monitoring are stored and what precautions are taken to prevent their misuse.

Neither the home ministry nor the ministry of electronics and information technology responded to detailed queries sent by Business Standard on the use of AASMA.

Concerns over monitoring

Concerns over misuse of social media data have increased globally in the past year or so, ever since it emerged that United Kingdom-based political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica collected the social media data of individuals, without their informed consent, to use them for political campaigning. The company is alleged to have analysed the social media posts of millions of individuals to create their psychological profiles, which it used for targeted messaging and influence voting patterns.

Privacy experts also argue that mass monitoring of social media by government agencies can have a chilling effect on free speech. “The government has the power of surveillance and interception of electronic data but it can only do so on a case-to-case basis and according to the procedure prescribed by the law. The law does not prescribe any procedure for mass monitoring of public’s electronic data. Mass social media monitoring is thus contra to the constitutional principles and contra to the Supreme Court’s judgment on right to privacy,” said cyber-security expert and Supreme Court Lawyer Pavan Duggal.

In its judgment on the right to privacy on August 24, 2017, the Supreme Court had said: “If the posting on social media websites is meant only for a certain audience... then it cannot be said that all and sundry in public have a right to somehow access that information and make use of it.”

Use of AASMA

According to the response to the RTI, some of the agencies already using AASMA include the Union Home Ministry, the Delhi Police, the police departments in Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala, Chhattisgarh and Bihar; the Anti-Terrorism Cell in Mumbai, Intelligence Department of Andhra Pradesh, the city police and the National Police Academy in Hyderabad, the North Eastern Police Academy and the Criminal Investigations Department in Meghalaya, the Internal Security Division in Bangalore, and the Central Industrial Security Force Headquarters in Delhi.

The agencies that have requested the installation of AASMA include the police departments of Telangana, Gujarat, Panjab, Daman & Diu and Dadra & Nagar Haveli, the Criminal Investigations Department of Jammu and Kashmir, the Border Security Force, the State Cyber Cell in Bhopal and the Central Reserve Police Force in Jammu & Kashmir.

The tool was developed by Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, associate professor at IIITD, around 2013-14. Since then its use by government agencies has grown many times over. “The Government of India has officially declared this project as ‘strategic’ in nature and is closely monitoring the growth of the same,” says IIID’s annual report for 2016-17. Kumaraguru and IIITD did not respond to Business Standard’s queries on the software and the measures to ensure that the technology is not misused.

A note by the National Police Mission on the use of AASMA for police departments gives a glimpse of how agencies might be using the software. According to the note, the tool would be used at ‘Social Media Labs’ at state police departments to keep a watch on the social media activities of the public at large. “The social media labs will provide a public sentiment analysis, identify behavioural patterns, influences and advocates, track the change and increase in chatter, and generate alerts in real time for police to take suitable action,” says the note. “The advanced social media monitoring tools shall help in gauging and analysing the public media and sentiment, draw up a predictive analysis of projected events and provide indicators to the police regarding the size and seriousness of these public emotions.”

Extending surveillance

The central government is currently facing criticism in Parliament from the Opposition for its recent moves on extending surveillance authority over citizens. On December 20, the home ministry had issued an order authorising 10 security and intelligence agencies “for the purposes of interception, monitoring and decryption of any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer”.

Four days later, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology proposed to amend the rules under the Information Technology Act to make it mandatory for online platforms to break the end-to-end encryption whenever the government wants to know the source of any online communication.

While these moves are meant to allow security agencies to watch the data privately stored on computers or communicated by citizens and through online platforms, AASMA’s use concerns with the monitoring of publicly posted information by users on social media.

“The tool (AASMA) might be looking only at the publicly posted information by citizens. But if you see it in addition to the other recent moves by the government to extend its watch into private data and communications of citizens, it raises serious concerns. With access to all the privately and publicly communicated opinions by a citizen at one place, the government can have a total and complete window into her digital footprints,” says Apar Gupta, lawyer and co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a non-profit body working for free internet and online privacy rights. Twitter: @Kum_Sambhav