Devangshu Datta: Laissez faire surveillance

Since the Radia tapes emerged into the public domain, there has been a loud argument about the ethics of the journalists who spoke to her. There has also been noise about India Inc’s manoeuvres to get favoured politicians into key Cabinet posts.

Both topics deserve ventilation. Folks in the media must introspect about time-honoured methods and the relationships they develop with their sources. Big business too has never stood naked in front of its clientele and consumer base, as it does now. About the political establishment, well, it does no harm for horse-trading details to be aired, even if one suspects it won’t do much good.

At the least, agents in those spheres of life have suffered some loss of credibility. But one entire arm of government has successfully avoided opprobrium despite being highly culpable. I’m referring to the bureaucracy.

Those “tapes” (actually digitally recorded conversations) were obtained by a government agency. They were leaked. By definition, the person (or persons) who leaked them had access. One can only speculate about the motives. Delhi is not short of conspiracy theories on the subject. Neither is Mumbai or Chennai.

However, whatever the motives, many phones were tapped, many conversations were recorded and then, the recordings were leaked. Nobody in the bureaucracy appears set to carry the can for this lapse. The taps may have been authorised but the leaks could scarcely have been. Were the recordings stacked out in the open for any body to wander in and walk off with them? Surely somebody is in theory held responsible for storing such data.

We don’t know which officer authorised the surveillance — given that it was a central agency it should have been the home secretary. We don’t know who was in charge of actually making the recordings and storing them. In all probability, we will never find out.

Yet, those are questions of burning importance, potentially at least as important as the weighty issues being debated. What is due process in authorising taps? How admissible is evidence gathered in this fashion? Is there a process of review for such requests? Why is the government or its servants not held culpable if private information gathered in this manner is leaked?

None of these questions have been asked, let alone answered. A tap is simple technologically. Every telecom service provider provides surveillance facilities to meet official requests for taps. So, any conversation originating and finishing on Indian networks can be recorded end-to-end.

Even without telco facilities, taps are simple. Off-the-shelf equipment costing in the range of $100 -2,000 can enable accurate point-and-shoot taps (and cellphone hacks) within up to 2 km radius of a given phone. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy provides an accurate description of how mobile phones can be identified and tapped, even if the number/EMEI is unknown, via voice-recognition software.

The ease of tapping makes it all the more imperative to have clearly delineated due processes, reviews and strong privacy protection for surveillance. The possibility for misuse is huge. Everything from insider trading, to leaking of recorded conversations to terrorists or criminals, to the release of salacious dialogue between celebs (or cybersex once 3G comes into play) is possible.

In RadiaGate, in lieu of due process and privacy protection, somebody delivered pen-drives in brown paper envelopes. Whoever was in theory responsible for the recordings was either directly responsible for the leak, or somewhat startlingly casual about protecting private data. Such tap requests supposedly emanate from officers at Inspector General (IG) rank. I haven’t noticed any IG being suspended for dereliction of duty, or asked to explain how the leaks occurred.

In this case, the content of what was leaked may be in the public interest. But without strong enforceable checks and balances, and the fear of condign punishment, the current laissez faire surveillance could help turn India’s corrupt and fragile democracy into something much worse.