Allowing agencies to snoop on electronic communication is not an issue. But where are the safeguards?

The Union Home Ministry’s notification that allows 10 agencies of the Indian Government — from criminal investigative and intelligence agencies to economic agencies — to snoop on people’s electronic communication is nothing spectacular in its own right. This because in many countries, Governments, even those that are democratically-elected, snoop on the exchanges of their own and even foreign citizens. It is almost certain that Indian intelligence agencies have been snooping on electronic data of suspected terrorists and their sympathisers. On this front, they are as adept as their counterparts in the Western world. And after events in Mumbai a decade ago, snooping has intensified. Its success is also measurable by the fact that India has stymied the growth of radical Islamist terror organisations and large-scale attacks. At the same time, allowing economic agencies, such as the Enforcement Directorate, to investigate electronic transactions might prevent more Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya style frauds. It is also clear that such guidelines have existed for some time and this Government just formalised the process.

Yet, this is deeply worrying as we all know that rules in India tend  to be misused by corrupt bureaucrats. In countries like the United Kingdom and the United States, surveilling a citizen or resident almost always requires the consent of a judge; although in the aftermath of 9/11, both countries passed anti-terrorism laws that gave their intelligence agencies sweeping powers of intercepting communication. But in both countries, those powers have been largely used to control terrorist activities and rather successfully at that. In India, we may not be able to trust our agencies to restrict their snooping to active criminal cases. They will almost certainly track political opponents in order to curry favour with the powers that be; even though illicit surveillance conducted by private parties is also a widespread problem in our country. Then there is the other problem — can Indian agencies be trusted to keep the records of the communication secret? Can and will they expose the intercepts to the public at large through a media that will happily lap it up instead of going through India’s (notoriously slow) judicial system? We all know what happened in the past and will almost certainly happen again in the future. At the same time, more sophisticated criminals, both terrorists and economic offenders, know that there are ways and means to avoid interception, or at least decryption of communication. It could be as simple as using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or using highly-secure 256 or 512 bit encryption that requires supercomputing to decrypt. So, coupled with the potential of misuse, and there being no safeguards, little wonder that Opposition politicians are raising their heckles in Parliament and many common law-abiding citizens are worried. After all, we all have dirty laundry on our hard-drives that we would rather keep secret and like it that way.