That Big Brother is watching to bring alive the prophecies of George Orwell would lead no one into a comfort zone
Civil society is under greater surveillance than ever before. While on the face of it electronic eavesdropping and the ubiquitous presence of closed circuit television cameras amount to abridgement of an individual’s rights, innocent people who have no reason to worry about the way they conduct their lives need be under no apprehension that their private conversations or the places they visit would be used in any way against them.
To know that 10,000 telephone lines are being tapped in a country of 1.2 billion people should cause no alarm.
Modern society is under attack like never before from various criminal activities even as the Internet and online communication through hand-held devices like mobile phones and tablets proliferate as never imagined. It is a fair estimate that about three billion devices are in use to communicate in India and that each of them can be a potential threat to society if the designs of the users are sinister and opposed to the precepts of a free and open society committed to secular democratic principles.
Over 1,000 email accounts are also under surveillance by government agencies that are dedicated to the detection of activities inimical to the state. Again, the numbers are so negligible as to represent no major threat to the defenders of the rights of individuals to absolute freedom in terms of their private lives. Investigators can also take heart from not having to keep telephone operators in the loop when it comes to intercepting conversations as a more modern central monitoring system is on the anvil. The phone-tap leak in the Niira Radia case may have awoken the establishment with regard to plugging possible sources of leaks, although it would only be fair to suggest the leak could have come from any source, including employees of official India with axes to grind.
The more sophisticated national intelligence gathering agencies get, the greater should be their power to mount surveillance without giving the game away. And yet it should worry civil society if the quality of video cameras gets so good as to make facial recognition to the tune of 90 per cent accuracy possible, as is happening in many of the developed countries that are putting in place a huge number of video-surveillance systems in public places.
That Big Brother is watching to bring alive the prophecies of George Orwell would lead no one into a comfort zone. The potential damage to innocent lives in terms of surveillance agency personnel misusing their knowledge to mount blackmailing operations is great enough for society to call for effective safeguards. And yet the numbers that many pivotal agencies, like the NIA, CBI and DRI, are working on does seem too trivial to make a difference to the enormity of the task of keeping an eye on devious people who may number in the millions in our country.