Surveillance initiatives by America’s National Security Agency, through which US intelligence services have mined vast amount of data collected over the years by telecom firms, Internet service providers and social media websites, open up the debate once again about security of the state versus the privacy of individuals. Nothing is apparently secure from Big Brother’s prying eyes: not emails, chats, videos, photos, data, file transfers, video-conferencing — in fact, the whole electronic kit and caboodle of the Web, Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. This is a scenario George Orwell thought up six decades ago.
But as the saying goes, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”. And terrorism is best countered by persistent counterintelligence of unbelievably large size undertaken in an operation appropriately codenamed Prism. This metadata in NSA hard drives has in fact unravelled many plots. All governments of course swear by the efficacy of such blanket surveillance and consider it vital to guard against terrorism, the scourge of our times; while civil liberty advocates warn of life in a super-nanny state.
There aren’t any easy answers. But terror sadly can’t be wished away, and governments simply cannot dismantle the apparatus of surveillance if that leaves people more vulnerable to attacks. The US example, with the state intensifying surveillance, and taking libertarian criticism in its stride, may thus be unavoidable. Maybe there’s a lesson in this for India as well.