Mass surveillance is the pervasive watching of an entire or a substantial part of the populace of a country. Governments are invseting in multiple projects for mass surveillance.
Governments are rapidly investing in advanced technologies to track their populations' social media activity. This sort of global monitoring, once the domain of the world's most powerful intelligence agencies, has spread to a wide variety of countries, from large authoritarian powers to smaller or poorer governments hoping to track dissidents and persecuted minorities. The increasing commercial market for social media surveillance has lowered the barrier to entry not only for dictatorial security services but also for national and local law enforcement agencies in democratic countries, where it is utilised with little oversight or accountability. The expanding use of social media surveillance, when combined with an alarming increase in the number of nations where social media users have been arrested for their legitimate online activities, threaten to suffocate civic activism on digital platforms. With surveillance comes the idea of surveillance capitalism, privacy, the “responsibilities of a citizen” are put in question, and, an illusion of choice is brought forth. These concepts are closely interlinked with each other and understanding these ideas will help us understand the overall path of surveillance in media and surveillance through the media, in the past, present, and maybe the future.
What is Surveillance?
Surveillance is a topical issue across the world, with growing awareness and an increase in both the number and type of surveillance technologies. Throughout the second half of the previous century, the type and number of surveillance technologies and the type and scope of persons and spaces being surveilled have gradually increased.
This has triggered the emergence of an academic discipline called surveillance studies, a multidisciplinary field covering both theoretical and empirical accounts of past, current, and near-future surveillance in society. Since surveillance is used as an umbrella term that covers a broad range of sub-topics discussed in other domains as well, the concept of surveillance features increasingly in different contexts and disciplines, making it harder to follow and focus debates across disciplines.
The term surveillance can be deconstructed in its etymological parts ‘sur’ (from above), and ‘veillance’ (to watch). Where often first associations with the terms surveillance are that of Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras placed in city centres and other spaces (e.g., airports, highways, the workplace), the term has been discussed before the emergence of omnipresent electronic eyes in public (and, increasingly, private) spaces. Due to vast and seemingly radical technological changes that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have brought about since roughly the 1960s, the term surveillance has been spreading both in meaning and substance and has been theorised from a large range of disciplines. The subject of surveillance is being watched with a certain purpose, which can be controlling and disciplining the subject into a certain behaviour or a set of norms, but also—possibly at the same time—protecting and caring for that subject. Where this understanding resonates with earlier writings on surveillance, in more recent theories and concepts, the notion of the subject as a passive actor is being questioned, as is the idea of an underlying project to impose certain morals and exercise control.
In a paper titled Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond: An Overview of Surveillance Theories from the Panopticon to Participation the authors break down the overall idea of surveillance -theory and practice into three major phases. The first major phase revolves around the idea of the Panopticon, which is characterised as offering surveillance as largely physical and spatial. Either in concrete, closed places such as institutional buildings or more widespread in territorially based social structures. This idea not only exercises power over millions of individuals but also creates an idea of self-disciplining. The second phase looks at institutions of networks, from various forms of discipline to relatively translucent forms of control. It weaves structures and digital networks together to have a discourse over new forms of power and who may have them. The third phase according to the authors, Galic, Tamin, and Koops, combines the first two phases and looks at new forms of surveillance. Datafication of society through social media, government, and corporate surveillance is found, and voluntary data sharing also emerges here.
Mass Surveillance in India
Mass surveillance is the pervasive watching of an entire or a substantial part of the populace of a country. In India, this would mean surveillance via Telephone tapping, Open-source intelligence, Lawful interception, etc which is possible under the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, which gives power to the Indian state machinery to have exclusive jurisdiction and privileges for establishing, maintaining, operating, licensing and oversight of all forms of wired and wireless communications within the Indian territory. It also gives them the power to monitor or intercept communications of any kind. Since its inception, numerous amendments have been passed to update the act to respond to changes in technology. The Indian government is not going to stop any time soon because over the years they have invested in multiple projects regarding mass surveillance.
DRDO Netra
DRDO Netra is a mass surveillance project of India that was being developed by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) laboratory under the Defence Research and Development Organisation. The system could detect selective words like “bomb”, “blast”, “attack” or “kill” within seconds from emails, instant messages, status updates, and tweets. The system will be capable of gauging suspicious voice traffic on Skype and Google Talk. To enhance the capacity of the DRDO Netra Project Black Knight was initiated in late 2013 to monitor social media trends and identify the source of various viral messages that posed a risk to the peace and prosperity of the global community.
Lawful Intercept and Monitoring (LIM)
Lawful Intercept and Monitoring, LIM for short, is a clandestine mass electronic surveillance program deployed by the Centre for Development of Telematics
(C-DOT), an Indian government-owned telecommunications technology development centre. LIM systems are used by the government to intercept records of voice, SMSs, GPRS data, details of a subscriber's application, and recharge history and call detail record (CDR) and monitor Internet traffic, emails, web-browsing, Skype, and any other Internet activity of Indian users.
National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) and Hyderabad Police Command-and-Control Centre (HPCCC)
India's proposed National Cyber Coordination Centre (NCCC) is a cyber security and e-surveillance initiative. Its goal is to screen communication metadata and coordinate other agencies' intelligence collection efforts. The NCCC could infringe on Indian people's privacy and civil freedoms in the lack of a legislative framework and parliamentary oversight. This project can be seen spreading its roots in Hyderabad in Telangana, the city with the greatest number of CCTV cameras. According to the report coming out Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), Amnesty International, and Article 19 collaborative project on surveillance states of India, it was found out that the Hyderabad government is building the country’s first-ever surveillance tower called Hyderabad Police Command and Control Centre (HPCCC). The HPCCC will collect and keep all personal information, digital transactions and CCTV footage in one place give the Hyderabad police an app that makes profiling of “suspicious individuals” easy and done in real-time.
“There is currently no legislation in place to protect the privacy of citizens – facial recognition is a harmful and invasive technology and it is imperative that Indian authorities immediately stop the use of this dangerous technology,” said Anushka Jain, Internet Freedom Foundation’s Associate Counsel for Surveillance & Transparency in the report.
The Pegasus Report
The Pegasus Report has brought the topic of privacy and monitoring back into the spotlight. The Pegasus Report is a detailed exploration of government surveillance of civilians in more than 50 nations. Amnesty International, Forbidden Stories, and a coalition of 17 media organisations from around the world are behind the investigations. The NSO Group, a private Israeli technology corporation to develop technology to prevent and investigate crime and terror, is at the heart of the crisis. As it turns out, the majority of governments, including India's, deny any involvement in the allegations. The rogue organisation helping nations spy on their citizens in the name of national security without any checks and balances or ethical and constitutional consideration should ring alarm bells.
The Pegasus report was the talk of Twitter when the report dropped but mainstream TV news channels just dismissed the report either as a non-issue or redirected their viewer’s attention to something frivolous. This spyware can snoop on three levels, according to the current findings: initial data extraction, passive monitoring, and active collecting. During the initial data extraction, data records such as SMS records, contacts, call logs, emails, messages, and browser history are transferred to the command-and-control server. The information might include everything from listening in on phone calls to pictures. The spyware can take pictures with the infected phone without the owner's consent.
The global market for surveillance
The market for social media surveillance has expanded, providing intelligence and law enforcement organisations with new tools for sifting through vast amounts of data. At least 40 of the 65 countries examined in Freedom on the Net 2019 Key Finding: Government’s harness big data for social media surveillance report by Freedom House have advanced social media monitoring strategies in place. Furthermore, governments are increasingly utilising them: in 15 of these countries, such programmes were either extended or started during the last year. Governments have effectively co-opted social media platforms, justifying their efforts in the name of boosting security, reducing disinformation, and ensuring public order. While these platforms pitch themselves as social connectors and community builders, state agencies in authoritarian countries see them as large repositories of speech and personal data that can be monitored, collected, and analysed to detect and crush the opposition.
Freedom House further states that China is a global leader in the development, use, and export of social media monitoring tools. Semptian, a Chinese company, claims that their Aegis surveillance system gives users "a complete view of the virtual world" and the ability to "keep and analyse endless data." The corporation claims to track over 200 million people in China, accounting for a quarter of the country's internet users. The company even sells a "national firewall" tool that imitates China's so-called Great Firewall, which regulates internet traffic.
If you have nothing to hide you should not worry about privacy
As long as state surveillance has existed, so have the arguments relating to privacy and agency of the self. This argument completely dismisses the fact it is equating privacy with secrecy, even though privacy is a far more nuanced concept. The "I have nothing to hide" argument, illustrates a widespread misunderstanding of the meaning and usefulness of the right to privacy. Only those who have something to hide or who have done something illegal are anxious about their privacy being invaded. If you have nothing to hide, no one can use knowledge about you against you. The argument goes on to say that a breach of your privacy should do you no harm. When our privacy is violated, we suffer some consequences. It's why we keep private journals or draw curtains in our homes or not live in glass houses.
Internationally, the right to privacy, whether in one's family, home or correspondence, has long been acknowledged. We don't want our neighbours or the government to know what goes on inside our houses or minds unless we agree to disclose such information. We value private places because we want to do and be as we choose, away from the prying eyes of others, not because something immoral or illegal is going on within our houses.
The "nothing to hide" argument creates a moral error regarding the kind of information individuals desire to keep private. Privacy refers to the ability to withhold information from people who do not need to know it. If we have “nothing to hide", we should not worry about government surveillance. An argument like this justifies mass surveillance that upends the long-standing principle of assumption of innocence until proven guilty.
The state's arguments against the acknowledgment of the fundamental right to privacy appear to have overlooked the numerous facets of privacy. We may have nothing to hide, but if the state's arguments are accepted, we will have a lot to be afraid of, because, big brother will always be watching over us not out of benevolence but with malice in mind.
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