Hi,
sahil साहिल: > Namaste everyone, > > I have few questions, please educate me on these: > > Why do we consider it as a bad approach that govt. is snooping on us? > Without it, how would our govt. come to know that who is bad (among others)? > If I know, I am not doing anything bad then why should I worry from govt. > snooping? 1) Can we trust the government itself? "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" which translates to "Who will guard the guards themselves?" Government itself is made up of people, even though, we can proudly say that we democratically elected the government, can we trust the government completely? The various scams of state governments and central governments give us a good reason why we cant trust those running the government. Also, a government in itself is transient, you never know what kind of future government can come. 2) Security of the data collected Its a common knowledge that when any riot happens, the organizers easily target people from specific communities thanks to data such as Voter's ID Card list etc available for that region. Hence even we can blindly trust the government, the fact that such a collated data exists, itself makes it a honeypot to attract bad elements in society to misuse the data. 3) Mass Surveillance vs targetted Surveillance Though there may be some strong reasons for government to do surveillance on specific individuals, there is very little rational to do mass surveillance. The very notion that everything you do or say is getting recorded will curtail freedom of expression. Everytime someone wants to express something little off the beat, he/she might have to take extreme caution and in many cases, people might not come forward at all to express. An analogy is imagine a light tower in central yard in a jail where prisoners cant see who is watching from the light tower. Since they know that there is 24 hours watch on it, the notion that someone there is watching itself creates fear in them to try anything to escape. Even in case of targetted surveillance, we know how Gujrat government 'allegedly' misused the state machinery to snoop on an individual. So even having means to do targetted surveillance needs to have very stringent checks and balances. 4) Eternity of the data collected The idea that the data collected will exist years later is also something to worry about. A simple example is what happened with Sec 377. When the high court declared it unconstitutional in 2009, many people came forward expressing their true orientation. However when Supreme Court overturned the HC decision, it left all the people who had come forward openly to be sitting ducks for harassment by the authorities. 5) Option to opt-out Like in case of Aadhar which looks like will stay in India now that the new government also seem to be comfortable with it, there is little option for those who value their privacy to opt-out of these schemes. In India, since government does provide for lot of amenities, Maria Xynou who is working on the Surveillance in India in CIS-India had mentioned that there is a attitude amongst us to look at government like a parent who takes care of us. Hence this attitude makes us put lot of trust in the government which is dangerous. You can watch her talk at CCC on Indian Surveillance State here, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A91idibgT0 Regards, Vignesh Prabhu http://fsmk.org ------------------------ Powered by BigRock.com _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc ILUGC Mailing List Guidelines: http://ilugc.in/mailinglist-guidelines
