Whenever it comes to
ministries to take a stand on crucial issues of public interest the ministries
ignore India's sovereignty and support foreign interests. So this time,
Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) behaved the same way and justified US
National Securtiy Agency's (NSA) snooping over Indian citizens.
With the
recent access by some media groups of documents provided by Mr. Snowden (a
whistleblower who revealed data mining story of NSA under PRISM project), it is
clear that India is among the top countries from which NSA is collecting
telephone records and internet data in bulk quantity. One can have idea with
the facts that in merely 30 days, billions of data pieces were picked up by NSA
from Indian citizens. Amazingly, in the overall list provided by Snowden, India
is the 5th largest target (with approx 6.3 billion bits) preceded by Egypt (7.6
billion bits) Jordan (12.7 billion bits) Pakistan (13.5 billion bits) and Iran
(more than 14 billion bits).
In
response to this, Minister of external affairs Mr. Salmaan Khurshid remarked,
"it is not actually snooping”. The NSA documents obtained by The Hindu
reveals that Boundless Informant not only keeps track of emails and calls
collected by the NSA, it is also used by the agency to give its managers
summaries of the intelligence it gathers worldwide, thus making it the
foundation of the global surveillance programs created by the world’s biggest
and most secretive intelligence agency.
But by
saying this, it is clear that the minister has no problem and has no concern
about the theft of data of Indian citizens by a foreign intelligence without
consent of the citizens and without any 'defined' motive.
This
'theft' by NSA is unethical, unconstitutional and illegal. It is because data
mining in quantity like millions and billions of data pieces and categorizing
these can be (mis)used in lot of ways. From the security concern to economical
hegemony, from the planning of diplomatic talks to war strategies, from the
trade of arms to bounding pressure over domestic and external affairs, from
affecting the corporate groups and their policies to disrupting press freedom,
anything can happen. And the most compromised is the Right to Privacy that a
citizen must have. From the data that is collected and called 'Metadata' , NSA
is able to see a person's mail records, telephone calls, even websites that
he/she visited.
The
question here is what is with MEA? is it serving people or foreign agencies?
India, which is dominated by rural, semi urban population of low and medium
economic status families, with low literacy and education ratio, with lot of
basic problems of food, water, land etc on one side and on the other is moving
along with globalization, infrastructure development, IT revolution that has
made a proportion of its citizens (specially youths) equipped with mobile
phones, email and facebook accounts, this is a threat for all its citizens.
With the geographical and strategic importance in terms of security features,
international diplomacy and with the preferable market with its high
population, India becomes a 'hot spot' for all external agencies. At the same
times, role of Indian citizens are limited in such important issues because of
their own domestic problems and therefore 'unawareness' of unavailability of
privacy and its consequences. However MEA has to attend it very seriously and
to take step against any such activity. Protecting the citizen's privacy is
obviously protecting the nation and its interests.
