Privacy: Big brother knows everything

There has been much animated discussion about the right to privacy these days. Of course, we have a right to privacy. There can be no question about that. But the problem now is that the march technology has made much of that right quite moot. In 2017, the number of mobile phone users is forecast to reach 4.77 billion. In 2016, an estimated 62.9 per cent of the population worldwide already owned a mobile phone. Of these, India and China alone accounted for about 2.5 billion. The United States followed with 327 million and a dysfunctional country like Pakistan had 125 million. Even in countries with little semblance of a government or a state, like Somalia and Afghanistan or Mali or Libya, there are functioning mobile phone networks. There are almost four billion Internet users world over now. Of these 44.8 per cent were in Asia, 21.5 per cent in Europe and 11.4 per cent in all of North America.

Quite clearly, we are talking and communicating more with each other. Billions of messages flit through the ether each day. That’s why this is called the communications era. This has led to new forms of business and new forms of doing business. With that small gizmo in your hand, that often nowadays packs more power than a bank of PC’s half a dozen years ago, you can buy an airline ticket in another continent or send flowers to a special friend in yet another one.

There can be other less benign uses also. A terrorist can detonate a bomb in a distant country with a mobile phone call. Criminals can orchestrate their activities without moving from their lairs. This new technology has posed many new challenges to the modern state, and like before every modern state has to defend itself against some enemy or the other. But states with the technical means and the financial resources have, as always, risen to the challenges, and we see this in action in a variety of ways. It also poses new challenges to the law-abiding citizens right to privacy.

Since data exchanged on cellular and Internet networks fly through the ether, they are easier to net by electronic interception. But these nets catch them in huge numbers. This is where the supercomputers come in. The messages that are netted every moment are run through sieves of sophisticated and complex computer programs that can simultaneously decode, detect and unravel, and by further analysing the incoming and outgoing patterns of calls and data transfers for the sending and receiving terminals or phones, can with a fair probability of accuracy tell the agency seeking information about what is going on and who is up to what?

The problem is that since this information also goes through the mobile phone network and Internet Service Providers, and the data actually gets decoded from electronic blips into voice and digital data, the private players too gain access to such information. A few years ago we had the case of the infamous Amar Singh CDs, which titillated so many with its graphic content and lowbrow conversations. Then we had the episode of the Radia tapes where we were privy to the machinations of the Tata’s corporate lobbyist in the national capital fixing policy, positioning ministers and string pulling media stars. But more usefully than this, a mobile phone, by nature of its technology, is also a personalised GPS indicator. It tells them where that phone is at any instant it is on. The Al Qaeda terrorist and US citizen Anwar el-Awlaki was blasted by a Hellfire missile fired from a CIA Predator drone flying over Yemen with the co-ordinates provided by Awlaki’s mobile phone.

Since a mobile phone is usually with you it tells the network (and other interested parties) where you are or were, and even where you are headed. If you are on a certain street, since it reveals where exactly you are and the direction of your movement, it can tell you where the next pizza place is or where and what is on sale. This is also breach of privacy, but often useful to you. But if you are up to no-good, then a switched on mobile phone is a certain giveaway. That’s what gave away Osama bin Laden in the end. A momentary indiscretion by a trusted courier and bodyguard and a name gleaned from a long ago water-boarding session was all it took.

Most of the credit for this must go to the secretive US intelligence gathering organisation, the National Security Agency. The NSA’s eavesdropping mission includes radio broadcasting, both from various organisations and individuals, the Internet, telephone calls, and other intercepted forms of communication.

The NSA is all hi-tech. It collects intelligence from four geostationary satellites. These satellites track and monitor millions of conversations and the NSA’s banks of high speed supercomputers process all these messages for certain phrases and patterns of conversations to decide if the persons at either end were worthy of further interest. The numbers these frequently connected up with would then again attract attention. In this manner linkages can be made.

NSA has installations in several US states and from them routinely intercepts electronic data from Europe, West Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The US regularly and routinely shares this information with friendly governments all over the world. While Russian and Chinese SIGINT capabilities are not quite as wide and capable as the US NIP, they too have a capability to pry on people. Russia has shown what it is capable of when it intervened in the US presidential elections.

According to the Washington Post, “every day, collection systems at the NSA intercept and store billions of emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases.” Because of its listening task, NSA/CSS has been heavily involved in cryptanalytic research, continuing the work of predecessor agencies which had broken many World War II codes and ciphers. The NSA and CIA together comprise the greatest intelligence gathering effort in the world. The human and financial resources deployed are quite extraordinary. The overall US National Intelligence Program has a budget of $80 billion in 2015. Clearly, the US is more determined than ever never to be caught unawares like 9/11.