Centre for Internet and Society

The Fight for Digital Sovereignty

sunil — 2013-10-25T07:29:22Z

It is time to incorporate free software principles to address the issue of privacy. Thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden, a former contractor to the United States (US) National Security Agency (NSA) who leaked secrets about the agency’s surveillance programmes, a 24-year-old movement aimed at protecting the rights of software users and developers has got some fresh attention from policymakers.

The article was published in the Economic & Political Weekly, Vol-XLVIII No. 42, October 19, 2013

The free and open source software movement (often collectively labelled as FOSS or sometimes FLOSS, with the “l” standing for “libre”) guarantees four freedoms through a copyright licence – the freedom to use for any purpose, the freedom to study the code, the freedom to modify it and the freedom to distribute the modified code gratis or for a fee. Free software principles have permeated the world in the form of movements around open standards, open content, open access and open data. The second freedom is the most critical in an open society. Privacy, security and integrity are best achieved through the transparency guaranteed by free software rather than the opacity of proprietary software.

Free software is directly useful in deciding on the software required for your device operating system and applications. NSA’s surveillance programme covered operating system vendors like Microsoft and Apple, and application vendors like Skype. The concerns raised by such surveillance programmes are best addressed by shifting to free software. Increasingly, this is possible on mobile devices because of the availability of Android derivatives that keep Google’s nose out of your business and on other personal computing devices through GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu. Ideally, this should be accomplished by a mandate for government and public infrastructure in specific areas where free software alternatives are on par with proprietary competitors. Two other policy options remain outside procurement policies for hardware – code escrow and independent audits. Firms that are willing to share code with the government should be preferred over those that do not, thereby encouraging proprietary software companies to provide for the second freedom in free software within a limited context. Code escrow could improve the quality of the independent audit.

Unfortunately, open hardware based on free software principles is still a fringe phenomenon in terms of market share. The Indian government cannot afford bans on foreign products, unlike the intelligence and military of Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, which recently prohibited the use of Lenovo machines in “secret” and “top secret” networks. Last October, the US government banned US telecos from using equipment from Huawei and ZTE. Both these bans are not based on any credible public evidence regarding back doors in any of the products manufactured by these Chinese companies. The Indian government, using funds like the Universal Service Obligation Fund, should support competitive research to reverse-engineer and analyse all foreign and indigenous hardware to ensure that there is no national security threat or infringement on the individual’s right to privacy. One example would be a research project to determine whether China-manufactured phones call home when they are used on Indian telecom networks.

Cloud and other online services run by corporations could also completely undermine privacy and security. This again can be partially addressed through the transparency enabled by free software and open standards. To begin with, the government must ban the use of Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc, for official purposes by those in public office, law enforcement and the military, while simultaneously mandating the use of cryptography for all sensitive material and communication. It should not, however, mandate the use of National Informatics Centre (NIC) infrastructure as it may be a single point of failure; instead, a variety of open-standards-compliant and free-software-based infrastructure for all public sector information communication technology (ICT) requirements should be encouraged. This procurement bias will result in the growth of domestic server administration and security competence, thus creating and contributing towards the establishment of a market for affordable privacy and security-enhanced services that ordinary citizens and private sector organisations can access.

The end objective through means such as free software, open hardware, code escrow and independent audits is sovereignty over software, hardware, cloud and network infrastructure. However, the state, the private sector, the consumer and the citizen may disagree on the details. Apart from law enforcement and national security concerns that may require targeted surveillance, there are other occasions when technological possibilities may have to be curtailed through policy to protect human rights and the public interest. For example, to implement the internationally accepted privacy principle of notice on electronic recording devices, some jurisdictions may require that video recorders display a blinking red light and that digital cameras make an audible click sound just like analog cameras. This was first initiated in South Korea to reduce the incidence of “upskirt photography”. This type of law may become more commonplace when technologies like Google Glass become more popular. In other words, absolute digital sovereignty may need to be curtailed in order to protect human rights in certain circumstances. But code could be used to resist regulation through law, thereby converting both the software and hardware layers of devices and networks into a battleground for sovereignty between the free software hacker and the state.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/epw-vol-xlviii-42-october-19-2013-sunil-abraham-the-fight-for-digital-sovereignty

The Design & Technology behind India’s Surveillance Programmes

udbhav — 2017-01-20T15:56:44Z

There has been an exponential growth in the pervasive presence of technology in the daily lives of an average Indian citizen over the past few years. While leading to manifold increase in convenience and connectivity, these technologies also allow for far greater potential for surveillance by state actors.

While the legal and policy avenues of state surveillance in India have been analysed by various organisations, there is very little available information about the technology and infrastructure used to carry out this surveillance. This appears to be largely, according to the government, due to reasons of national security and sovereignty.^[1] This blog post will attempt to paint a picture of the technological infrastructure being used to carry out state surveillance in India.

Background
The revelations by Edward Snowden about mass surveillance in mid-2013 led to an explosion of journalistic interest in surveillance and user privacy in India.^[2] The reports and coverage from this period, leading up to early 2015, serve as the main authority for the information presented in this blog post. The lack of information from official government sources as well as decreasing public spotlight on surveillance since that point of time generally have both led to little or no new information turning up about India’s surveillance regime since this period. However, given the long term nature of these programmes and the vast amounts of time it takes to set them up, it is fairly certain that the programmes detailed below are still the primary bedrock of state surveillance in the country, albeit having become operational and inter-connected only in the past 2 years.

The technology being used to carry out surveillance in India over the past 5 years is largely an upgraded, centralised and substantially more powerful version of the surveillance techniques followed in India since the advent of telegraph and telephone lines: the tapping & recording of information in transit.^[3] The fact that all the modern surveillance programmes detailed below have not required any new legislation, law, amendment or policy that was not already in force prior to 2008 is the most telling example of this fact. The legal and policy implication of the programmes illustrated below have been covered in previous articles by the Centre for Internet & Society which can be found here,^[4] here^[5] and here.^[6] Therefore, this post will solely concentrate on the technological design and infrastructure being used to carry out surveillance along with any new developments in this field that the three source mentioned would not have covered from a technological perspective.

The Technology Infrastructure behind State Surveillance in India

The programmes of the Indian Government (in public knowledge) that are being used to carry out state surveillance are broadly eight in number. These exclude specific surveillance technology being used by independent arms of the government, which will be covered in the next section of this post. Many of the programmes listed below have overlapping jurisdictions and in some instances are cross-linked with each other to provide greater coverage:

Central Monitoring System (CMS)
National Intelligence Grid (NAT-GRID)
Lawful Intercept And Monitoring Project (LIM)
Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS)
Network Traffic Analysis System (NETRA)
New Media Wing (Bureau of New and Concurrent Media)

The post will look at the technological underpinning of each of these programmes and their operational capabilities, both in theory and practice.

Central Monitoring System (CMS)

The Central Monitoring System (CMS) is the premier mass surveillance programme of the Indian Government, which has been in the planning stages since 2008^[7] Its primary goal is to replace the current on-demand availability of analog and digital data from service providers with a “central and direct” access which involves no third party between the captured information and the government authorities.^[8] While the system is currently operated by the Centre for Development of Telematics, the unreleased three-stage plan envisages a centralised location (physically and legally) to govern the programme. The CMS is primarily operated by Telecom Enforcement and Resource Monitoring Cell (TERM) within the Department of Telecom, which also has a larger mandate of ensuring radiation safety and spectrum compliance.

The technological infrastructure behind the CMS largely consists of Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in India being mandated to integrate Interception Store & Forward (ISF) servers with their Lawful Interception Systems required by their licences. Once these ISF servers are installed they are then connected to the Regional Monitoring Centres (RMC) of the CMS, setup according to geographical locations and population. Finally, Regional Monitoring Centre (RMC) in India is connected to the Central Monitoring System (CMS) itself, essentially allowing the collection, storage, access and analysis of data collected from all across the country in a centralised manner. The data collected by the CMS includes voice calls, SMS, MMS, fax communications on landlines, CDMA, video calls, GSM and even general, unencrypted data travelling across the internet using the standard IP/TCP Protocol.^[9]

With regard to the analysis of this data, Call Details Records (CDR) analysis, data mining, machine learning and predictive algorithms have been allegedly implemented in various degrees across this network.^[10] This allows state actors to pre-emptively gather and collect a vast amount of information from across the country, perform analysis on this data and then possibly even take action on the basis of this information by directly approaching the entity (currently the TERM under C-DOT) operating the system. ^[11] The system has reached full functionality in mid 2016, with over 22 Regional Monitoring Centres functional and the system itself being ‘switched on’ post trials in gradual phases.^[12]

National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID)

The National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) is a semi-functional^[13] integrated intelligence grid that links the stored records and databases of several government entities in order to collect data, decipher trends and provide real time (sometimes even predictive) analysis of data gathered across law enforcement, espionage and military agencies. The programme intends to provide 11 security agencies real-time access to 21 citizen data sources to track terror activities across the country. The citizen data sources include bank account details, telephone records, passport data and vehicle registration details, the National Population Register (NPR), the Immigration, Visa, Foreigners Registration and Tracking System (IVFRT), among other types of data, all of which are already present within various government records across the country.^[14]

Data mining and analytics are used to process the huge volumes of data generated from the 21 data sources so as to analyse events, match patterns and track suspects, with big data analytics^[15] being the primary tool to effectively utilise the project, which was founded to prevent another instance of the September, 2011 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. The list of agencies that will have access to this data collection and analytics platform are the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), Enforcement Directorate (ED), Intelligence Bureau (IB), Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB), National Investigation Agency (NIA), Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the Military Intelligence of Assam , Jammu and Kashmir regions and finally the Home Ministry itself.^[16]

As of late 2015, the project has remained stuck because of bureaucratic red tape, with even the first phase of the four stage project not complete. The primary reason for this is the change of governments in 2014, along with apprehensions about breach of security and misuse of information from agencies such as the IB, R&AW, CBI, and CBDT, etc.^[17] However, the office of the NATGRID is now under construction in South Delhi and while the agency claims an exemption under the RTI Act as a Schedule II Organisation, its scope and operational reach have only increased with each passing year.

Lawful Intercept And Monitoring Project

Lawful Intercept and Monitoring (LIM), is a secret mass electronic surveillance program operated by the Government of India for monitoring Internet traffic, communications, web-browsing and all other forms of Internet data. It is primarily run by the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) in the Ministry of Telecom since 2011.^[18]

The LIM Programme consists of installing interception, monitoring and storage programmes at international gateways, internet exchange hubs as well as ISP nodes across the country. This is done independent of ISPs, with the entire hardware and software apparatus being operated by the government. The hardware is installed between the Internet Edge Router (PE) and the core network, allowing for direct access to all traffic flowing through the ISP. It is the primary programme for internet traffic surveillance in India, allowing indiscriminate monitoring of all traffic passing through the ISP for as long as the government desires, without any oversight of courts and sometimes without the knowledge of ISPs.^[19] One of the most potent capabilities of the LIM Project are live, automated keyword searches which allow the government to track all the information passing through the internet pipe being surveilled for certain key phrases in both in text as well in audio. Once these key phrases are successfully matched to the data travelling through the pipe using advanced search algorithms developed uniquely for the project, the system has various automatic routines which range from targeted surveillance on the source of the data to raising an alarm with the appropriate authorities.

LIM systems are often also operated by the ISPs themselves, on behalf of the government. They operate the device, including hardware upkeep, only to provide direct access to government agencies upon requests. Reports have stated that the legal procedures laid down in law (including nodal officers and formal requests for information) are rarely followed^[20] in both these cases, allowing unfettered access to petabytes of user data on a daily basis through these programmes.

Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS)

The Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & System (CCTNS) is a planned network that allows for the digital collection, storage, retrieval, analysis, transfer and sharing of information relating to crimes and criminals across India.^[21] It is supposed to primarily operate at two levels, one between police stations and the second being between the various governance structures around crime detection and solving around the country, with access also being provided to intelligence and national security agencies.^[22]

CCTNS aims to integrate all the necessary data and records surrounding a crime (including past records) into a Core Application Software (CAS) that has been developed by Wipro.^[23] The software includes the ability to digitise FIR registration, investigation and charge sheets along with the ability to set up a centralised citizen portal to interact with relevant information. This project aims to use this CAS interface across 15, 000 police stations in the country, with up to 5, 000 additional deployments. The project has been planned since 2009, with the first complete statewide implementation going live only in August 2016 in Maharashtra. ^[24]

While seemingly harmless at face value, the project’s true power lies in two main possible uses. The first being its ability to profile individuals using their past conduct, which now can include all stages of an investigation and not just a conviction by a court of law, which has massive privacy concerns. The second harm is the notion that the CCTNS database will not be an isolated one but will be connected to the NATGRID and other such databases operated by organisations such as the National Crime Records Bureau, which will allow the information present in the CCTNS to be leveraged into carrying out more invasive surveillance of the public at large.^[25]

Network Traffic Analysis System (NETRA)

NETRA (NEtwork TRaffic Analysis) is a real time surveillance software developed by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) at the Defence Research and Development Organisation. (DRDO) The software has apparently been fully functional since early 2014 and is primarily used by Indian Spy agencies, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) with some capacity being reserved for domestic agencies under the Home Ministry.

The software is meant to monitor Internet traffic on a real time basis using both voice and textual forms of data communication, especially social media, communication services and web browsing. Each agency was initially allocated 1000 nodes running NETRA, with each node having a capacity to analyse 300GB of information per second, giving each agency a capacity of around 300 TB of information processing per second.^[26] This capacity is largely available only to agencies dealing with External threats, with domestic agencies being allocated far lower capacities, depending on demand. The software itself is mobile and in the presence of sufficient hardware capacity, nothing prevents the software from being used in the CMS, the NATGRID or LIM operations.

There has been a sharp and sudden absence of public domain information regarding the software since 2014, making any statements about its current form or evolution mere conjecture.

Analysis of the Collective Data

Independent of the capacity of such programmes, their real world operations work in a largely similar manner to mass surveillance programmes in the rest of the world, with a majority of the capacity being focused on decryption and storage of data with basic rudimentary data analytics.^[27] Keyword searches for hot words like 'attack', 'bomb', 'blast' or 'kill' in the various communication stream in real time are the only real capabilities of the system that have been discussed in the public domain,^[28] which along with the limited capacity of such programmes^[29] (300 TB) is indicative of basic level of analysis that is carried on captured data. Any additional details about the technical details about how India’s surveillance programmes use their captured data is absent from the public domain but they can presumed, at best, to operate with similar standards as global practices.^[30]

Capacitative Global Comparison

As can be seen from the post so far, India’s surveillance programmes have remarkably little information about them in the public domain, from a technical operation or infrastructure perspective. In fact, post late 2014, there is a stark lack of information about any developments in the mass surveillance field. All of the information that is available about the technical capabilities of the CMS, NATGRID or LIM is either antiquated (pre 2014) or is about (comparatively) mundane details like headquarter construction clearances.^[31] Whether this is a result of the general reduction in the attention towards mass surveillance by the public and the media^[32] or is the result of actions taken by the government under the “national security” grounds under as the Official Secrets Act, 1923^[33] can only be conjecture.

However, given the information available (mentioned previously in this article) a comparative points to the rather lopsided position in comparison to international mass surveillance performance. While the legal provisions in India regarding surveillance programmes are among the most wide ranging, discretionary and opaque in the world^[34] their technical capabilities seem to be anarchic in comparison to modern standards. The only real comparative that can be used is public reporting surrounding the DRDO NETRA project around 2012 and 2013. The government held a competition between the DRDO’s internally developed software “Netra” and NTRO’s “Vishwarupal” which was developed in collaboration with Paladion Networks.^[35] The winning software, NETRA, was said to have a capacity of 300 GB per node, with a total of 1000 sanctioned nodes.^[36] This capacity of 300 TB for the entire system, while seemingly powerful, is a miniscule fragment of 83 Petabytes traffic that is predicted to generated in India per day.^[37] In comparison, the PRISM programme run by the National Security Agency in 2013 (the same time that the NETRA was tested) has a capacity of over 5 trillion gigabytes of storage^[38], many magnitudes greater than the capacity of the DRDO software. Similar statistics can be seen from the various other programmes of NSA and the Five Eyes alliance,^[39] all of which operated at far greater capacities^[40] and were held to be minimally effective.^[41] The questions this poses of the effectiveness, reliance and proportionality of the Indian surveillance programme can never truly be answered due to the lack of information surrounding capacity and technology of the Indian surveillance programmes, as highlighted in the article. With regard to criminal databases used in surveillance, such as the NATGRID, equivalent systems both domestically (especially in the USA) and internationally (such as the one run by the Interpol)^[42] are impossible due to the NATGRID not even being fully operational yet.^[43]

Conclusion

Even if we were to ignore the issues in principle with mass surveillance, the pervasive, largely unregulated and mass scale surveillance being carried in India using the tools and technologies detailed above have various technical and policy failings. It is imperative that transparency, accountability and legal scrutiny be made an integral part of the security apparatus in India. The risks of security breaches, politically motivated actions and foreign state hacking only increase with the absence of public accountability mechanisms. Further, opening up the technologies used for these operations to regular security audits will also improve their resilience to such attacks.

^[1] http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-constitutionality-of-indian-surveillance-law

^[2] http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/how-surveillance-works-in-india/

^[3] https://www.privacyinternational.org/node/818

^[4] http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/state-of-cyber-security-and-surveillance-in-india.pdf

^[5] http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/security-surveillance-and-data-sharing.pdf

^[6] http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/paper-thin-safeguards.pdf

^[7] http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=54679 & http://www.dot.gov.in/sites/default/files/English%20annual%20report%202007-08_0.pdf

^[8] http://ijlt.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/IJLT-Volume-10.41-62.pdf

^[9] http://www.thehindu.com/scitech/technology/in-the-dark-about-indias-prism/article4817903.ece

^[10] http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/india-centralmonitoring-system-something-to-worry-about

^[11] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/pages/attachments/2016/07/08/ind195494.e.pdf

^[12] http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/security-risk/indian-lawful-interception-data-centers-are-complete/94053.fullarticle

^[13] http://natgrid.attendance.gov.in/ [Attendace records at the NATGRID Office!]

^[14] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-09-10/news/41938113_1_executive-order-nationalintelligence-grid-databases

^[15] http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/natgrid-to-use-big-data-analytics-to-track-suspects-1

^[16] http://sflc.in/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/SFLC-FINAL-SURVEILLANCE-REPORT.pdf

^[17] http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/natgrid-gets-green-nod-but-hurdles-remain/1/543087.html

^[18] http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-violates-privacy-safeguards-to-secretly-monitor-internet-traffic/article5107682.ece

^[19] ibid

^[20] http://www.thehoot.org/story_popup/no-escaping-the-surveillance-state-8742

^[21] http://ncrb.gov.in/BureauDivisions/CCTNS/cctns.htm

^[22] ibid

^[23] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/ncrb-to-connect-police-stations-and-crime-data-across-country-in-6-months/articleshow/45029398.cms

^[24] http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/crime-criminal-tracking-network-system/1/744164.html

^[25] http://www.dailypioneer.com/nation/govt-cctns-to-be-operational-by-2017.html

^[26] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-03-10/news/31143069_1_scanning-internet-monitoring-system-internet-data

^[27] Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, consequences, critique: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2053951714541861

^[28] http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/info-tech/article2978636.ece

^[29] See previous section in the article “NTRO”

^[30] Van Dijck, José. "Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology." Surveillance & Society 12.2 (2014): 197.

^[31] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-3353230/Nat-Grid-knots-India-s-delayed-counter-terror-programme-gets-approval-green-body-red-tape-stall-further.html

^[32] http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/5/186025-privacy-behaviors-after-snowden/fulltext

^[33] https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2015/india

^[34] http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2014/06/05/indias-snooping-and-snowden/

^[35] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-03-10/news/31143069_1_scanning-internet-monitoring-system-internet-data

^[36] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/government-to-launch-netra-for-internet-surveillance/articleshow/27438893.cms

^[37] http://trak.in/internet/indian-internet-traffic-8tbps-2017/

^[38] http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21579473-americas-national-security-agency-collects-more-information-most-people-thought-will

^[39] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/07/the-fact-that-mass-surveillance-doesnt-keep-us-safe-goes-mainstream.html

^[40] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/

^[41] Supra Note 35

^[42] http://www.papillonfoundation.org/information/global-crime-database/

^[43] http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/editorial/Revive-NATGRID-with-safeguards/article13975243.ece

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-design-technology-behind-india2019s-surveillance-programmes

The Constitutionality of Indian Surveillance Law: Public Emergency as a Condition Precedent for Intercepting Communications

bedaavyasa — 2014-08-04T04:52:42Z

Bedavyasa Mohanty analyses the nuances of interception of communications under the Indian Telegraph Act and the Indian Post Office Act. In this post he explores the historical bases of surveillance law in India and examines whether the administrative powers of intercepting communications are Constitutionally compatible.

Introduction

State authorised surveillance in India derives its basis from two colonial legislations; §26 of the Indian Post Office Act, 1898 and §5 of the Telegraph Act, 1885 (hereinafter the Act) provide for the interception of postal articles[1] and messages transmitted via telegraph[2] respectively. Both of these sections, which are analogous, provide that the powers laid down therein can only be invoked on the occurrence of a public emergency or in the interest of public safety. The task of issuing orders for interception of communications is vested in an officer authorised by the Central or the State government. This blog examines whether the preconditions set by the legislature for allowing interception act as adequate safeguards. The second part of the blog analyses the limits of discretionary power given to such authorised officers to intercept and detain communications.

Surveillance by law enforcement agencies constitutes a breach of a citizen’s Fundamental Rights of privacy and the Freedom of Speech and Expression. It must therefore be justified against compelling arguments against violations of civil rights. Right to privacy in India has long been considered too ‘broad and moralistic’[3] to be defined judicially. The judiciary, though, has been careful enough to not assign an unbound interpretation to it. It has recognised that the breach of privacy has to be balanced against a compelling public interest [4] and has to be decided on a careful examination of the facts of a certain case. In the same breath, Indian courts have also legitimised surveillance by the state as long as such surveillance is not illegal or unobtrusive and is within bounds [5]. While determining what constitutes legal surveillance, courts have rejected “prior judicial scrutiny” as a mandatory requirement and have held that administrative safeguards are sufficient to legitimise an act of surveillance. [6]

Conditions Precedent for Ordering Interception

§§5(2) of the Telegraph Act and 26(2) of the Indian Post Office Act outline a two tiered test to be satisfied before the interception of telegraphs or postal articles. The first tier consists of sine qua nons in the form of an “occurrence of public emergency” or “in the interests of public safety.” The second set of requirements under the provisions is “the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of an offence.” While vesting the power of interception in administrative officials, the sections contemplate a legal fiction where a public emergency exists and it is in the interest of sovereignty, integrity, security of the state or for the maintenance of public order/ friendly relations with foreign states. The term “public emergency,” however, has not been clearly defined by the legislature or by the courts. It thus vests arbitrary powers in a delegated official to order the interception of communication violating one’s Fundamental Rights.

Tracing the History of the Expression “Public Emergency”

The origins of the laws governing interception can be traced back to English laws of the late 19th Century; specifically one that imposed a penalty on a postal officer who delayed or intercepted a postal article.[7] This law guided the drafting of the Indian Telegraph Act in 1885 that legitimised interception of communications by the state. The expression “public emergency” appeared in the original Telegraph Act of 1885 and has been adopted in that form in all subsequent renderings of provisions relating to interception. Despite the contentious and vague nature of the expression, no consensus regarding its interpretation seems to have been arrived at. One of the first post-independence analyses of this provision was undertaken by the Law Commission in 1968. The 38th Law Commission in its report on the Indian Post Office Act, raised concerns about the constitutionality of the expression. The Law Commission was of the opinion that the term not having been defined in the constitution cannot serve as a reasonable ground for suspension of Fundamental Rights.[8] It further urged that a state of public emergency must be of such a nature that it is not secretive and is apparent to a reasonable man.[9] It thus challenged the operation of the act in its then current form where the determination of public emergency is the discretion of a delegated administrative official. The Commission, in conclusion, implored the legislature to amend the laws relating to interception to bring them in line with the Constitution. This led to the Telegraph (Amendment) Act of 1981. Questions regarding the true meaning of the expression and its potential misuse were brought up in both houses of the Parliament during passing of the amendment. The Law Ministry, however, did not issue any additional clarifications regarding the terms used in the Act. Instead, the Government claimed that the expressions used in the Act are “exactly those that are used in the Constitution.” [10] It may be of interest to note here that the Constitution of India, neither uses nor defines the term “public emergency.” Naturally, it is not contemplated as a ground for reasonably restricting Fundamental Rights provided under Article 19(1). [11] Similarly, concerns regarding the potential misuse of the powers were defended with the logically incompatible and factually inaccurate position that the law had not been misused in the past.[12]

Locating “Public Emergency” within a Proclamation of Emergency under the Constitution (?)

Public emergency in not equivalent to a proclamation of emergency under Article 352 of the Constitution simply because it was first used in legislations over six decades before the drafting of the Indian Constitution began. Besides, orders for interception of communications have also been passed when the state was not under a proclamation of emergency. Moreover, public emergency is not the only prerequisite prescribed under the Act. §5(2) states that an order for interception can be passed either on the occurrence of public emergency or in the interest of public safety. Therefore, the thresholds for the satisfaction of both have to be similar or comparable. If the threshold for the satisfaction of public emergency is understood to be as high as a proclamation of emergency then any order for interception can be passed easily under the guise of public safety. The public emergency condition will then be rendered redundant. Public emergency is therefore a condition that is separate from a proclamation of emergency.

In a similar vein the Supreme Court has also clarified[13] that terms like “public emergency” and “any emergency,” when used as statutory prerequisites, refer to the occurrence of different kinds of events. These terms cannot be equated with one another merely on the basis of the commonality of one word.

The Supreme Court in Hukam Chand v. Union of India,[14] correctly stated that the terms public emergency and public safety must “take colour from each other.” However, the court erred in defining public emergency as a situation that “raises problems concerning the interest of the public safety, the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or the prevention of incitement to the commission of an offence.” This cyclic definition does not lend any clarity to the interpretive murk surrounding the term. The Act envisages public emergency as a sine qua non that must exist prior to a determination that there is a threat to public order and sovereignty and integrity of the state. The court’s interpretation on the other hand would suggest that a state of public emergency can be said to exist only when public order, sovereignty and integrity of the state are already threatened. Therefore, while conditions precedent exist for the exercise of powers under §5(2) of the Act, there are no objective standards against which they are to be tested.

Interpretation of Threshold Requirements

A similar question arose before the House of Lords in Liversidge v. Anderson.[15] The case examined the vires of an Act that vested an administrative authority with the conditional power to detain a person if there was reasonable cause to believe that the person was of hostile origin. Therein, Lord Atkin dissenting with the majority opinion stated in no unclear terms that power vested in the secretary of state was conditional and not absolute. When a conditional authority is vested in an administrative official but there aren’t any prescriptive guidelines for the determination of the preconditions, then the statute has the effect of vesting an absolute power in a delegated official. This view was also upheld by the Supreme Court in State of Madhya Pradesh v. Baldeo Prasad.[16] The court was of the opinion that a statute must not only provide adequate safeguards for the protection of innocent citizens but also require the administrative authority to be satisfied as to the existence of the conditions precedent laid down in the statute before making an order. If the statute failed to do so in respect of any condition precedent then the law suffered from an infirmity and was liable to be struck down as invalid.[17] The question of the existence of public emergency, therefore being left to the sole determination of an administrative official is an absolute and arbitrary power and is ultra vires the Constitution

Interestingly, in its original unamended form, §5 contained a provisio stating that a determination of public emergency was the sole authority of the secretary of state and such a finding could not be challenged before a court of law. It is this provision that the government repealed through the Telegraph (Amendment) Act of 1981 to bring it in line with Constitutional principles. The preceding discussion shows that the amendment did not have the effect of rectifying the law’s constitutional infirmities. Nonetheless, the original Telegraph Act and its subsequent amendment are vital for understanding the compatibility of surveillance standards with the Constitutional principles. The draconian provisio in the original act vesting absolute powers in an administrative official illustrates that the legislative intent behind the drafting of a 130 year law cannot be relied on in today’s context. Vague terms like public emergency that have been thoughtlessly adopted from a draconian law find no place in a state that seeks to guarantee to its citizens rights of free speech and expression.

Conclusion

Interception of communications under the Telegraph Act and the Indian Post office act violate not only one’s privacy but also one’s freedom of speech and expression. Besides, orders for the tapping of telephones violate not only the privacy of the individual in question but also that of the person he/she is communicating with. Considering the serious nature of this breach it is absolutely necessary that the powers enabling such interception are not only constitutionally authorised but also adequately safeguarded. The Fundamental Rights declared by Article 19(1) cannot be curtailed on any ground outside the relevant provisions of Cls. 2-6.[18] The restrictive clauses in Cls. (2)-(6) of Article 19 are exhaustive and are to be strictly construed.[19] Public emergency is not one of the conditions enumerated under Article 19 for curtailing fundamental freedoms. Moreover, it lacks adequate safeguards by vesting absolute discretionary power in a non-judicial administrative authority. Even if one were to ignore the massive potential for misuse of these powers, it is difficult to conceive that the interception provisions would stand a scrutiny of constitutionality.

Over the course of the last few years, India has been dangerously toeing the line that keeps it from turning into a totalitarian surveillance state. [20] In 2011, India was the third most intrusive state[21] with 1,699 requests for removal made to Google; in 2012 that number increased to 2529[22]. The media is abuzz with reports about the Intelligence Bureau wanting Internet Service Providers to log all customer details [23] and random citizens being videotaped by the Delhi Police for “looking suspicious.” It becomes essential under these circumstances to question where the state’s power ends and a citizens’ privacy begins. Most of the information regarding projects like the CMS and the CCTNS is murky and unconfirmed. But under the pretext of national security, government officials have refused to divulge any information regarding the kind of information included within these systems and whether any accountability measures exist. For instance, there have been conflicting opinions from various ministers regarding whether the internet would also be under the supervision of the CMS [24]. Even more importantly, citizens are unaware of what rights and remedies are available to them in instances of violation of their privacy.

The intelligence agencies that have been tasked with handling information collected under these systems have not been created under any legislation and therefore not subject to any parliamentary oversight. Attempts like the Intelligence Services (Powers and Regulation) Bill, 2011 have been shelved and not revisited since their introduction. The intelligence agencies that have been created through executive orders enjoy vast and unbridled powers that make them accountable to no one[25]. Before, vesting the Indian law enforcement agencies with sensitive information that can be so readily misused it is essential to ensure that a mechanism to check the use and misuse of that power exists. A three judge bench of the Supreme Court has recently decided to entertain a Public Interest Litigation aimed at subjecting the intelligence agencies to auditing by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India. But the PIL even if successful will still only manage to scratch the surface of all the wide and unbridled powers enjoyed by the Indian intelligence agencies. The question of the constitutionality of interception powers, however, has not been subjected to as much scrutiny as is necessary. Especially at a time when the government has been rumoured to have already obtained the capability for mass dragnet surveillance such a determination by the Indian courts cannot come soon enough.

[1] Indian Post Office Act, 1898, § 26

[2] Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 § 5(2)

[3] PUCL v. Union of India, AIR 1997 SC 568

[4] Govind vs. State of Madhya Pradesh, (1975) 2 SCC 148

[5] Malak Singh vs. State Of Punjab & Haryana, AIR 1981 SC 760

[6] Supra note 3

[7] Law Commission, Indian Post Office Act, 1898 (38^th Law Commission Report) para 84

[8] ibid

[9] id

[10] Lok Sabha Debates , Minister of Communications, Shri H.N. Bahuguna, August 9, 1972

[11] The Constitution of India, Article 358- Suspension of provisions of Article 19 during emergencies

[12] Lok Sabha Debates , Minister of Communications, Shri H.N. Bahuguna, August 9, 1972

[13] Hukam Chand v. Union of India, AIR 1976 SC 789

[14] ibid

[15] Liversidge v. Anderson [1942] A.C. 206

[16] State of M.P. v. Baldeo Prasad, AIR 1961 (SC) 293 (296)

[17] ibid

[18] Ghosh O.K. v. Joseph E.X. Air 1963 SC 812; 1963 Supp. (1) SCR 789

[19] Sakal Papers (P) Ltd. v. Union of India, AIR 1962 SC 305 (315); 1962 (3) SCR 842

[20] See Notable Observations- July to December 2012, Google Transparency Report, available at http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/ (last visited on July 2, 2014) (a 90% increase in Content removal requests by the Indian Government in the last year)

[21] Willis Wee, Google Transparency Report: India Ranks as Third ‘Snoopiest’ Country, July 6, 2011 available at http://www.techinasia.com/google-transparency-report-india/ (last visited on July 2, 2014)

[22] See Notable Observations- July to December 2012, Google Transparency Report, available at http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/government/ (last visited on July 2, 2014) (a 90% increase in Content removal requests by the Indian Government in the last year)

[23] Joji Thomas Philip, Intelligence Bureau wants ISPs to log all customer details, December 30, 2010 http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2010-12-30/news/27621627_1_online-privacy-internet-protocol-isps (last visited on July 2, 2014)

[24] Deepa Kurup, In the dark about ‘India’s Prism’ June 16, 2013 available at http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/in-the-dark-about-indias-prism/article4817903.ece

[25] Saikat Dutta, We, The Eavesdropped May 3, 2010 available at http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?265191 (last visited on July 2, 2014)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-constitutionality-of-indian-surveillance-law

Targeting surveillance

praskrishna — 2014-12-30T14:10:58Z

In the fall of 2005, Scotland Yard raided a flat in west London and arrested a suspected al-Qaeda militant known by a teasing Arabic nickname, Irhabi (“Terrorist”) 007.

The article by Ajai Sreevatsan was published in the Hindu on December 28, 2014. Sunil Abraham gave his inputs.

The similarities between Irhabi 007, later identified as Younis Tsouli, and India’s Mehdi Masoor Biswas are uncanny.

Neither participated in any terror attack. Their reputation stems from an alleged involvement as cyber propagandists for proto-terror groups — Irhabi was distributing manuals and teaching online seminars on behalf of the emerging al-Qaeda faction in Iraq, while Mehdi is alleged to be an IS sympathiser. Both in their early 20s with cover identities during the day, and separated by a decade in technological evolution.

Such expertise within terror groups is hardly surprising, says Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society. “Any organisation engaged in a war for hearts and minds and oil fields will exploit contemporary technology to its fullest potential,” he says.

Irhabi currently serves a 16-year jail term, while Mehdi awaits his trial. What their cases highlight is that the phenomenon of young, tech-savvy armchair radicals is nothing new.

Research done at Israel’s Haifa University, which tracks the proliferation of terrorist websites, shows that the number of such sites went up from fewer than 100 in the late-1990s to more than 4,800 in just a decade. There is also credible evidence that an al-Qaeda website posted a sketched-out proposal for the 2004 Madrid bombings three months before the attack. Another macabre example is the crowd-sourcing effort launched in 2005 by the Victorious Army Group to build its website. By the competition’s rules, the winner would get to fire a rocket at an American base.

As Indian agencies gear up to respond to similar online threats in this part of the world, Mr. Abraham says India should not repeat the mistakes made by the West over the previous decade. “We should not get caught up in big data surveillance,” he says.

“Surveillance is like salt. It could be counter-productive even if slightly in excess. Ideally, surveillance must be targeted. Indiscriminate surveillance just increases the size of the haystack, making it difficult to find the needles,” Mr. Abraham says.

“Even in the case of Mehdi, his identity was uncovered not by online spying but by Channel 4 which did some old-fashioned detective work,” he says.

In any case, recent events show that the threat of online terror propaganda might be overblown. Much like online activism, it is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

A set of letters sent by newly recruited volunteers of IS was leaked to the French newspaper Le Figaro earlier this month and it shows youngsters complaining about being made to do the dishes or the Iraqi winter. One of them wrote: “I’m fed up to the back teeth. My iPod no longer works out here. I have got to come home.” Of the estimated 1,100 young French who are believed to have joined the IS, more than 100 have already returned.

The IS may have Twitter on its side. But the harsh realities of Iraq and the gruesome ideology behind the slick doctrinal videos are a lot harder to sell.

Mr. Abraham says there is no such thing as a Twitter revolution or a social media terror group. “Such statements underestimate the role of ideology and human beings,” he says.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-hindu-december-28-2014-ajai-sreevatsan-targeting-surveillance

Surveillance: Privacy Vs Security

praskrishna — 2013-08-19T05:32:55Z

The Foundation for Media Professionals is organizing a debate at the India International Centre, New Delhi on August 17, 2013. Shri Kapil Sibal will give the opening speech. Natgrid chief Raghu Raman is one of the debaters. Pranesh Prakash is participating in this event as a panelist.

This was published by the Foundation for Media Professionals on their website. Also read the blog post by Vivian Fernandes and Ninglun Hanghal.

In the backdrop of the recent disclosures by US defense contractor Edward Snowden about the activity of the National Security Agency (NSA) and reports that NSA may have collaborated with India on surveillance program in the country that have raised concerns about privacy and right of citizens, Foundation for Media Professionals (FMP) in partnership with Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) invited Pranesh Prakash to a panel discussion on "Surveillance: Privacy vs. Security".

Guest Speaker
Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Govt. of India

Panelists

Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director, Centre for Internet and Society

Dr. Usha Ramanathan, Independent Law Researcher
Saikat Datta, Resident Editor, DNA
Capt. Raghu Raman, National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid)

Moderator

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/foundation-for-media-professionals-august-17-2013-surveillance-privacy-v-security

Surveillance Stories: Optimizing rights and governance

Admin — 2018-10-31T01:39:56Z

Sunil Abraham gave a talk at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore on October 16, 2018. Sunil used a series of stories to explain how surveillance works and fails in the context of theft, murder, insider trading, terrorism, demonetization and encounter killings.

These stories were used to explore multiple technical solutions for solving the “surveillance optimization problem”. Policy makers have to simultaneously maximize various rights — the right to privacy, the right to transparency, the right to free speech — and uphold the imperatives of the nation state: national security, law enforcement and effective governance.

Two decades ago, Lawrence Lessig introduced a socioeconomic theory of regulation called the ‘pathetic dot theory’, which discusses how individuals in a society are regulated by four forces — law, code or technical infrastructure, market and social norms. The talk will explore how these four regulatory options contribute to solving the surveillance optimization problem.

This was published on the website of National Centre for Biological Sciences

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/surveillance-stories-optimizing-rights-and-governance

Surveillance in India: Policy and Practice

praskrishna — 2017-03-15T01:05:07Z

The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy organized a brainstorming session on net neutrality on February 8, 2017 and a public seminar on surveillance in India the following day on February 9, 2017 in New Delhi. Pranesh Prakash gave a talk.

Pranesh presented a narrative of the current state of surveillance law, our knowledge of current surveillance practices (including noting where programmes like Natgrid, CMS, etc. fit in), and charted a rough map of reforms needed and outstanding policy research questions.

Pranesh Prakash

Pranesh Prakash is a Policy Director at - and was part of the founding team of - the Centre for Internet and Society, a non-profit organisation that engages in research and policy advocacy. He is also the Legal Lead at Creative Commons India and an Affiliated Fellow at the Yale Law School's Information Society Project, and has been on the Executive Committee of the NCUC at ICANN. In 2014, he was selected by Forbes India for its inaugural "30 under 30" list of young achievers, and in 2012 he was recognized as an Internet Freedom Fellow by the U.S. government.

His research interests converge at the intersections of technology, culture, economics, law, and justice. His current work focuses on interrogating, promoting, and engaging with policymakers on the areas of access to knowledge (primarily copyright reform), 'openness' (including open government data, open standards, free/libre/open source software, and open access), freedom of expression, privacy, digital security, and Internet governance. He is a prominent voice on these issues, with the newspaper Mint calling him “one of the clearest thinkers in this area”, and his research having been quoted in the Indian parliament. He regularly speaks at national and international conferences on these topics. He has a degree in arts and law from the National Law School in Bangalore, and while there he helped found the Indian Journal of Law and Technology, and was part of its editorial board for two years.

Click here to see the agenda for the brainstorming session on net neutrality.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/surveillance-in-india-policy-and-practice

Surveillance Enabling Identity Systems in Africa: Tracing the Fingerprints of Aadhaar

Shruti Trikanad and Vrinda Bhandari — 2022-08-09T08:17:32Z

Biometric identity systems are being introduced around the world with a focus on promoting human development and social and economic inclusion, rather than previous goals of security. As a result, these systems being encouraged in developing countries, particularly in Africa and Asia, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

In this report, we identify the different external actors that influencing this “developmental” agenda. These range from philanthropic organisations, private companies, and technology vendors, to state and international institutions. Most notable among these is the World Bank, whose influence we investigated in the form of case studies of Nigeria and Kenya. We also explored the role played by the “success” of the Aadhaar programme in India on these new ID systems. A key characteristic of the growing “digital identity for development” trend is the consolidation of different databases that record beneficiary data for government programmes into one unified platform, accessed by a unique biometric ID. This “Aadhaar model” has emerged as a default model to be adopted in developing countries, with little concern for the risks it introduces. Read and download the full report here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/surveillance-enabling-identity-systems-in-africa-tracing-the-fingerprints-of-aadhaar

Surveillance and the Indian Constitution - Part 3: The Public/Private Distinction and the Supreme Court’s Wrong Turn

pranesh — 2014-03-06T23:02:45Z

After its decision in Gobind, the Supreme Court's privacy floodgates opened; a series of claims involving private parties came before its docket, and the resulting jurisprudence ended up creating confusion between state-individual surveillance, and individual-individual surveillance.

Gautam Bhatia's blog post was originally published on Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy Blog

We have seen that Gobind essentially crystallized a constitutional right to privacy as an aspect of personal liberty, to be infringed only by a narrowly-tailored law that served a compelling state interest. After the landmark decision in Gobind, Malak Singh v State of P&H was the next targeted-surveillance history-sheeter case to come before the Supreme Court. In that case, Rule 23 of the Punjab Police Rules was at issue. Its vires was not disputed, so the question was a direct matter of constitutionality. An order of surveillance was challenged by two individuals, on the ground that there were no reasonable bases for suspecting them of being repeat criminals, and that their inclusion in the surveillance register was politically motivated. After holding that entry into a surveillance sheet was a purely administrative measure, and thus required no prior hearing (audi alteram partem), the Court then embarked upon a lengthy disquisition about the scope and limitations of surveillance, which deserves to be reproduced in full:

“But all this does not mean that the police have a licence to enter the names of whoever they like (dislike?) in the surveillance register; nor can the surveillance be such as to squeeze the fundamental freedoms guaranteed to all citizens or to obstruct the free exercise and enjoyment of those freedoms; nor can the surveillance so intrude as to offend the dignity of the individual. Surveillance of persons who do not fall within the categories mentioned in Rule 23.4 or for reasons unconnected with the prevention of crime, or excessive surveillance falling beyond the limits prescribed by the rules, will entitle a citizen to the Court’s protection which the court will not hesitate to give. The very rules which prescribe the conditions for making entries in the surveillance register and the mode of surveillance appear to recognise the caution and care with which the police officers are required to proceed. The note following R. 23.4 is instructive. It enjoins a duty upon the police officer to construe the rule strictly and confine the entries in the surveillance register to the class of persons mentioned in the rule. Similarly R.23.7 demands that there should be no illegal interference in the guise of surveillance. Surveillance, therefore, has to be unobstrusive and within bounds. Ordinarily the names of persons with previous criminal record alone are entered in the surveillance register. They must be proclaimed offenders, previous convicts, or persons who have already been placed on security for good behaviour. In addition, names of persons who are reasonably believed to be habitual offenders or receivers of stolen property whether they have been convicted or not may be entered. It is only in the case of this category of persons that there may be occasion for abuse of the power of the police officer to make entries in the surveillance register. But, here, the entry can only be made by the order of the Superintendent of Police who is prohibited from delegating his authority under Rule 23.5. Further it is necessary that the Superintendent of Police must entertain a reasonable belief that persons whose names are to be entered in Part II are habitual offenders or receivers of stolen property. While it may not be necessary to supply the grounds of belief to the persons whose names are entered in the surveillance register it may become necessary in some cases to satisfy the Court when an entry is challenged that there are grounds to entertain such reasonable belief. In fact in the present case we sent for the relevant records and we have satisfied ourselves that there were sufficient grounds for the Superintendent of Police to entertain a reasonable belief. In the result we reject both the appeals subject to our observations regarding the mode of surveillance. There is no order as to costs.”

Three things emerge from this holding: first, the Court follows Gobind in locating the right to privacy within the philosophical concept of individual dignity, found in Article 21’s guarantee of personal liberty. Secondly, it follows Kharak Singh, Malkani and Gobind in insisting that the surveillance be targeted, limited to fulfilling the government’s crime-prevention objectives, and be limited – not even to suspected criminals, but – repeat offenders or serious criminals. And thirdly, it leaves open a role for the Court – that is, judicial review – in examining the grounds of surveillance, if challenged in a particular case.

After Malak Singh, there is another period of quiet. LIC v Manubhai D Shah, in 1993, attributed – wrongly – to Indian Express Newspapers the proposition that Article 19(1)(a)’s free expression right included privacy of communications (Indian Express itself had cited a UN Report without incorporating it into its holding).

Soon afterwards, R. Rajagopal v State of TN involved the question of the publication of a convicted criminal’s autobiography by a publishing house; Auto Shankar, the convict in question, had supposedly withdrawn his consent after agreeing to the book’s publication, but the publishing house was determined to go ahead with it. Technically, this wasn’t an Article 21 case: so much is made clear by the very manner in which the Court frames its issues: the question is whether a citizen of the country can prevent another person from writing his biography, or life story. (Paragraph 8) The Court itself made things clear when it held that the right of privacy has two aspects: the tortious aspect, which provides damages for a breach of individual privacy; and the constitutional aspect, which protects privacy against unlawful governmental intrusion. (Paragraph 9) Having made this distinction, the Court went on to cite a number of American cases that were precisely about the right to privacy against governmental intrusion, and therefore – ideally – irrelevant to the present case (Paras 13 – 16); and then, without quite explaining how it was using these cases – or whether they were relevant at all, it switched to examining the law of defamation (Para 17 onwards). It would be safe to conclude, therefore, in light of the clear distinctions that it made, the Court was concerned in R. Rajagopal about an action between private parties, and therefore, privacy in the context of tort law. It’s confusing observations, however, were to have rather unfortunate effects, as we shall see.

We now come to a series of curious cases involving privacy and medical law. In Mr X v Hospital Z, the question arose whether a Hospital that – in the context of a planned marriage – had disclosed the appellant’s HIV+ status, leading to his social ostracism – was in breach of his right to privacy. The Court cited Rajagopal, but unfortunately failed to understand it, and turned the question into one of the constitutional right to privacy, and not the private right. Why the Court turned an issue between two private parties – adequately covered by the tort of breach of confidentiality – into an Article 21 issue is anybody’s guess. Surely Article 21 – the right to life and personal liberty – is not horizontally applicable, because if it was, we might as well scrap the entire Indian Penal Code, which deals with exactly these kinds of issues – individuals violating each others’ rights to life and personal liberty. Nonetheless, the Court cited Kharak Singh, Gobind and Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, further muddying the waters, because Article 8 – in contrast to American law – embodies a proportionality test for determining whether there has been an impermissible infringement of privacy. The Court then came up with the following observation:

“Where there is a clash of two Fundamental Rights, as in the instant case, namely, the appellant’s right to privacy as part of right to life and Ms. Akali’s right to lead a healthy life which is her Fundamental Right under Article 21, the RIGHT which would advance the public morality or public interest, would alone be enforced through the process of Court, for the reason that moral considerations cannot be kept at bay.”

With respect, this is utterly bizarre. If there is a clash of two rights, then that clash must be resolved by referring to the Constitution, and not to the Court’s opinion of what an amorphous, elastic, malleable, many-sizes-fit “public morality” says. The mischief caused by this decision, however, was replicated in Sharda v Dharmpal, decided by the Court in 2003. In that case, the question was whether the Court could require a party who had been accused of unsoundness of mind (as a ground for divorce under the wonderfully progressive Hindu Marriage Act) to undergo a medical examination – and draw an adverse inference if she refused. Again, whether this was a case in which Article 21 ought to be invoked is doubtful; at least, it is arguable, since it was the Court making the order. Predictably, the Court cited from Mr X v Hospital Z extensively. It cited Gobind (compelling State interest) and the ECHR (proportionality). It cited a series of cases involving custody of children, where various Courts had used a “balancing test” to determine whether the best interests of the child overrode the privacy interest exemplified by the client-patient privilege. It applied this balancing test to the case at hand by balancing the “right” of the petitioner to obtain a divorce for the spouse’s unsoundness of mind under the HMA, vis-à-vis the Respondent’s right to privacy.

In light of the above analysis, it is submitted that although the outcome in Mr X v Hospital Z and Sharda v Dharmpal might well be correct, the Supreme Court has misread what R. Rajagopal actually held, and its reasoning is deeply flawed. Neither of these cases are Article 21 cases: they are private tort cases between private parties, and ought to be analysed under private law, as Rajagopal itself was careful to point out. In private law, also, the balancing test makes perfect sense: there are a series of interests at stake, as the Court rightly understood, such as certain rights arising out of marriage, all of a private nature. In any event, whatever one might make of these judgments, one thing is clear: they are both logically and legally irrelevant to the Kharak Singh line of cases that we have been discussing, which are to do with the Article 21 right to privacy against the State.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/surveillance-and-the-indian-consitution-part-3

Surveillance and the Indian Constitution - Part 2: Gobind and the Compelling State Interest Test

pranesh — 2014-01-27T18:03:38Z

Gautam Bhatia analyses the first case in which the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to privacy, Gobind v. State of Madhya Pradesh, and argues that the holding in that case adopted the three-pronged American test of strict scrutiny, compelling State interest, and narrow tailoring in its approach to privacy violations.

After its judgment in Kharak Singh, the Court was not concerned with the privacy question for a while. The next case that dealt – peripherally – with the issue came eleven years later. In R.M. Malkani v State of Maharashtra, the Court held that attaching a recording device to a person’s telephone did not violate S. 25 of the Telegraph Act, because

"where a person talking on the telephone allows another person to record it or to hear it, it can-not be said that the other person who is allowed to do so is damaging, removing, tampering, touching machinery battery line or post for intercepting or acquainting himself with the contents of any message. There was no element of coercion or compulsion in attaching the tape recorder to the telephone."

Although this case was primarily about the admissibility of evidence, the Court also took time out to consider – and reject – a privacy-based Article 21 argument, holding that:

"Article 21 was invoked by submitting that the privacy of the appellant’s conversation was invaded. Article 21 contemplates procedure established by law with regard to deprivation of life or personal liberty. The telephonic conversation of an innocent citizen will be protected by Courts against wrongful or high handed interference by tapping the conversation. The protection is not for the guilty citizen against the efforts of the police to vindicate the law and prevent corruption of public servants. It must not be understood that the Courts will tolerate safeguards for the protection of the citizen to be imperiled by permitting the police to proceed by unlawful or irregular methods."

Apart from the fact that it joined Kharak Singh in refusing to expressly find a privacy right within the contours of Article 21, there is something else that unites Kharak Singh and R.M. Malkani: they hypothetical in Kharak Singh became a reality in Malkani – what saved the telephone tapping precisely because it was directed at "… a guilty person", with the Court specifically holding that the laws were not for targeting innocent people. Once again, then, the targeted and specific nature of interception became a crucial – and in this case, a decisive – factor. One year later, in another search and seizure case, Pooran Mal v Inspector, the Court cited M.P. Sharma and stuck to its guns, refusing to incorporate the Fourth Amendment into Indian Constitutional law.

It is Gobind v State of MP, decided in 1975, that marks the watershed moment for Indian privacy law in the Constitution. Like Kharak Singh, Gobind also involved domiciliary visits to the house of a history-sheeter. Unlike Kharak Singh, however, in Gobind the Court found that the Regulations did have statutory backing – S. 46(2)(c) of the Police Act, which allowed State Government to make notifications giving effect to the provisions of the Act, one of which was the prevention of commission of offences. The surveillance provisions in the impugned regulations, according to the Court, were indeed for the purpose of preventing offences, since they were specifically aimed at repeat offenders. To that extent, then, the Court found that there existed a valid “law” for the purposes of Articles 19 and 21.

By this time, of course, American constitutional law had moved forward significantly from eleven years ago, when Kharak Singh had been decided. The Court was able to invoke Griswold v Connecticut and Roe v Wade, both of which had found a "privacy" as an "interstitial" or "penumbral" right in the American Constitution – that is, not reducible to any one provision, but implicit in a number of separate provisions taken together. The Court ran together a number of American authorities, referred to Locke and Kant, to dignity, to liberty and to autonomy, and ended by holding, somewhat confusingly:

“the right to privacy must encompass and protect the personal intimacies of the home, the family marriage, motherhood, procreation and child rearing. This catalogue approach to the question is obviously not as instructive as it does not give analytical picture of that distinctive characteristics of the right of privacy. Perhaps, the only suggestion that can be offered as unifying principle underlying the concept has been the assertion that a claimed right must be a fundamental right implicit in the concept of ordered liberty… there are two possible theories for protecting privacy of home. The first is that activities in the home harm others only to the extent that they cause offence resulting from the mere thought that individuals might he engaging in such activities and that such ‘harm’ is not Constitutionally protective by the state. The second is that individuals need a place of sanctuary where they can be free from societal control. The importance of such a sanctuary is that individuals can drop the mask, desist for a while from projecting on the world the image they want to be accepted as themselves, an image that may reflect the values of their peers rather than the realities of their natures… the right to privacy in any event will necessarily have to go through a process of case-by-case development."

But if no clear principle emerges out of the Court’s elucidation of the right, it was fairly unambiguous in stressing the importance of the right itself. Interestingly, it grounded the right within the context of the freedom struggle. "Our founding fathers," it observed, "were thoroughly opposed to a Police Raj even as our history of the struggle for freedom has borne eloquent testimony to it." (Para 30) The parallels to the American Fourth Amendment are striking here: in his historical analysis Akhil Amar tells us that the Fourth Amendment was meant precisely to avoid the various abuses of unreasonable searches and seizures that were common in England at the time.

The parallels with the United States become even more pronounced, however, when the Court examined the grounds for limiting the right to privacy. "Assuming that the fundamental rights explicitly guaranteed to a citizen have penumbral zones and that the right to privacy is itself a fundamental right, that fundamental right must be subject to restriction on the basis of compelling public interest." "Compelling public interest" is an interesting phrase, for two reasons. First, “public interest” is a ground for fundamental rights restrictions under Article 19 (see, e.g., Article 19(6)), but the text of the Article 19 restrictions do not use – and the Court, in interpreting them, has not held – that the public interest must be “compelling”. This suggests a stricter standard of review for an Article 21 privacy right violation than Article 19 violations. This is buttressed by the fact that in the same paragraph, the Court ended by observing: “even if it be assumed that Article 19(5) [restrictions upon the freedom of movement] does not apply in terms, as the right to privacy of movement cannot be absolute, a law imposing reasonable restriction upon it for compelling interest of State must be upheld as valid.” The Court echoes the language of 19(5), and adds the word “compelling”. This surely cannot be an oversight.

More importantly – the compelling State interest is an American test, used often in equal protection cases and cases of discrimination, where “suspect classes” (such as race) are at issue. Because of the importance of the right at issue, the compelling state interest test goes hand-in-hand with another test: narrow tailoring. Narrow tailoring places a burden upon the State to demonstrate that its restriction is tailored in a manner that infringes the right as narrowest manner that is possible to achieve its goals. The statement of the rule may be found in the American Supreme Court case of Grutter v Bollinger:

"Even in the limited circumstance when drawing racial distinctions is permissible to further a compelling state interest, government is still constrained under equal protection clause in how it may pursue that end: the means chosen to accomplish the government’s asserted purpose must be specifically and narrowly framed to accomplish that purpose."

To take an extremely trivial example that will illustrate the point: the State wants to ban hate speech against Dalits. It passes legislation that bans “all speech that disrespects Dalits.” This is not narrowly tailored, because while all hate speech against Dalits necessarily disrespects them, all speech that disrespects Dalits is not necessarily hate speech. It was possible for the government to pass legislation banning only hate speech against Dalits, one that would have infringed upon free speech more narrowly than the “disrespect law”, and still achieved its goals. The law is not narrowly tailored.

Crucially, then, the Court in Gobind seemed to implicitly accept the narrow-tailoring flip side of the compelling state interest coin. On the constitutionality of the Police Regulations itself, it upheld their constitutionality by reading them narrowly. Here is what the Court said:

“Regulation 855, in our view, empowers surveillance only of persons against whom reasonable materials exist to induce the opinion that they show a determination, to lead a life of crime – crime in this context being confined to such as involve public peace or security only and if they are dangerous security risks. Mere convictions in criminal cases where nothing gravely imperiling safety of society cannot be regarded as warranting surveillance under this Regulation. Similarly, domiciliary visits and picketing by the police should be reduced to the clearest cases of danger to community security and not routine follow-up at the end of a conviction or release from prison or at the whim of a police officer.”

But Regulation 855 did not refer to the gravity of the crime at all. Thus, the Court was able to uphold its constitutionality only by narrowing its scope in a manner that the State’s objective of securing public safety was met in a way that minimally infringed the right to privacy.

Therefore, whether the Gobind bench was aware of it or not, its holding incorporates into Indian constitutional law and the right to privacy, not just the compelling State interest test, but narrow tailoring as well. The implications for the CMS are obvious. Because with narrow tailoring, the State must demonstrate that bulk surveillance of all individuals, whether guilty or innocent, suspected of crimes or not suspected of crimes (whether reasonably or otherwise), possessing a past criminal record or not, speaking to each other of breaking up the government or breaking up a relationship – every bit of data must be collected to achieve the goal of maintaining public security, and that nothing narrower will suffice. Can the State demonstrate this? I do not think it can, but at the very least, it should be made to do so in open Court.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/surveillance-and-the-indian-consitution-part-2

Surveillance and the Indian Constitution - Part 1: Foundations

pranesh — 2014-01-23T15:12:30Z

In this insightful seven-part series, Gautam Bhatia looks at surveillance and the right to privacy in India from a constitutional perspective, tracing its genealogy through Supreme Court case law and compares it with the law in the USA.

Note: This was originally posted on the Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy blog.

On previous occasions, we have discussed the ongoing litigation in ACLU v. Clapper in the United States, a challenge to the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) bulk surveillance program. Recall that a short while after the initial Edward Snowden disclosures, The Hindu revealed the extent of domestic surveillance in India, under the aegis of the Central Monitoring System (CMS). The CMS (and what it does) is excellently summarized here. To put thing starkly and briefly:

“With the C.M.S., the government will get centralized access to all communications metadata and content traversing through all telecom networks in India. This means that the government can listen to all your calls, track a mobile phone and its user’s location, read all your text messages, personal e-mails and chat conversations. It can also see all your Google searches, Web site visits, usernames and passwords if your communications aren’t encrypted.”

The CMS is not sanctioned by parliamentary legislation. It also raises serious privacy concerns. In order to understand the constitutional implications, therefore, we need to investigate Indian privacy jurisprudence. In a series of posts, we plan to discuss that.

Privacy is not mentioned in the Constitution. It plays no part in the Constituent Assembly Debates. The place of the right – if it exists – must therefore be located within the structure of the Constitution, as fleshed out by judicial decisions. The first case to address the issue was M. P. Sharma v. Satish Chandra, in 1954. In that case, the Court upheld search and seizure in the following terms:

"A power of search and seizure is in any system of jurisprudence an overriding power of the State for the protection of social security and that power is necessarily regulated by law. When the Constitution makers have thought fit not to subject such regulation to Constitutional limitations by recognition of a fundamental right to privacy, analogous to the American Fourth Amendment, we have no justification to import it, into a totally different fundamental right. by some process of strained construction."

The right in question was 19(1)(f) – the right to property. Notice here that the Court did not reject a right to privacy altogether – it only rejected it in the context of searches and seizures for documents, the specific prohibition of the American Fourth Amendment (that has no analogue in India). This specific position, however, would not last too long, and was undermined by the very next case to consider this question, Kharak Singh.

In Kharak Singh v. State of UP, the UP Police Regulations conferred surveillance power upon certain “history sheeters” – that is, those charged (though not necessarily convicted) of a crime. These surveillance powers included secret picketing of the suspect’s house, domiciliary visits at night, enquiries into his habits and associations, and reporting and verifying his movements. These were challenged on Article 19(1)(d) (freedom of movement) and Article 21 (personal liberty) grounds. It is the second ground that particularly concerns us.

As a preliminary matter, we may observe that the Regulations in question were administrative – that is, they did not constitute a “law”, passed by the legislature. This automatically ruled out a 19(2) – 19(6) defence, and a 21 “procedure established by law” defence – which were only applicable when the State made a law. The reason for this is obvious: fundamental rights are extremely important. If one is to limit them, then that judgment must be made by a competent legislature, acting through the proper, deliberative channels of lawmaking – and not by mere administrative or executive action. Consequently – and this is quite apart from the question of administrative/executive competence - if the Police Regulations were found to violate Article 19 or Article 21, that made them ipso facto void, without the exceptions kicking in. (Paragraph 5)

It is also important to note one other thing: as a defence, it was expressly argued by the State that the police action was reasonable and in the interests of maintaining public order precisely because it was “directed only against those who were on proper grounds suspected to be of proved anti-social habits and tendencies and on whom it was necessary to impose some restraints for the protection of society.” The Court agreed, observing that this would have “an overwhelming and even decisive weight in establishing that the classification was rational and that the restrictions were reasonable and designed to preserve public order by suitable preventive action” – if there had been a law in the first place, which there wasn’t. Thus, this issue itself was hypothetical, but what is crucial to note is that the State argued – and the Court endorsed – the basic idea that what makes surveillance reasonable under Article 19 is the very fact that it is targeted – targeted at individuals who are specifically suspected of being a threat to society because of a history of criminality.

Let us now move to the merits. The Court upheld secret picketing on the ground that it could not affect the petitioner’s freedom of movement since it was, well secret – and what you don’t know, apparently, cannot hurt you. What the Court found fault with was the intrusion into the petitioner’s dwelling, and knocking at his door late at night to wake him up. The finding required the Court to interpret the meaning of the term “personal liberty” in Article 21. By contrasting the very specific rights listed in Article 21, the Court held that:

“Is then the word “personal liberty” to be construed as excluding from its purview an invasion on the part of the police of the sanctity of a man’s home and an intrusion into his personal security and his right to sleep which is the normal comfort and a dire necessity for human existence even as an animal? It might not be inappropriate to refer here to the words of the preamble to the Constitution that it is designed to “assure the dignity of the individual” and therefore of those cherished human value as the means of ensuring his full development and evolution. We are referring to these objectives of the framers merely to draw attention to the concepts underlying the constitution which would point to such vital words as “personal liberty” having to be construed in a reasonable manner and to be attributed that these which would promote and achieve those objectives and by no means to stretch the meaning of the phrase to square with any preconceived notions or doctrinaire constitutional theories.” (Paragraph 16)

A few important observations need to be made about this paragraph. The first is that it immediately follows the Court’s examination of the American Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, with their guarantees of “life, liberty and property…” and is, in turn, followed by the Court’s examination of the American Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the protection of a person’s houses, papers, effects etc from unreasonable searches and seizures. The Court’s engagement with the Fourth Amendment is ambiguous. It admits that “our Constitution contains no like guarantee…”, but holds that nonetheless “these extracts [from the 1949 case, Wolf v Colorado] would show that an unauthorised intrusion into a person’s home and the disturbance caused to him thereby, is as it were the violation of a common law right of a man – an ultimate essential of ordered liberty”, thus tying its own holding in some way to the American Fourth Amendment jurisprudence. But here’s the crucial thing: at this point, American Fourth Amendment jurisprudence was propertarian based – that is, the Fourth Amendment was understood to codify – with added protection – the common law of trespass, whereby a man’s property was held sacrosanct, and not open to be trespassed against. Four years later, in 1967, in Katz, the Supreme Court would shift its own jurisprudence, to holding that the Fourth Amendment protected zones where persons had a “reasonable expectation of privacy”, as opposed to simply protecting listed items of property (homes, papers, effects etc). Kharak Singh was handed down before Katz. Yet the quoted paragraph expressly shows that the Court anticipated Katz, and in expressly grounding the Article 21 personal liberty right within the meaning of dignity, utterly rejected the propertarian-tresspass foundations that it might have had. To use a phrase invoked by later Courts – in this proto-privacy case, the Court already set the tone by holding it to attach to persons, not places.

While effectively finding a right to privacy in the Constitution, the Court expressly declined to frame it that way. In examining police action which involved tracking a person’s location, association and movements, the Court upheld it, holding that “the right of privacy is not a guaranteed right under our Constitution and therefore the attempt to ascertain the movements of an individual which is merely a manner in which privacy is invaded is not an infringement of a fundamental right guaranteed by Part III.”

The “therefore” is crucial. Although not expressly, the Court virtually holds, in terms, that tracking location, association and movements does violate privacy, and only finds that constitutional because there is no guaranteed right to privacy within the Constitution. Yet.

In his partly concurring and partly dissenting opinion, Subba Rao J. went one further, by holding that the idea of privacy was, in fact, contained within the meaning of Article 21: “it is true our Constitution does not expressly declare a right to privacy as a fundamental right, but the said right is an essential ingredient of personal liberty.” Privacy he defined as the right to “be free from restrictions or encroachments on his person, whether those restrictions or encroachments are directly imposed or indirectly brought about by calculated measures.” On this ground, he held all the surveillance measures unconstitutional.

Justice Subba Rao’s opinion also explored a proto-version of the chilling effect. Placing specific attention upon the word “freely” contained within 19(1)(d)’s guarantee of free movment, Justice Subba Rao went specifically against the majority, and observed:

“The freedom of movement in clause (d) therefore must be a movement in a free country, i.e., in a country where he can do whatever he likes, speak to whomsoever he wants, meet people of his own choice without any apprehension, subject of course to the law of social control. The petitioner under the shadow of surveillance is certainly deprived of this freedom. He can move physically, but he cannot do so freely, for all his activities are watched and noted. The shroud of surveillance cast upon him perforce engender inhibitions in him and he cannot act freely as he would like to do. We would, therefore, hold that the entire Regulation 236 offends also Art. 19(1)(d) of the Constitution.”

This early case, therefore, has all the aspects that plague the CMS today. What to do with administrative action that does not have the sanction of law? What role does targeting play in reasonableness – assuming there is a law? What is the philosophical basis for the implicit right to privacy within the meaning of Article 21’s guarantee of personal liberty? And is the chilling effect a valid constitutional concern?

We shall continue with the development of the jurisprudence in the next post.

You can follow Gautam Bhatia on Twitter

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/surveillance-and-the-indian-consitution-part-1

Spreadsheet data on sample of 50 security companies

maria — 2014-02-28T16:13:39Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/data-on-surveillance-technology-companies

Social Media Monitoring

amber — 2017-01-16T14:23:13Z

We see a trend of social media and communication monitoring and surveillance initiatives in India which have the potential to create a chilling effect on free speech online and raises question about the privacy of individuals. In this paper, Amber Sinha looks at social media monitoring as a tool for surveillance, the current state of social media surveillance in India, and evaluate how the existing regulatory framework in India may deal with such practices in future.

Social Media Monitoring: Download (PDF)

Introduction

In 2014, the Government of India launched the much lauded and popular citizen outreach website called MyGov.in. A press release by the government announced that they had roped in global consulting firm PwC to assist in the data mining exercise to process and filter key points emerging from debates on Mygov.in. While this was a welcome move, the release also mentioned that the government intended to monitor social media sites in order to gauge popular opinion. Further, earlier this year, the government set up National Media Analytics Centre (NMAC) to monitor blogs, media channels, news outlets and social media platforms. The tracking software used by NMAC will generate tags to classify post and comments on social media into negative, positive and neutral categories, paying special attention to “belligerent” comments, and also look at the past patterns of posts. A project called NETRA has already been reported in the media a few years back which would intercept and analyse internet traffic using pre-defined filters. Alongside, we see other initiatives which intend to use social media data for predictive policing purposes such as CCTNS and Social Media Labs.

Thus, we see a trend of social media and communication monitoring and surveillance initiatives announced by the government which have the potential to create a chilling effect on free speech online and raises question about the privacy of individuals. Various commentators have raised concerns about the legal validity of such programmes and whether they were in violation of the fundamental rights to privacy and free expression, and the existing surveillance laws in India. The lack of legislation governing these programmes often translates into an absence of transparency and due procedure. Further, a lot of personal communication now exists in the public domain which renders traditional principles which govern interception and monitoring of personal communications futile. In the last few years, the blogosphere and social media websites in India have also changed and become platforms for more dissemination of political content, often also accompanied by significant vitriol, ‘trolling’ and abuse. Thus, we see greater policing of public or semi-public spaces online. In this paper, we look at social media monitoring as a tool for surveillance, the current state of social media surveillance in India and evaluate how the existing regulatory framework in India may deal with such practices in future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/social-media-monitoring

Security and Surveillance: A public discussion on Optimizing Security while Safeguarding Human Rights

praskrishna — 2014-12-19T08:46:34Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) invites you to a public discussion on optimizing security and safeguarding human rights at its Bangalore office on Friday, December 19th, 2014, 16:00 to 18:00.

The Centre for Internet and Society, in collaboration with Privacy International UK, has undertaken exploratory research into surveillance, security, and the security market in India.

Through this research, we hope to understand and document policy and law associated with security, surveillance, and the security market in India and learn about the regulation of security and related technologies such as encryption, filtering, monitoring software, and interception equipment. We also hope to understand the import and export policy regime for dual use technologies.

Such findings will be critical in creating evidence based research to inform security policy and regulation in India and work towards enabling regulatory frameworks that optimize the nation’s security while protecting the rights of citizens.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/security-and-surveillance-optimizing-security-human-rights

Right to Food Campaign, Ranchi Convention, 2016

sumandro — 2019-03-16T04:40:52Z

The Right to Food Campaign held its 2016 Convention in Ranchi during September 23-25, 2016. While three years have elapsed since the passage of the National Food Security Act, despite improvements in the Public Distribution System (PDS), large implementation gaps remain. This is what the Convention focused on, and gathered researchers and campaigners from across the country to share experiences and case studies on effectiveness and exclusions from the PDS. Sumandro Chattapadhyay took part in a session of the Convention to discuss how UID-linked welfare delivery is being rolled out across key programmes like provision of pension and rationed distribution of essential commodities, and their impact on people's right to welfare services.

Right to Food Campaign: Website.

Right to Food Campaign: Cash Transfers and UID: Our Main Demands.

Ranchi Convention, 2016: Programme.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/right-to-food-campaign-ranchi-convention-2016