Photo: Sarang Sena
Edited excerpts from an interview
What was your initial reaction when The Guardian reported on the US’ global snooping programme, PRISM?
A: My first reaction was, what a good story for The Guardian ! My second reaction was massive incredulity about the reported scale of the surveillance programme. Till today, the precise nature of the programme is not particularly clear. Two schools of thought have emerged. One says the NSA has an unlimited number of secret backdoors into companies and communication providers, and that they are recording everybody’s conversations. They are creating a massive database of communications and are able to use this to spy on the world. The alternative view is that they have legal arrangements with all these different agencies based in the US, which allow them to, under a secret court order, to retrospectively get some information from the company logs. So it is not that they have a copy of all the messages that are going in and out of gmail, for example, but the ability, with the sanction of the court, to ask for access to all the emails a particular individual has sent, or a list of all the people that person has spoken to on Skype.
My initial reaction was to the extent of the programme, but its existence was no surprise to me at all. We have known about such things for a long time. We didn’t know what it was called or about the secret court orders — that was a surprise. For me, the important part of the story was the lack of open legal oversight.
We have been debating this in the UK for quite a while now because the British government is trying to pass a law that will enable quite extensive tracking and recording of communication. This has created a big debate around civil liberties. I feel the dramatic way in which Snowden leaked this information has in many ways set that debate back a little, because it is gives fuel to everybody’s conspiracy theories. It has been written about as a huge conspiracy, when it actually is not, and this has made it very difficult to talk about the issue. You have to be either black or white on the subject and it is very difficult to have an opinion that goes down the middle, because one side will say you are in league with the ‘fascist’ security service, and the people on the other side will say that if you are against such things, you are in league with the terrorists. There is no way to say what I think is the right thing, that in a modern society there has to be a balance between security and personal liberty, and it is up to society to find the right balance at a given point of time.
Some say, “The government is spying to keep us safe.” But if governments have access to everything online — often seen as a free space, especially for those who can’t protest on the streets — doesn’t it make it easier to arrest people or curb civil liberties in the name of security or national interest. Isn’t this something we need to worry about?
That is the thing to worry about. It is not about the capability of listening to people, but what you then do with that information. Of course, security services in the modern world have that ability; for that matter, even private companies have that ability. There are plenty of marketing companies who do the same thing to find out what people are saying about Coca Cola, for instance. Civil liberties are threatened only if you live under a regime that thinks you need to go to prison if you criticise it. That’s the real issue, not the monitoring of speech, because speech, especially public speech, is meant to monitored, that’s the whole point of saying things out loud.
The issue is one of oversight, not capability. Since you can’t do away with the capability, what we need is a legal framework that prevents the security services from using it to create a police state.
Balance between security and privacy is also the defence offered by the US government. Where do you stand in this debate?
I stand more on the side of privacy than security. India is a good example of this. There needs to be stronger judicial oversight for these capabilities. Imprisoning whistleblowers is unacceptable in a democracy. That is why you need an independent judiciary, which is capable of handling that. The same holds for snooping capability.What is worrying is that you have to build quite a complex infrastructure to have these capabilities. In most parts of the world, terrorism is not the biggest problem that people face. Even if terrorists kill a thousand people in a country every year, many more are killed by industrial negligence and the effects of corruption, pollution or malnutrition, and in road accidents. But terror calls for countermeasures that can do a lot of damage. If a massive surveillance system is built to counter terror, it can be also used for other things, which may be dangerous.
In the UK, various laws have been passed for counter-terrorism and surveillance, but the local councils also use those measures to decide who is eligible for social security benefits. In a couple of cases, counter-terrorism surveillance capabilities were used to work out who wasn’t using their recycling bin properly. Once the capability is there, you use it for other things, and that comes from a lack of oversight. You have to build in systems to prevent the mechanism from being used for ‘bad stuff’.
What safeguards does India need to look at, especially with reports of political parties using intelligence agencies for their own ends as well as a growing trend of curtailing civil liberties?
If your politicians cannot be trusted with such capabilities, then they should not have them at all. If there is no oversight and a history of abuse, they should not be allowed these tools and if they are smart, they would not want them.
It is tough to talk to politicians about this, because you are saying, “You should not have this capability, because we don’t trust you with it”. At a personal level, that is an insult. But if you ask them whether they would trust their rivals not to use that against them, then the answer in India, like anywhere else, will be ‘no’. So why build the capability in the first place?
India has a poor cyber security track record. So won’t such a system be dangerous as it can be hacked into?
There is definitely a worry about who makes the equipment. In the UK, there is a controversy about telecom companies using equipment supplied by Huawei, a Chinese equipment manufacturer. The US has made it illegal for telecom companies to import or use equipment from Huawei, because the NSA suspects that it enables the Chinese secret service to listen in on phone calls. However, it is not banned in the UK and because it is very cheap, many have bought it. I won’t be surprised if we find later that the communication infrastructure was secretly monitored and controlled by the Chinese.
So it’s not just about hacking. If India were to go for this, they would probably buy Chinese equipment because it’s cheap and they are your neighbours, but the risk is that your entire information network might be exposed to the Chinese intelligence agencies. It’s dangerous to build this system because you don’t know what you are building it with.
A German Opposition leader said that while it’s fine for the US to spy on terrorists, it is inappropriate to spy on citizens. India’s foreign ministry, too, is concerned about PRISM…
Of course, this sort of surveillance is for terrorists and not for citizens, but how would the security services know who is who. After all, terrorists are not listed in the phone book as terrorists. Surveillance is meant to find out who is a terrorist. Once someone is found to be an innocent person, they stop listening to him or her. I think there is some misunderstanding of how these things work. There isn’t some big room somewhere with an American CIA or NSA agent listening to your phone calls. There is no machine listening to phone calls for the word bomb, or some artificial intelligence reading everybody’s emails. That’s not how we are being monitored. There is, however, a big data base of who calls whom and from where. When a new suspect is identified through a court order, you can go back and look at who that person has sent messages to. You can identify their friends and find out if they are also suspected terrorists or drug dealers or child pornographers. A combination of conspiracy theories and misunderstanding the technology makes you end up having these stressful conversations. Security services everywhere are secretive, so the conspiracy theories get stronger. Of course, it’s not in anyone’s interest to disprove these theories. Because if you think that the NSA or the CIA or MI6 or the India secret service has magical powers to read every email and listen to every phone call, you wouldn’t ever do a criminal conspiracy over email or phone. You are less likely to do something bad. So the NSA will never say what you are talking about is impossible. They want you to think about that capability. The conspiracy theorists want you to think that we live in a police state and the world is run by the CIA. So it’s in everybody’s interest to keep the story of this amazing magical technology going forward.
We know from the leaked PowerPoint presentation that the PRISM programme only has $20 million. That won’t pay for more than five guys. The air conditioning for each American soldier in Afghanistan costs around a quarter of a billion dollars, so at $20 million, PRISM is obviously not that big a programme.
Is Snowden a traitor or a whistleblower?
Legally speaking, he is a traitor. Whether or not he was justified in doing what he did is for the US courts to decide. A top secret, classified, oath-taking intelligence official doesn’t leak secret documents and expect a round of applause. Should he ever get back to the US, he will stand trial for treason.
Snowden said he couldn’t stand by and live in a society that was “watched”. Do we need stronger laws for whistleblowers who take stands for the greater good of society?
Absolutely, even as whistleblowers are protected from persecution, there is a need to carry out surveillance for legal purposes. Snowden is definitely guilty of treason. The question is whether he should be punished for it. The US judicial system might find him guilty but not send him to prison. The courts should be able to give clemency on the basis of public interest to whistleblowers who have broken the law. And there should definitely be safeguards to protect whistleblowers who have not broken the law from being prosecuted for speaking out.
But no country will ever set a precedent and say that if you are dealing with top secret matters, but think that we are doing bad things, you are at liberty to release the secret documents to the press. Because nobody knows the whole picture nor will understand the complete ramifications of those releases.
That’s what annoyed me about the Wikileaks diplomatic cables saga. Those documents had a lot that was sensitive. There should not be massive amounts of secrecy in governance, but some things are meant to be secret because of international relations.
If you go to a family party and see that your aunt has put on a lot of weight, you don’t say, “Oh my god, you are so fat!” You might have a secret conversation with your brother and sister, but that’s a private conversation with the understanding that they will not tell your aunt, “Hey, you know what he said?” It’s the same thing with diplomacy.
But, yes, surveillance programmes need to be open and not secret because ethical decisions can only be made in the open. The argument that “if you have nothing to hide, you should have no problem if we listen to you” doesn’t stand, for if that’s the case, why was the entire programme secret?