Thread by @gautambhatia88

A quick note on phone tapping. It is, unfortunately, something that is left to the arbitrary discretion of the government, and at the root of this situation (unsurprisingly) is a bad Supreme Court judgment:

indiankanoon.org/doc/31276692/

(1/n)

In PUCL v Union (1997), it was argued that, given the serious privacy issues involved, phone tapping cannot take place without judicial authorisation. Unfortunately, the Court did not agree, and instead laid down some guidelines, for bureaucratic authorisation.

(2/n)

To be honest, given the way magistrates mechanically allow remand applications and higher courts deny bail where fundamental issues of liberty are involved, I'm no longer confident that that would have made any difference, but that's another debate.

(3/n)

When Srikrishna Committee on Data Protection was constituted a couple of years ago, people specifically made the point that data protection is pointless without surveillance reform, and that the Committee would end up indirectly legitimising surveillance through omission (4/n).

For reasons that I do not need to spell out, the Committee completely ignored these points, and that's one of the (many) reasons why the so-called Personal Data Protection Bill is an absolute eyewash. (5/n)

So what might genuine surveillance reform look like? An effort was made by a civil society initiative, culminating in the Indian Privacy Code, which set out detailed safeguards to prevent government from abusing surveillance powers:

saveourprivacy.in/bill

(6/n)

For more on these issues, follow @internetfreedom.

(8/8)