This is a thread on how govt agencies have been monitoring social media accounts of citizens. I am putting together at one place all that has been reported so far. Stay with me. (1/n)
In April 2018, the Union I&B Ministry floated a tender to contract an agency to monitor social media posts of citizens, including their "emails" and "historical communications", to gauge their opinions about government policies, and create "360-degree view of people." (2/n) 
The ministry wanted to institute an "analytical tool" that could categorise conversations into "positive, negative and neutral" and target citizens with personalised messages to promote positive opinions about government schemes. More details here: scroll.in/article/879833… (3/n)
Govt withdrew the tender in August after privacy groups and the opposition parties protested and the Supreme Court warned that setting up Social Media Communication Hub, where the analytical tool was to be instituted, would lead to India becoming a "Surveillance State". (4/n)
In the meantime, the UIDAI, which manages the Aadhaar database of more than one billion Indians, floated a tender in July 2018, to hire a firm to identify “detractors” and “influencers” and run campaigns to “neutralise” the “negative sentiments” about Aadhar on social media (5/n)
Govt documents revealed the Aadhar authority might have hired a firm in 2016 too to “monitor individual social media user/account” and categorise sentiments related to Aadhaar into “positive, neutral or negative.” More details here scroll.in/article/888133… (6/n)
The UIDAI plan has also been challenged in the SC. While its impact on privacy were being debated, documents revealed that over 40 govt departments, mostly law enforcement bodies, had been using a “strategic” tool that conducts mass surveillance of citizens’ social media (7/n)
The tool – Advanced Application for Social Media Analytics (AASMA) – is developed by IIIT, Delhi, with funding from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. It can track social profiles, devices and their locations. Identify “top users” and analyse sentiment. (8/n)
The I&B ministry and the UIDAI plans came to public notice as the procurement of software and services was done through a tender process. But AASMA was being installed at interested agencies on their request without such process. More about the tool: scroll.in/article/893015… (9/n)
Now an RTI has revealed that even the I&B Ministry was monitoring social media accounts of citizens since 2016. It had hired a firm for up to two years of monitoring. Through the April tender It wanted to extend the scheme up until the #Elections2019. (10/n)
Here is the extract of the work-order for ObjectOne Information Systems Ltd, the firm the I&B ministry hired for "monitoring services," accessed through RTI. The tender for this said the company would identify “influencers” and monitor “overall responses to a message" (11/n)
In the ongoing case in the SC, the #UIDAI has argued that it is only looking into information posted publicly by citizens and there is no privacy violation. So, what's wrong? Privacy advocates argue that even this could have a chilling effect on free speech. (12/n)
The govt is still debating a Data Protection Law to prevent misuse of online data of citizens without their consent. But this is what the Supreme Court had said on August 24, 2017, in its judgment by a nine-judge Bench on the right to #privacy (13/n)
Watch this space for more.
