I&B ministry to snoop on emails and profile Twitter users

With less than a year to go for the general election, the Union Ministry of Information & Broadcasting is setting up a social media monitoring hub. The tender inviting bids by Broadcast Engineering Consultants India Ltd. closed on May 31.

Bids have been invited from Indian companies with the capability of developing analytical tools in order to:

• Create digital profiles of citizens
• Monitor digital platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, Linkedin, Flickr, blogs and email among others
• Listen to email conversations
• Create a ‘conversation archive’ of users
• Create a geographical analysis with exact locations
• Classify Internet info as positive, negative and neutral
• Produce actionable analytical data on users and
• Produce predictive analysis of potential headlines in media channels and newspapers across the globe

BECIL tender document also calls for 20 social media analytics executives to produce six reports every day for the ministry. The document says that each of the 716 districts in the country will have a social media executive to track local news and events.

While the I&B Ministry has maintained a Sphinx-like silence on the issue, cyber experts have rung alarm bells. Listening to emails, profiling social media users, they say, point to possible misuse of such data in elections. In the absence of a law to ensure data protection or prescribe the process of obtaining consent from users, the attempt to monitor social media and profile users would amount to invasion of privacy, they said.

The Government is behaving like the Orwellian Big Brother, says Congress leader and lawyer Dr Abhishek Manu Singhvi. While nine judges of the Supreme Court has upheld the fundamental right to privacy and despite Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution, the Information Technology Act etc. protecting the citizen’s privacy and human rights, he added, the Government appears determined to turn the country into a surveillance state.

In the entire tender document of 66 pages, he points out, there is not a single safeguard mentioned. In fact the document says that the vendor would have to supply the Meta Data as well.

The Government has been guilty of allowing BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to run a private App, the Namo App, to download data, audio, video, contacts, location and friends list of users. Over a million NCC cadets addressed by the Prime Minister were made to part with their mobile phone numbers, emails etc. to the PMO.

“What is this mad obsession with collecting data? One of the arguments offered by no less than the Attorney General before the Supreme Court was that data is secured in Aadhaar because they lie behind a 13 feet high and 5 feet thick wall,” said Singhvi while referring to foreign firms like Cambridge Analytica that campaigned for the BJP in elections and breached Aadhaar data.