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Whistle-Blowing in the Wind

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Whistle-Blowing in the Wind ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Whistle-blowing in the Wind SRINIVASAN RAMANI, STANLY JOHNY Vol. 48, Issue No. 28, 13 Jul, 2013 Srinivasan Ramani ([email protected]) is Senior Assistant Editor with the Economic and Political Weekly. Stanly Johny ([email protected]) is a journalist based in New Delhi. Only the small nations of Latin America, committed to “Socialism of the 21st century”, stand up to the might of the United States, by offering to provide asylum to whistleblower Edward Snowden. The rest of the world’s state establishments show their inability to defy the US despite great sympathy for Snowden among their citizens (including within the US). In an ideal world, a whistleblower like Edward Snowden – an insider who threw light on the dystopian mass surveillance conducted by the US’ secretive security agencies – would have been regarded as the truth-teller he wanted to be known as. He would have been provided sanctuary by any government that would have been outraged at the US’ intrusive surveillance apparatus. The world’s other nations would have offered sympathy and demanded that the US rollback the programme and Snowden would have been hailed for his catalytic efforts. In the real world that is clearly dominated by a lone superpower to which every other nation regardless of standing or power has some entwined interest related relationship, Snowden is a headache for the state establishments. With the US cancelling his passport, pressing criminal charges and seeking to imprison Snowden, the state establishments elsewhere - irrespective of being the US’ formal allies (and are invariably targets of the NSA’s surveillance) – have been coy with regards the question of his asylum. This is despite public opinion that is clearly favourable to Snowden across such countries, from those in Europe to even in Russia and China and within the US. If ever there was an example of the disconnection between the state and society the world over – it is this. Reactions to revelations of the presence of massive mass surveillance programmes run by the US’ National Security Agency (NSA) can be broadly classified into four kinds – indignant reaction from state representatives of the US allies apart from other nations; condemnation and outrage from citizens cutting across national boundaries; nonchalant acceptance of the programme by some nation-states; and lastly genuine sympathy and willingness to resist the US’ diktats by some countries offering asylum to Snowden. ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 Indian External Affairs minister Salman Khurshid's[1] appraisal of the US' NSA's vast eavesdropping apparatus is a close encounter with the third kind. His remark about the PRISM programme (and the massive fiber optic cable snatch of internet data, among others) as mere "computer analysis, computer study of pattern of calls" is either just a supine acceptance of the programme or a naive dismissal of the potency of the NSA effort. The PRISM programme involves the access by the NSA of servers and databases of the behemoth internet companies and is apparently done to give structure and clarity to the NSA’s other effort to “vacuum” internet data from fiber optic cables originating from the USA. These programmes are a clear example of what people call the existence of a powerful “military-industrial complex” in the US. Khurshid should actually do a better job of his duties as the "external affairs" minister of the country and see how these revelations – mostly published in the Guardian newspaper among others—have been received both by the US allies and other international actors as well as the domestic political and civil society representatives within the US itself. He could do better than blithely accepting the official US claims about the project, which have either been mendacious or plainly misleading to the public. Domestic Reaction in the US The defence of the programme by US officials has been that it is directed at the external world and that spying on US citizens is circumscribed by restrictions posed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Domestically, the US administration has sought to play down the obvious problematic nature of the NSA's operations to suggest that these are "externally oriented" programmes and that there is enough oversight to protect the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment guarantee of privacy for American citizens. And that the programme is robust enough for national security. This defence has been called into question by several who have suggested that the checks and balances offered by the FISA Act are rather flimsy in practice - as is apparent in the Verizon revelations. Commentators have found that "suspicion-free"/dragnet wiretapping for metadata is not as innocuous as made out to be. The amendments brought about to the FISA Act during the Obama regime only provided a veneer of legitimacy to the predecessor George W. Bush’s programme of warrantless wiretapping of US citizens and the NSA’s actions went even beyond the atrocious Patriot Act passed during Bush’s tenure. No serious and diligent expert on national security has bought the argument that it requires such a method of suspicion-free (dragnet) wiretapping and internet surveillance to prevent and interdict acts of terrorism in the USA. As for those who are concerned about privacy and the retention of a free environment for dissent and freedom of expression in the US, the limitless tracking of phone calls, allowing for profiling using metadata information is a clear violation of constitutional rights. On the US’ external front, representatives of the EU, unlike the Indian government, have ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 been indignant in response to revelations of intrusive surveillance by the NSA (through other programmes, one of which is codenamed “Dropmire”) of their diplomats and government personnel[2]. EU representatives have been equally upset about mass internet surveillance of their citizens, whose privacy agreements with internet companies while signing up for their services, have basically been rendered useless with the revelations of indiscriminate retrieval and analysis of their internet data - voice chats, text messages, emails etc. Reports in the Der Spiegel suggest that half a billion records of internet conversations and phone calls were being monitored every month by the NSA. Documents provided by Snowden have revealed that the NSA has worked with Britain jointly in a programme called “Tempora” to spy on EU allies. Interestingly, Snowden also suggests that EU countries also cooperate with the NSA in a “no questions asked basis”. In other words, the EU members’ strongly worded reaction to the revelations was perhaps only for public consumption. Why is the Indian government being so coy in its criticism of the US government's efforts or even being so dismissive of it despite the intensity of surveillance that the NSA has focused on India[3]? Bandwagoning with the big power The response by ex-diplomats and some “strategic analysts” has been that spying is a common international practice – every nation-state does it for its purposes and this is nothing to be alarmed or surprised about. That response does not consider the fact that the spying done by the NSA – on billions of records of phone calls and pieces of internet communication per day – dwarfs any dedicated and targeted espionage operation carried by anyone else. Some commentators have even weirdly argued for India to emulate the PRISM programme for its own national security imperatives. The Indian government’s non-response to the NSA revelations perhaps flows from other considerations. For one, the Indian government has reportedly been pursuing a similar programme for online surveillance in India. Termed the Centralised Monitoring System, decks have been cleared by the Indian government to utilise legislation allowing for electronic surveillance to be directly conducted by a centralised government agency without having to rely upon telecommunication companies for the purpose. The Indian IT minister’s glib response to a query about this programme was that it actually enhanced privacy – by taking away responsibility from the telecom companies and bestowing it on the agency. But a cursory look at the operations, which purportedly provide an ability to track metadata of any individual using internet and communication services in India, without adequate checks and balances, suggests that this programme just as PRISM is ripe for misuse. Secondly and more substantively, the Indian government under the UPA (and its predecessor, the NDA) has been avid in its aims to bandwagon with the US by slowly dismantling its strategic independence vis-a-vis the lone major superpower over the years. ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846 The process of becoming an outright ally to the US has been slowed down due to domestic opposition and resentment among sections of the diplomatic corps which has traditionally been trained to emphasise strategic autonomy and self-reliance as motifs for India's foreign policy. But the UPA under PM Manmohan Singh has only tried to continue policies of over- turning both motifs couching them under "pragmatism" and adjustments necessitated due to the changes in the world power structure following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Outwardly, the Indian establishment has rejected claims of loss of strategic independence by arguing that it is still committed to various efforts. These include promoting multipolarity via alternate international groupings for economic and political cooperation and coordination such as the BRICS, and expanding its external involvement in other regions of the world by utilising its soft power due to rise in its prestige as a knowledge power. Yet, India's inability to avoid becoming subservient to the US' power has hamstrung its stated goals. The pursuit of a strategic alliance with the US has brought it difficulty with its neighbour China, who perceives the growing US-India strategic tie-up as the former's attempts at undercutting rising China by "offshore balancing".
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