[Reader-list] The culture of Surveillance

[Ravi Sundaram]

It seems to me that new openness with that surveillance technologies are
being discussed in India points to certain crucial, long term shifts in
elite discourses.

Historically technologies of surveillance in South Asia have been state
monopolies, ranging from innocent town and city records and the census, to
those associated with the forces of order: tapping of phones, mail and the
mundane mechanics of intelligence gathering at the local police station. 

The new transition happened when the mobile phone contracts were given out
in the early 1990's - when the regime made it mandatory for all mobile
phone companies to set up monitoring units manned by the police, at the
company's cost. The same principle has applied to ISP's, and the new cable
landing stations for bandwidth. This is still an 19th century model of
intelligence gathering, there have been ways to get around it (SIM cards in
mobile phones), but the framework remains and will surely be mobilised
during crisis points.

The new surveillance push has come has actually from India's IT industry -
which has cheerfully collaborated with the govt in setting up the new
national security network. The industry today acts much like their US
counterparts: in that surveillance and security technologies are "pitched"
to eager government officials. For the Indian state, which is now in a
condition of perennial crisis, IT and technological renewal is the new
lodestar. Hence the new schemes ranging from the fantastic (the national ID
scheme),  to those being practiced on marginal populations (Jeebesh's post
on the Hyderabad prison population) the company -
http://www.ilitec.com/cias.htm) ..These are intimations of the future.
Everywhere in India, police officials, local governments, law enforcement
are rushing breathlessly to the IT industry for solutions to the problem of
'local' knowledge.

It seems to me that old-style libertarianism, which sees the state as
solely responsible will also not work here, since new surveillance
technologies have been implemented in many of India's IT companies, without
any discussion. These are experimental grounds for national deployment. But
capital today plays a crucial role in the culture surveillance, in ways
that we could not imagine ten years ago.

The media seems fairly excited about such developments, and fairly innocent
about the implications of surveillance issues. Given the state of our
public culture a debate on these issues is imperitive.