Surveillance and The Pollster-geist

Astrologers and pollsters can both befuddle with their predictions, and how to say ‘No’ to the spy in your toaster

BEFORE THE exit polls began to run, India Today TV caused considerable public excitement by turning to tarot readers and astrologers. Rahul Kanwal has been fielding three-cornered brickbats for fielding charlatans to play off against the high priests of the mean, median and mode, but perhaps the derision emanating from the liberal community is undeserved. Surely an astrologer’s reading of the polls is no more unreliable than a pollster’s? The discredited fraternity needs to spread the blame, and the distant descendants of Varahamihira — who was a fine astronomer but in the fashion of Indian astronomers, an astrologer first — are readily available. And anyway, astrologers are the kings of morning television, telling people what to eat, what colour to dress in and what sacrifices to make in order to stave off disaster.

In communications technology, what is old hat to practitioners is often news to the public. This week, there have been two instances, domestic and international, of tech non-news making headlines. The big international headline in communications is the latest Wikileaks dump, which suggests that US government spooks and their contractors can take control of your phones, computers, car, smart television and your toaster. This is not exactly news to people working in the field. Opportunities to turn our devices into bugs have multiplied with the proliferation of internet-connected hardware, and the birth of the internet of things is going to take this game to a new level.

Off the air surveillance of mobile networks and digital circuits is completely undetectable now. Earlier, the “off-hook” hack was used to delude landlines into believing that they had been picked up, at which point they turned into always-on bugs. Now, a similar trick is being used to turn smart TVS into surveillance devices. Modern devices are much more useful than their predecessors, which snooped on sound. Now, almost everything has a camera, and it is not very hard for a hacker to turn it on remotely. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

The source code of the surveillance software which the Wikileaks dump exposes will be shared with the industry, so that they can protect their products better. But what the coverage around the story does not highlight is that the target of state surveillance — the public in general — usually has to explicitly grant permissions before it can work. “Zero day exploits” are the exception — vulnerabilities which the programmer, seller and user of a product did not know about before it was released. They give the ungodly a small window of opportunity before the hole is patched. Apart from that, a person’s privacy can be violated only with his or her consent and active participation. You have to surf to an unsafe location, click something visibly dodgy, or open an email you really shouldn’t see to give the government the toe in the electronic door. The rule of thumb is very simple: if you don’t want your TV or toaster to compromise you, discourage them from surfing porn sites and responding to Nigerian scam mails.

Meanwhile, here at home, BJP MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar is making news online precisely when he may have wished to fly under the radar. Getting a temporary injunction against The Wire and forcing it to pull down two articles has given new life to those very articles, and runaway human curiosity is causing otherwise disinterested people to shrug off their political lassitude and go hunting for them. One explores the possibility of a conflict of interest in defence procurement, and the other discusses Chandrasekhar’s backing for Republic, the new “independent” TV channel announced by Arnab Goswami, which still remains on the drawing board. There is a linguistic conflict here — an “independent” channel should not be dependent on a party MP.

What’s baffling about this matter is the legal action. Chandrasekhar knows how the internet works. Was he really not aware that the takedown is history? The internet is anyway designed as a multiple redundancy system. Concerted human agency is required for it to lose data. And with the proliferation of spiders, no one has any idea how many copies of a web page which has been taken down still exist in online. In this case, copies exist on archive.is, which appears to be located in Iceland but reports a Prague address, uses services based in Liechtenstein and is attributed to either a Russian skater or a glamour photographer. This is clearly a guy disinterested in fame, and only interested in offering a service which people can use to permanently archive their web pages if they fear takedowns.

Other copies must exist on Brewster Kahle’s Wayback Machine, which has archived The Wire pretty diligently. The last snapshot was taken just days ago, on March 6. It is really not rocket science to access these archives, and the takedown had the effect of exciting public attention, the same as hiding candy from children. And hence the revived, childlike interest on Twitter in the very ethical questions which the takedown was supposed to discourage. If you don’t want people to see something, try leaving it in full sight.

You have to surf to an unsafe location, click something visibly dodgy, or open an email you really shouldn’t see to give the government the toe in the electronic door.