The hype around the Pegasus case (of allegations that the ‘personal communication devices of a range of people in India, including journalists, civil society activists and politicians were targeted illegally using the Israeli-made spyware’) and the misplaced hope in the Supreme Court of India (which had appointed a committee to probe the allegations) that the probe outcome would be decisive have now been deflated. There is something terribly amiss which will unfold over time, to reveal that the Centre and the States operate like a police state when it comes to surveillance. Corporations have and carry out the same level of surveillance, completely unfettered by the law. We perhaps placed too much hope in the central government and the Supreme Court. The Court did not have the courage to force the Government to disclose its intrusive activities. “None of your business” was the message sent out by the Union government. Perhaps setting up the committee itself was an exercise in futility.
As far back as 1986, in the Wiretap Act in the United States, the law prohibited private agencies from engaging in surveillance. When government seeks permission to do surveillance it must apply to a Federal Court, and only when there is “no other option”. Thirty-six years later, in India, corporate houses snoop on activists and competitors at will and collect huge dossiers on “persons of interest”.
In 1997, in Ireland, the Report on Privacy was released with its focus on private parties and it recommended the recognition of a new statutory tort. The report complained of the legal vacuum created by new technology outpacing laws and said that this was a classic case for law reform. Spying by governments was the new threat on the horizon.
