Random access: Accused by the pen drive

[A.Rahman]

Random access: Accused by the pen drive​

May 28, 2007: Fear can be funny. Paranoia makes people do strange things, like that General Ripper in Dr Strangelove. In the terrible grip of a crazy idea that the Commies are poisoning "the purity and essence of our natural fluids", the American General, fondling a phallic cigar and contorting his face, launches a nuclear strike against Russia on his own. To "save the precious body fluids of the American people," the General presses a panic button that triggers a doomsday machine which destroys the whole world. Ripper's fear was not funny. It was destructive. In this Kubrik classic, all the powerful people wearing funny hats were driven crazy by fear.

The fear of Reds crawling under your bed is making the police in India do strange things as well. People are being picked up and interrogated on the basis of the files in their computers and pen drives. And if the pen drive contains files about SEZs, land-grabbing, atrocities against dalits and communal riots, you are in big trouble.

Not only will you be taken to the police station, given a dose of truth serum and questioned in isolation, the police will also threaten to lock up anyone who dares to speak in your support.

We don't know if Arun Ferreira from Bandra is a member of the CPI (Maoist) or not, or if he has been involved in any violent act, but the police have already passed a judgement: He is a seditionist — a Naxalite threatening the Indian state. Part of the "evidence" is in his pen drive which has some files on "sensitive issues".

They haven't produced any evidence of his involvement in any violent activity, but Ferreira is guilty because the police suspect he is guilty.

This is not funny. It's scary. If people can be put behind bars for what they have saved in their computers, half the journalists, academics, social activists, NGO workers and writers in this country should be in the police station waiting for their turn to be jabbed with sodium pentothal and talk in a daze about the "seditionist material" in their computers.

And then they would throw you into a dingy cell where petty thieves, rapists and professional killers kick you day and night for being "anti-national".

This is exactly what happened with Delhi-based Kashmiri journalist Iftikhar Geelani a few years ago. The police caught him under the draconian Official Secrets Act for some documents in his laptop which reflected "his inclination towards insurgency in Kashmir".

The documents turned out to be a US State Department report which is available on the internet and had been published by at least one newspaper in India. But, for the police it was simple: a Kashmiri carrying information on the Indian army has to be a terrorist. So, Geelani was guilty because they suspected him of being guilty. It was the same story with B K Subbarao, a scientist with the Indian Navy who was in jail for 20 months because a paranoid establishment suspected him of selling off national secrets.

And they built a case against him on the basis of material he was carrying when they intercepted him at the airport. He was eventually absolved of the charge. Subbarao says that he was called a spy for carrying his own PhD thesis (from IIT-Bombay).

In the past few years, national security has become an obsession. As hundreds of social movements for empowerment — from dalits to tribals to women — gain strength every day, the establishment gets terrified. And it hits back with a vengeance, with national security as its weapon and its shield.

It is a mild reminder of a certain Mr Joseph McCarthy and the ministry of fear he created in the US in the 1950s.

Paranoid about social unrest in the US, McCarthy was convinced that "subversives" had infiltrated the American government and that they were disclosing secret information. Exaggerating the threat of communism, McCarthy claimed that there was a "homosexual underground" that was abetting the "communist conspiracy".

He put many marginalised groups on his list of subversives. And the result was a crackdown on political opponents, writers, film-makers, social and civil rights activists.

We are witnessing something similar here now: the police picking people merely on suspicion, trying to build cases on the basis of emails, phone calls, SIM cards and pen drives.

The cases keep falling flat in the courts while real terrorists walk in and out of the country at will, blowing up common Indians on trains and buses, at mosques and in temples, in cinema halls and offices. The real perpetrators of these crimes almost never get caught, tried and convicted.

Catching people for carrying "sensitive information" can't be a way of tackling national security issues. It has something to do with opinion. It has something to do with suppressing political opposition. It is all about trampling on liberties and stifling dissent. Governments around the world — from the US to Sudan to Colombia — have been itching to launch a war of terror on those who oppose them. And thousands of people with political opinions have been "fixed" through this "war on terror".

In this season of suspicion, I check my personal computer at home. There are hundreds of reports on human rights violations in India, police atrocities, dalit organisations, transcripts of Al Qaida tapes, Abu Ghraib, Naxalite groups, and Nandigram, all downloaded from the net.

I don't think it's safe anymore to save those files on the computer or a pen drive. It's better to keep all this in your mind. They don't have a machine with which they can read your mind. Not yet.

ToI

 

[Contrarian]

Do whatever, pick up whomever, kill the Naxals.no matter what.

 

[joey]

This is quite fair, knowing the recent breach of security by foreign agents using pen drive, but it still baffles me how NGO's are being picked up, really really never heard a case like this, other than the one happened to a guy from MP who was a naxal sympathiser.

The article really puts a beautiful twist, by equating tribals, with naxals and calling it a social movement? like the one happening in north east?

We are witnessing something similar here now: the police picking people merely on suspicion, trying to build cases on the basis of emails, phone calls, SIM cards and pen drives.

so what you want us to do ban internet like china? either enjoy freedom and let it being monitored.a terror can be done with only a few emails. there has been quite some cases of peoples arrested in airports based on sensitive information in their pen drives.

The cases keep falling flat in the courts while real terrorists walk in and out of the country at will, blowing up common Indians on trains and buses, at mosques and in temples, in cinema halls and offices. The real perpetrators of these crimes almost never get caught, tried and convicted.

wtf? oh yes it must be bush & co conspiracy!

have been itching to launch a war of terror on those who oppose them. And thousands of people with political opinions have been "fixed" through this "war on terror".

Seems like a nice dose of communism

The cyber security spy ring

When India tested its nuclear weapons in 1998, the US got a shock of significant magnitude. CIA officials said they did not know about the tests until then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee went on television to announce it four hours after the event. Till then, the seismic data, from which the test could have been detected, had apparently not been analysed yet. The fleets of US spy satellites had been fooled; the multi-billion dollar intelligence network of the only superpower on earth had egg on its face.

This spurred the US to focus on its intelligence gathering in India. It would appear that the efforts have borne fruit.

If the suspicions being expressed by Indian intelligence agents are true, the US may now be in possession of information on India’s war plans for the army, navy and air force. The atomic energy establishment, which no foreign agency is known to have breached significantly in the past, may also have been compromised. Even ISRO data is thought to have leaked to the US spy agencies. Put together, it represents a leak of massive proportions.

It happened because of some smart work on the part of the US agents, and the curious ‘chalta-hai’ type of loophole that is so typical of India. The National Security Council Secretariat — the repository of all this information — is not secured anywhere near as well as the individual intelligence agencies and military headquarters are. In fact, even its staff comprises a large number of part-timers on short contracts. Many of them receive meagre salaries in the range of Rs 15,000-Rs 20,000 a month.

The story so far is that SS Paul, a disgruntled computer analyst with the NSCS, passed on secret data from NSCS computers to Rosanne Minchew, third secretary in the US embassy in Delhi, for $50,000 (Rs 23 lakh). He did this by storing the data on USB drives and taking it out. The operation was on for about a year. Paul eventually got caught because a wing of Delhi Police knew Minchew’s role in the US embassy. They put her mobile under observation and found she was receiving SMS’ from a number that turned out to be Paul’s. He was put under surveillance, and was found to be passing classified information to her.

Investigations in the case showed that Paul had been introduced to Minchew by Commander Mukesh Saini of the NSCS. Saini was the man heading the National Information Security Coordination Cell, and was an important part of the Indo-US Cyber Security Forum. In his capacity as National Information Security coordinator, he was in touch with sector cyber security officers and systems administrators in various ministries, departments and security forces. Investigators now believe Paul was not the only one who Saini introduced to US intelligence. At least five others are under suspicion for passing information to Paul, who passed it further to Minchew.

The case has prompted the Intelligence Bureau to ban cell phones with advanced features from its premises. It already has software, specially developed for its use, to detect the use of USB drives on its intranet. This software logs the time a USB drive is inserted into a computer and the time it is taken out, gives the ID of the computer and its user, and lists the files accessed. The log report is sent to a designated computer.

This software was not deployed at the NSCS. Sensitive ministries and departments also don’t have this software.

However the problem is being seen by experts as more human than technical. If the people tasked with cyber security themselves sell out, it can’t be considered a technical failure, they point out.

Cyber security expert Subimal Bhattacharjee points out that India does not have a policy on critical infrastructure protection. Moreover, security systems are not properly deployed, he adds, otherwise checks and balances would exist so that a person’s colleagues would get to know if he was taking out data. His views are echoed by J Prasanna of K7 computing, who says system administration and cyber security responsibilities should never be concentrated in one person. Banning cellphones, or USB devices, or keeping computers off the Internet do not ensure security, he adds. Monitoring use is a better option.

 

[Samudra]

To criticse the Police and intel agencies for what they have done betrays an ignorance of history.

One could start with a few books on the Cambridge Five to understand the nuances of the trade and how Communist rascals have to be dealt with.

Godspeed to the hunters.