Blackberry..To be or not to be.

Privacy or lack of it is an option that must firmly remain with the individual. Increasingly I find my own privacy, one that belongs to the nameless, faceless invaded for no rhyme or reason out of my own doing. I have only myself to blame largely for this and cannot indulge in finger-pointing. I sit in my car and discuss bank details, travel plans and a myriad other personal information with concerned parties on the phone. All the while the faithful driver is privy to confidential information. I have an option not to continue my banter, but in order to make use of all the time that we continue to spend on the roads than anywhere else, I do just that. Your own car space in not the only space where eavesdropping is most common. Look around you when you go make a purchase at a store and paying at the bill counter. A minimum of five pairs of eyes would be peering inside your hand bag when you open it and a few more trying to pry into your credit card details. At home, the domestic help have more access to your personal information than any other too. Even children listen to every thing that you say and share it with friends in school. All the while you think they are not old enough to understand. Collecting information is an art by itself. Bored housewives are the Masters of this subject. Prudence pays if one wishes to protect his / her privacy to the bare minimum. Of course, all these things are well under our control. But, what does one do who is not as nameless or faceless and his privacy invaded by the Government?

I use the blackberry often. Not as often as I use the I phone though. An encrypted text messaging service enables Blackberry users to communicate to one another in a clandestine manner is now being perceived as a security threat for India. RIM has offered meta data information to the Indian Government and the Government is not happy with its adequacy. I do not think the Government is interested in monitoring the movements of terrorists alone, but more interested in probably tracking who is trying to pull down the Italian rule. Blackberry does not remain the only way to communicate secretly. Terrorists are more techno savvy than most and are themselves hi tech geeks. They fly planes too for God’s sake. The Government’s innuendo goes on and on with this new blackberry saga.

Pritish Nandy discusses it in greater detail.

I don’t use a Blackberry. My son and daughters do. I use the world’s most boring phone, the one which has been left miles behind in the smartphone race. Once a much admired brand, Nokia now looks like a left behind. The Blackberry and the iPhone have won the popularity stakes. So why don’t I use them instead?

My reasons are ridiculous. One: I find touch phones a bit sick. I love touching food and eating it with my fingers. I love touching beautiful women. But to caress a phone to make it respond to me is a bit unnerving at my age. I guess I’m plain old fashioned. I can’t snog a robot, pet a tamagotchi or shag an iPad. My romances begin and end only with real people of the opposite sex. As for the Blackberry, I find it as exciting as Queen Latifah on steroids. It’s simply much too much for me to handle. Plus, I like phones with great designs and the Blackberry doesn’t quite fit that bill. It’s dowdy, boring, unimaginative.

But why am I discussing phones here? No, it’s not about phones stupid. It’s about technology. The Blackberry uses a technology that allows you and me to talk to each other, share our little secrets, crack silly jokes, strike the odd deal, and say all those wonderfully inconsequential things to our friends and lovers that we don’t want others to hear or know about. Our Constitution entitles us to this privacy. This is your and my right as Indian citizens. For years now, the Government has been trying every trick in the trade to eavesdrop on our conversations and often does so without us ever knowing. Even Cabinet Ministers and senior Opposition leaders have their phone chats listened in on. Why would they spare us? This means any petty Government official who has a bone to pick with you, whether it’s for parking your car in front of his house or because his wife once smiled at you at a party and said hello, can instantly target you as a security risk or an anti-national.

The amount of raw data one must wade through to catch criminals through phone conversations or messaging is impossible to handle in a country as vast and talkative as ours where millions of people are constantly chatting away on their handsets in many languages, many dialects by voice, sms, emails, chat service and social networking sites. So if the intent is to catch criminals at random—terrorists, tax evaders, bribe takers—this is no way to do it. One can spend an entire lifetime listening to sick jokes, porn chats, astrological predictions, sales talk and couples squabbling without getting one piece of authentic, credible, actionable information that can nail a wrongdoer. In any case, intercepted phone chats are not exactly evidence that courts like to hear.

So what’s the purpose of such snooping? What’s this paranoia that drives us to pursue the dubious examples of Saudi Arabia and UAE (Bahrain too, one hears) to lean on RIM, the company that makes the Blackberry, to open up their security codes to Government scrutiny so that snooping becomes possible? Is it the argument of the State that the privacy of millions of Indian citizens should be made subservient to what it sees as national interest, which in this case is the right to snoop on everyone so that security concerns of the State are addressed? To my knowledge, no terrorist has ever been caught with a Blackberry. They use sat phones. And even if the Blackberry is banned or its encryption codes forced open by the Government by arm twisting RIM, there will be Skype and many more internet phone systems still open to criminals. By the time the Government gets down to banning those, new technologies will emerge. Terrorists and criminals are clever people. They are always one step ahead of the law.

So why ban the Blackberry? It will only hurt people like you and I who will now be sharing our private conversations with eager, State-hired eavesdroppers. What they will make out of such conversations we don’t know. But what we do know are two things. One: The word privacy will vanish from our lexicon with every State agency listening on to everything we say and do. Two: More and more innocent people will be harassed by these agencies in their constant attempt to justify their snooping. Witch hunts will increase. Journalists, RTI activists, whistle blowers will be pre-empted, blackmailed, possibly even set up for a kill if they know too much. Is this is the kind of nation we want India to be, in the name of national security?

If RIM refuses to cave in, even I will switch over to the Blackberry to show my support for the cause of free speech, aesthetics be damned. Right now, the Blackberry has come to represent my right to privacy and I am not going to give it up so easily. Nor should you