[HumJanenge] Natgrid will kick in from May 2011. Is the big brother threat for real?

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main47.asp?filename=Ne131110Natgrid_will.asp

A terrorist has been arrested in Kashmir's Anantnag district. During
interrogation, he reveals that two of his fellow operatives are from
Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. As of now, the procedure is that the
interrogator would write a report to be perused by his senior
officers. If and when they read it, the information will then be
forwarded to their counterparts in the relevant states, who will
forward it to the district superintendent of police. This winding
process often takes a month.

But from May 2011, there will be major changes in the way such data is
handled across India. With the National Intelligence Grid (Natgrid) in
place, the interrogator will immediately feed the data into the
Natgrid and the Coimbatore Police will get instant updates. They can
not only mail back specific questions to the interrogators, but also,
if required, send someone to join the investigation right away. All
thanks to Natgrid.

Natgrid, the brainchild of Home Minister P Chidambaram, is based on
the US model. It will integrate the existing 21 databases with Central
and state government agencies and other organisations in the public
and private sector such as banks, insurance companies, stock
exchanges, airlines, railways, telecom service providers, chemical
vendors, etc.

Eleven government agencies (including RAW, Intelligence Bureau,
Revenue Intelligence, Income Tax, etc.) will be able to access
sensitive personal information of any individual — such as bank
accounts, insurance policies, property owned or rented, travel, income
tax returns, driving records, automobiles owned or leased, credit card
transactions, stock market trades, phone calls, emails and SMSes,
websites visited, etc. A national population registry will be
established by the 2011 Census, during which fingerprints and iris
scans would be taken along with GPS records of each household.

Once the Natgrid is in place, security agencies will need to just feed
your name into the system and all information about you will be
available at the click of a button. Apart from this, important
information that every police or intelligence agency receives will
also be fed to the grid, thereby enabling the agencies to coordinate
their strategy.

According to the home ministry, the Central intelligence agencies and
state police have plenty of information that is not shared or because
there is no umbrella organisation to collate all the information,
which any or all the agencies can share to generate real-time
intelligence. The Natgrid enables quick extraction of information,
data mining, pattern recognition and flagging 'tripwires' of
suspicious or unusual activities.

With a budget of Rs. 2,800 crore and a staff of 300, the Natgrid is
headed by Raghu Raman, an ex-serviceman who previously headed the
Mahindra Special Service Groups, a leading player in risk and
governance consulting.
Natgrid will integrate existing 21 databases with Central and state
government agencies and other organisations

BUT WILL the Natgrid really improve our national security? Or will it
merely duplicate the existing intelligence mechanism? "Natgrid is all
about instant communication," says former Intelligence Bureau director
Ajit Doval. "It will help in dissemination of data — everybody will be
in the loop. It will function like a power grid, where every state
shares power stored in it. A major hurdle in the fight against
terrorism is that many intelligence agencies are wary about sharing
information with each other. In the US, the CIA does not talk to the
FBI, which keeps the NSA at bay. In the UK, the MI5, MI6 and
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) are known to have turf
battles. In India, the RAW regards the IB and MEA as more of an enemy
than it does the ISI."

"The success of the GCHQ and MI5 in identifying militants in Pakistan
by matching voice samples from phone conversations intercepted between
Pakistan and UK, and comparing them with a database of voice prints of
suspects, underscores the need for Natgrid," says Ravi Visvesvaraya,
head of C4ISRT (Command, Control, Communications and Computers
Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Targeting), a defence
think tank. "India has had a Joint Intelligence Committee to
coordinate between intelligence agencies, but its functioning has been
stymied by the very agencies it was supposed to integrate."

Training of end-users is also important. "If you want Natgrid to be
effective, you have to open it to the last operating level, that is
your sub-inspector," says Doval. "The problem will be that most of
them are semi-literate and not well versed with computers. So, the
chances are that they feed so many things that contaminated data will
finish off the good data. To save it, you will need to have trained
people all over the country so that they don't fill the grid with
trash."

What also worries the home ministry is the security of the system and
its potential misuse. "A stringent system for verification should be
in place," says Doval. "If there is a mole, then terrorists or hackers
will be able to download data. Imagine the kind of catastrophic
scenario that will create. So, it will be a challenge to look after
the security of the system."
'In conjunction with the UID scheme, Natgrid will result in invasion
of privacy,' says C4IRST head Ravi Visvesvaraya

Some are worried about privacy issues. "In conjunction with the UID
scheme, Natgrid will result in invasion of privacy, and personal data
will be extremely vulnerable to exploitation by criminals," says
Visvesvaraya. "Due to the terror threat, there has been a trend in the
judiciary and legislature to make surveillance easier and curtail
privacy rights."

Today, a citizen has absolutely no legal protection against government
surveillance. Though the Supreme Court had ruled against arbitrary
surveillance on a petition filed by the People's Union for Civil
Liberties in 1996, it was overturned by Parliament with the passage of
the Information Technology (Amendment) Act 2008. It is noteworthy that
no political party raised objections when the government passed this
Act, which removed certain safeguards regarding surveillance.

"The assertions that the Natgrid will have mechanisms to prevent
leakage and that it will access only abstracted and approved subsets
of information cannot be relied upon," warns Visvesvaraya.

Indeed, in a pending case about invasion of privacy, the Delhi High
Court observed: "We have no clear definition of what is meant by
'invasion of privacy' within the RTI Act." Indeed, we have no
equivalent of the UK's Data Protection Act, 1998, Section 2 (Sensitive
Personal Data), which reads as follows:

In this Act, "sensitive personal data" means information such as:
• The racial or ethnic origin of the subject
• His/her political opinions
• His/her religious beliefs or other beliefs of a similar nature
• Whether he/she is a member of a trade union
• His/her physical or mental health condition
• His/her sexual life
• The commission or alleged commission by him/her of any offence
• Any proceedings for any offence committed or alleged to have been
committed by him/her, the disposal of such proceedings or the court
sentencing.

"Natgrid is an important step, but there are various handicaps," says
a home ministry official. "To ensure that the data does not fall into
the wrong hands or is not abused will be a Herculean task the
promoters will face."