INFORMATION WARFARE - AN INDIAN STORY
‘Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.’
- Ronald Reagan
I’ve heard about different kinds of military strategies , thanks to computer games, newspapers, history textbooks and a few movies. Techniques like guerilla warfare, surgical strikes, raiding tactics, and pincer strikes, all have fascinated me at some point of time. "Information warfare", however is a relatively new term. The first time I came across this term was when reports about the Russian interference in the US Election results came out. The stories about the alleged modus operandi would rival any Hollywood spy-flick. As per reports, Moscow had two Russian women travelling across 6 major states of the US collecting material information regarding the electoral atmosphere and sending them back for analysis. Surprisingly, Facebook, the magnum opus in social networking had a part in it too. Fake accounts were made using shell companies and stealing Social Security Numbers (SSN) on the network which were used to generate content that would create an “anti-Hillary” sentiment throughout the country which save Facebook, even the FBI couldn’t oversee. And the result shows. Donald Trump won despite clearly falling behind for the most of the phase of the Presidential campaign. Genius, eh? A string of identity thefts, a few info there, few info here, voila! You determine who gets to be the world’s most powerful man.
The way public opinion got shaped in the US underlines the power of social media in democratic politics. The world witnessed its power with the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions in 2011 when it aided the oppressed in organizing protests and passing information in the battle against autocrats. India got its taste with the Narendra Modi Campaign in 2014, which changed the way how politics is fought in the country. The increased recognition of the ability of social media to reach to the deepest gullies, nook and crannies of the country spelled an opportunity for political strategists. Since then, the turf of politics has shifted from streets to screens. Political parties these days have active and dedicated cyber wings (or rather ‘troll wings’) busy in throwing trash on leaders of rival parties and showering pushpavrishtis on their own, enlarging their achievements all the while masking their faults.
But when it comes to all these, a rational person would usually have a laugh and move about their lives. As far as he is concerned, social media has opened up an avenue for free and uninterrupted exchange of ideas, the power of which has been cherished by liberal activists, and loathed by countries like China and North Korea which still have neck deep censorships. Sadly not all instances are of that gravity. Apart from the US elections, reports of hiring of PR firms by the affluent Gupta family in South Africa to eclipse corruption charges leveled against their confidante ex- President Jacob Zuma is the latest in misusing social media to fuel individualistic propaganda. Instances like this makes social media a sleeping giant in the working of a democracy. The way people in a whole country think or how the topics of discussion are formulated by a select few having fixed agendas, from the point of view of democracy, is indeed frightening.
Another aspect of this new found war is that it is not just limited to nations and parties. Adding fuel to the fire is yet another element – Privacy. Think of our own ‘Aadhar’ in this context. Section 57 of the Aadhar Act enables any individual or private companies to use Aadhar information for the purpose of identifying the individual. Though the Russian breached SSN system of the US and the Aadhar system in India can’t be compared on a ‘foot-on-foot’ basis, the fact that both of them are tags that can be used to pin-pointedly identify an individual’s social and economic profile need not be debated. In fact, the latter is much more potently dangerous, as it uses bio-metric information as a means of identification.
Though India isn’t the first country to have collected bio-metric information, it shares the concerns common to all of them. On top of that, Aadhar is leaky. The world’s biggest biometric ID system is a matter of child’s play for experienced hackers, who could break down the Face ID and fingerprint recognition in IPhones in matter of days of their launch. Added to this is the bureaucracy nabbed by corruption that gets you access into a billion strong Aadhar database for less than 500 rupees. The growth of the 3D printing technology combined with easy availability biometrics is yet another cause of concern. With hackers these days duplicating the iris pattern of German Chancellor Angela Merkel from just a high resolution photograph, imagine the challenges that privacy and democracy has to face in this country with no effective preventive mechanisms in place, nor a strong legislation or safeguards to protect people from an almost certain saga of data breaches. This spells tough times for democracy in the country.