Countering surveillance

Both legal and technical gaps need to be plugged

Over the past few years, the government has taken several steps that have led to apprehensions of India becoming a surveillance state with unchecked and growing powers to spy on citizens. The latest move is the home ministry’s step to create a centralised database of fingerprints, linking all police stations and state fingerprint databases across India. The new Crime and Criminal Tracking Network System (CCTNS) is a work in progress with ambitious plans to add face recognition capability and also link vehicle registrations. There are also reports of the ministry repeatedly asking for access to the Unique Identification Authority of