Pegasus is a nation destroyer.
Scientists of various affiliations (independent, corporate, government) continue to research technology that could one day read our mind. Not just to sense an emotion, such as euphoria/despair/anxiety, but specifically read thoughts such as ‘I would like to eat an apple’ or ‘I feel sexually attracted to my friend’s husband Ramesh’. Imagine if in your lifetime, the government acquired such technology and mandated that every citizen’s brain be linked to it. Many seemingly-persuasive excuses can be offered: Crime control, national security and so on. If the use of such technology was put to vote, how would you vote?
Our internal dialogue is perhaps the most private part of our ‘self’. I have many thoughts that I would like to keep to myself; I’m sure you do too. Over the past decade the ‘smartphone’ has, in a way, become an extension of our internal dialogue. We may feel fear or desire which we want to read more about on the internet. We can click on an image, enlarge it and spend four seconds looking at it - it could be something we would feel embarrassed about even if it was in our closest or our most intimate friend knew about. The smartphone is also our private diary, an album of photographs of everyone we know - our partners, our children.
“Privacy includes at its core the preservation of personal intimacies, the sanctity of family life, marriage, procreation, the home and sexual orientation. Privacy also connotes a right to be left alone. Privacy safeguards individual autonomy and recognises the ability of the individual to control vital aspects of his or her life. Personal choices governing a way of life are intrinsic to privacy. Privacy protects heterogeneity and recognises the plurality and diversity of our culture. While the legitimate expectation of privacy may vary from the intimate zone to the private zone and from the private to the public arenas, it is important to underscore that privacy is not lost or surrendered merely because the individual is in a public place. Privacy attaches to the person since it is an essential facet of the dignity of the human being.” - Supreme Court of India in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy & Anr. Vs. Union of India
While Big Tech may well be getting access to all of it; there is a reason that we don’t put every photograph we have on our Facebook feed. We don’t publish our search history on our Facebook feed. We don’t publish our texts - those that we type and send and those that we type but never send - on Instagram or Twitter.
We don’t say to ourselves, let me go ahead and publish this, Google and Facebook will see it anyway. We live in the belief that a part of us - even the part which finds expression on our phones - will remain hidden from the world. Even if none of it is criminal in any way. Governments and activists across the world continue to demand that Big Tech protect our privacy. Apple has recently made changes so that now we know which app is looking at which data.
Surveillance software like Pegasus copies all our photographs from our phones, records every key stroke we touch, every message we write, even if we don’t send it. Basically every single thing that happens on our phone. If this isn’t horrifying enough, it also controls our cameras and the mic in the phone. If you’re taking your phone to the toilet, it is recording you there. It is recording your children, your partners in all their emotional and physical states, it is listening to every breath you take. It is an invasion of our minds, our homes, our loved ones.
When governments acquire software like Pegasus, they acquire the ability not only to invade us, but to plant files of all kinds that they want to. Multiple reports tell us that this has been done in the case of the Bhima Koregaon accused. I have spelt out two dangers thus far - invasion of what is private but true to us, and being framed by what has been planted on us maliciously.
There is a third danger, and I will try to express it in the simplest terms. The ability of the government of a country to use a software like Pegasus against its own citizens means the end of that country. The Supreme Court has, in multiple judgments, spelt out what the ‘basic structure’ of a Constitution is. This structure isn’t basic merely to the book, but to the nation itself. It includes federalism, separation of powers, an independent judiciary, parliamentary democracy and much more. The court says that there are implied limitations on the power of the Parliament to change this - which means that these features cannot be undone, no matter what law is passed by Parliament.
The ability of the government of a country to use a software like Pegasus against its citizens is, in effect, the complete and total annihilation of the Constitution and the basic structure. If the most private and intimate parts of a Supreme Court judge’s life can be accessed by politicians, then independence of the judiciary is dead. Access to an Opposition political leader’s life means Parliamentary democracy and federalism are dead. Access to journalist’s phone means an independent press is dead.
I am deliberately saying, after much thought, that it is dead instead of saying that it is threatened even though the threat itself should move us to action and resistance. It may be possible to lay its foundations again but that process will be as difficult as it was to build a free, democratic India in the year 1857.
There can be no moral counter-argument or alternate view to this. Anyone who defends the use of Pegasus - ask them to publish every single file on their phones and their internet histories on the internet, and then give the world 24x7 video and audio access to their lives.
Governments of many countries have been accused of using software like Pegasus. If their citizens let them get away with it, it will perhaps be the first time in human history that we will witness citizens surrendering both their thoughts as well as their nations in one single event, and to such an extent. For the sake of humanity, I hope such a day does not come to pass.
(This piece was first published here