Can you have your cake and eat it too? Even an infant figures out soon enough that this is pretty impossible. Still, it wails and wishes things were otherwise. Growing into adulthood, we don?t really grow out of such disorientation. Technology only pushes it into hyperdrive. We want better broadband. We are annoyed at being made to wait for 3G services. My mobile should have faster Internet delivery. The logical corollary of all this connectivity is reduced privacy, weakened security. We ought to know that the more we live our lives on our mobiles and on the Internet, the more vulnerable we are becoming to our chosen boundaries being breached by machines not of our choosing. But no sooner does such a breach register?and the odds are constantly rising?then we start spluttering. A search for the guilty could make us turn to service providers or governments or banks et al. Seldom does it make one look in the mirror.

If the mirror could speak, it would say that Indian citizens have given tacit consent to surveillance, including electronic surveillance. The Mumbai 26/11 attacks raised a hue and cry about how Indian intelligence was stymied and technologically outperformed by the terrorists. Before this, pushed by a sense that Indian intelligence had been caught napping as hostile forces set up the Kargil offensive, similar cries had been addressed by the establishment of the National Technical Research Organisation. It is unreasonable to today argue that NTRO was supposed to monitor only specified communication links as against conducting general sweeps, too. Without such sweeps, R&AW would never have picked up telephonic conversations that today form an important part of India?s case concerning the 26/11 terrorists? linkages with Pakistan. In Kargil days, of course, one of R&AW?s great successes was nosing into telephone conversations between General Musharraf and his chief of general staff, which again helped build India?s case about the Pakistan army?s role in the incursion.

We are being told that in Western democracies, the debate over privacy vs security?the tension between the Benjamin Franklin dictum ?They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety? and Thomas Jefferson?s ?The price of liberty is eternal vigilance??has much higher visibility. This is correct and traceable in varied ways. Beginning last year, the American Bar Association actually offers seminars on how marital lawyers can use electronic evidence to advance their cases. Notwithstanding privacy protections, interception of cellphones, text messages and browsing records is increasingly and legitimately attracting public exposure. Tiger Woods was recently inconvenienced by this trying fact.

Popular culture, too, provides a wide sampling of high-tech privacy-cracking kits. A host of TV dramas ranging from the US?s CSI to the UK?s Waking the Dead are not only premised on technology?s challenge to confidentiality, they also put the confusion over legal safeguards centrestage. This brings us to the second claim that is being made on behalf of Western democracies, which is not nearly as defensible.

We are being told that in Western democracies, an optimum balance has been found between privacy principles and the surveillance imperative. Such a balance is completely mythical. In the US, courts continue to juggle established rights against new-fangled science. While litigation has forced the suspension of some individual programmes, warrantless wiretapping is alive and kicking. A host of data relating to airline tickets, car rentals, job records, etc, has already been disclosed to third parties and is, therefore, not covered by the Fourth Amendment. Profiling systems remain secret (it is again not very reasonable to expect Indian sleuths to conduct surveillance without some form of profiling). Social security numbers are far from being perfectly protected?in an experiment, Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross could accurately predict these nine-digit numbers for 8.5% of the people born in the US between 1989 and 2003.

In the UK, a plethora of public bodies can access communications data. Armed with more than 4m CCTV cameras?or around one for every 14 people?and DNA databases, the UK government monitors citizens rather more closely than its Indian counterpart. In both the US and the UK cases, if terrorism gave the first big push for legitimising a new surveillance order, the financial crisis added icing on the spooky case. Reeling under fears that 20th century legal and institutional frameworks stymie investigating agencies from digging out the financial frauds as much as the terrorist plots peculiar to the 21st century, various authorities (again with the public?s tacit acquiescence) are increasingly deploying tools that give civil liberty campaigners nightmares.

Together, terrorism and the financial crisis have relegitimised big government, whether it is in democracies like India and the US or alternative outliers like China. Particularly newage concerns like climate change are according additional legitimacy to increased government intervention. Thus encouraged, as governments get increased immunity as well as increased capability for trawling through citizens? lives, they find side benefits like stumbling on tax dodgers. Then there is the ID card aspect, which is particularly pertinent for India as it pursues the UID project. Because citizens now expect governments to offer more efficient deliveries of everything from health to food subsidies, they are willing to share all kinds of details (including biometric data) in exchange for some version of a smartcard. Such a card, after all, is what we have already negotiated with our favourite supermarket or online bookstore.

The stronger challenge to a federal intelligence agency like NTRO intercepting the conversations of everyone from a Congress general secretary and a Bihar chief minister to a Union minister, a CPI (M) general secretary and a former national security advisor derives from the question of authorisation. We are being told that NTRO is an institutional orphan without ministerial oversight. Assuming that orphans are indeed less capable of legitimate and honourable self-conduct, how can ministerial purview (which the home minister has said he is open to considering) guarantee that NTRO doesn?t curry political favours with targeted tapping? If the matter concerns updating legislation, this is, of course, necessary. The Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, the Information Technology Act of 2000 and the Supreme Court judgment in response to a PIL challenge are all supremely lagging in terms of how tracking digital footprints has moved to the centrestage of intelligence gathering.

Privacy is a construct of modernity. The irony is that it is modernity?s newest avatars that are shaking up privacy?s claims. Whether it is cellphones that are already ubiquitous in India or the Internet whose ubiquity is now a national goal, today?s technologies are forcing us to redefine expectations of privacy. We aren?t just victims of change but its agents as well.