The Brave New World of the Glass House

What does the Niira Radia tapes, Wikileaks and whole body scanners have in common? It is the end of privacy both for the public individual or the private one. For the public individual, every thing that they speak or write can now be put in public domain. A quarter of a million cables from US Embassies around the world, some of them marked highly confidential are now public. So are the private conversations of the high and mighty in India – from how they manipulated the system to everyday trivia are all out there. A US Government or a Tata may scream about invasion of their secret private world. In the new digital era, they have to start recognising they do not have this any more.

For the private individual, the invasion of privacy is of a different order. Let us face it – most of us have very little information that is of interest to the rest of the world. That is why the concern about the only private information we have – the size of our privates. The whole-body scanners that are now being introduced take even this privacy away from us.

Welcome to the new world where everybody can watch everybody – if they want to. We are unlikely to get control over our private data ever again, the laws, the society's wishes, notwithstanding. The Governments, the Tatas or us. All of us are in a 24 hour reality show – this is the brave new world of the glass house.

How did this come about? While the social causes, particularly for air travel, was important for body scanners, a part of the reason is the simple growth in the digitisation of knowledge. That is why the US State Department put all its diplomatic cables into an electronic archive. It made sorting and retrieving information easy, but it also introduced the obvious risk of being easily accessible. Earlier, anyone could only have looked physically at a small part of this information. One of the problems in an earlier age was that even if one had access to important documents, copying them and taking them out was not easy. Now all it takes is a few minutes, that too completely unobtrusive. Copying this information – a quarter million of cables – is today equally simple – a DVD or a small flash drive can store gigabytes of information. You do not have to walk to a copying machine – all this can be done today while seated in your cubicle, accessing the on-line archive and using a laptop or the office desktop to copy it.

Again, it appears that 5,000 conversations with Niira Radia have been recorded by the Enforcement Directorate. Only a small fraction of this is currently in public domain. Here again, once telephone conversations have been taped, to expect that they will not be copied and will remain a secret forever, is wishful thinking. Amar Singh's tapes also became public though not as widely as the Radia tapes. It did not reveal too much about how power is wielded in the country – and more about the kind of person he is. Radia tapes are important – not because of who are on the tapes but how the Government and media are dancing to the tune of the mega corporations – the Ambani's and the Tatas – and their big time fixers.

The public disclosure of his conversations with Radia has caused Tata to complain about invasion of his privacy. Well, here is one of the most powerful business man in the country, complaining about his right to privately talk to his fixer. Niira Radia was fixing ministries, various deals, flows of money and foreign exchange and even the news. It is difficult to believe that Tata was completely ignorant of this side of her operations. If she was under the scanner of the Enforcement Directorate for violating various rules and she was also working for him to fix things for his companies, why should he expect special privileges?

Vir Sanghvi and Barkha Dutt have also complained about how their privacy being invaded. Vir Sanghvi is a special case, as Radia briefed him on what he should write on the Ambani Vs Ambani legal dispute. Radia tells him that he should not talk about natural resources being given to private houses, as Mukesh really has got this, but should focus on how a private MOU between two brothers should not override national concerns. He was also told to criticise the judge who had held that the MOU between the two Ambani brothers was binding. The column that Sanghvi wrote (http://virsanghvi.com/CounterPoint-ArticleDetail.aspx?ID=312 ) does just that. We will not go into whether the arguments in the article was bogus or not. The issue here is that he reproduced almost verbatim what Niira Radia told him to write! And this was not all. In his initial response to the Radia tapes, he fudged (http://www.tehelka.com/story_main47.asp?filename=Ws1911102G_FALLOUT.asp), which was the article he had written after his conversation with Radia, referring to a later article (http://www.hindustantimes.com/Bhaisaabs-fight-your-battles-elsewhere/Ar…). Only later, he mentioned both the articles and claimed he wrote what he did after getting convinced about the correctness about Radia's positions. This argument would have been plausible, except for the tape transcripts. It shows that he wrote n his column exactly what Radia told him to write. And the conversation was clear – he was going to write this in the next day's column, which he did.

May be there was no quid pro quid involved. May be he was just lazy. Instead of writing himself, it was much easier to take dictation. The point is that it is no longer possible to do all this privately and get away with it. The private and the public can no longer be kept separate. If you cog in private, you risk being outed in public.

The response of Indian corporate houses and the US Government have been identical to the Wikileaks and the Radia tapes. The outrage is that something that was secret was made public. If the major task of diplomacy is to lie for your county, Wikileaks has shown this is now no longer feasible. Just as Radia tapes have shown that private conversations of the high and mighty are no longer private.

Of course, there are highly objectionable acts of Governments that become public through such leaks. Such as asking American diplomats in the UN to spy on UN officials and diplomats posted in the UN. The issue increasingly is not that the Governments have the right to keep such things secret but whether they should be involved in such illegal acts?

It is not that any of these acts were ever fully secret. But there was always plausible deniability. That is the fig-leaf that Wikileaks has blown away. From Afghanistan to Kashmir, nothing now is secret. For us, the argument that we did not know what our Governments are doing, now no longer holds.

If you are a private person, your actions may have no public interest. So you won't find it in the Internet or in the 24 hour news channels. But that does not mean you are free from surveillance and monitoring. Or being naked in front of whole-body scanners. All this is an invasion of privacy and many people are going to find it highly uncomfortable, if not objectionable. The point is that whatever our reactions are, this is here to stay, whether we like it or we don't. Welcome to the new glass house world, private citizens too!

What will be the impact of this in the long term? Will it lead to a more open Governments and with a better informed public or will it only lead to growing cynicism? This is the vital question we need to address. If the Radia tapes (or Wikileaks) produce only a business as usual – within the Government, corporate houses and the media, people will become cynical. If the popular outrage leads to some action and house cleaning, then democracy would be strengthened. What we need to do as the people in this country (or elsewhere) is not become just passive consumers of news but to make news. Not come out with lamps only when TimesNow tells us, but also when the media tell us not to. Not be just voyeurs standing outside the glass house. It is people as actors who can make a difference, not people as passive consumers of this new commodity called news.