A sea of ignorance

[ROUDRAM]

[b]If terrorism has a “root cause”, then there’s one for repeated failure to detect terrorist attacks too — corruption. Let’s stop blaming the poor beat constable and make the imperious babus on Raisina Hills answer for the Delhi High Court blast
[/b]

Urban couch potatoes are great suckers for “national security”. Every time there is a bomb blast, media performers line up “experts” —  retired intelligence bureaucrats, sabjantawallah journalists and even graying matinee idols — who unfailingly recommend the following:


We must be a “strong” nation — damn the citizen’s right to guard personal information; summarily machine gun all those awaiting trial under TADA, POTA, UAPA, MCOCA, etc.
Look how America prevented a repeat of 9/11 — so we must have laws like the Patriot Act, the Total Information Awareness, mountains of audit-free cash for intelligence agencies, etc.
More, more, oh more counter-terror agencies — and yes, please sack the entire irritating Indian judiciary which places no credibility on “terrorists’” confessions

What would the Cabinet Secretariat and Home Ministry do without friends like these? Such folks readily justify the expenditure of obscene amounts (and the suppression of accountability about the same) and wouldn’t bat an eyelid if the human rights of some ghetto Muslims are stolen because a bogeyman called “Pakistan” is ready to devour us, our wives, children and mothers-in-law. Their hero is George W Bush, who passed into history as the worst enemy of American values and totally failed in his “crusade”.

It is time to break the myth about America preventing a repeat of 9/11 through the use of Bush’s extraordinary measures. It must be understood that 9/11 was a mad operation planned in a decentralised way by a small group of fanatics directed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad. It was executed successfully thanks to total lack of coordination between the CIA and FBI. At any rate, such a trans-Atlantic operation involving huge resources is impossible to repeat at frequent intervals.

On the other hand, Terrorism Inc. is mighty pleased with itself for the manner in which it has bled America dry over the past decade. According to David Ropeik the author of How Risky is it, really?(McGraw Hill, 2010): “Perhaps this sombre anniversary can help us realise that we have paid an excessively high price, not just because of the exploding airplanes and buildings, but because of the other explosion that terrifying day... the explosion of fear.” With 4,474 dead (and 22,452 injured) in Iraq and more than 1,700 fatalities (about 13,500 injured) in Afghanistan, and ordinary Americans devastated by rising poverty, social divide and questioning their own nationhood, the long-standing objectives of jehadis to destroy America is pretty much on course.

Old bunnies like me, who deposed before the Kargil Committee and read its recommendations like some holy book with innocent faith that someday India will develop the wherewithal to outsmart terrorism’s master planners, are a little tired of the empty vessels who emit the highest decibels on nights like Wednesday’s.

They make sweet music for the mandarins on Raisina Hills who live a charmed life despite their failure to deliver primary safety to ordinary Indians. So, every time “BOOM” goes a bomb in some crowded place, these all powerful bureaucrats hear “BUDGET!!!”

While one waits for NATGRID to arrive as the magic bullet, it is time we wondered on its necessity in a free country like India. The concept of developing surveillance technology to track and monitor terrorists and other asymmetric threats to national security by achieving total information awareness is structurally heinous, because to achieve this the government will have the power to create enormous databases of personal information on every Indian gleaned from numerous agencies without even a search warrant goes against the grain of civil liberties because a large number of confidentiality clauses, written or otherwise, would be broken. This idea was mooted by the United States Defense Department in the aftermath of 9/11, but shot down because the US Congress struck down funding for it.

These days the NTRO story comes with a whiff of a scam, and indeed it’s a scandal provided the journalists investigate deeper than what the CAG is willing to leak — after all the final report is for the Prime Minister’s eyes only and why should the Prime Minister of the UPA government, the same who is guilty of abetting the biggest scams in Indian history, do the nation the favour of revealing the details of the NTRO loot? Since 2004-05, more than ` 8,000 crore has been sunk into this top-secret organisation. Yet, it lacks sufficiently trained engineers, scientists and mathematicians. It is totally directionless and obsesses itself with trivial pursuits. Sitting at the head is a former civil engineer who knows nothing about the vast strides taken in the field of SIGINT and cyber warfare by China, the United States and, hold your breath, Pakistan.

It is gross oversimplification that Wednesday’s bomb blast, or the ones in Mumbai and Pune before it, was caused by “poor intelligence” or, alternatively, “intelligence not acted upon.” If there is a “root cause” to terrorism, then there is one for its thriving as well. In India’s case it is corruption at the response level. This is because our intelligence establishment is excluded from Parliamentary oversight. The “secret service” funds at the disposal of the head of R&AW is believed to run into tens of thousands of crore annually and nobody can question the incumbent’s discretionary powers over it. Given the liberty he enjoys to recruit ‘sources’ in hostile countries, run front organisations, buy eavesdropping equipment and, above all, gat around the world to “follow leads”, India should have become terrorism free a long time ago.

Corruption haunts almost every single hi-tech purchase made out in the name of intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence. If even half the stories on how purchases of hi-tech equipment in the name of preventing terrorism are put in the public domain, then the real culprit — the bureaucracy of the security establishment — will be exposed. Often politicians have no idea what is happening because these babus report only to the prime minister of the day, who for the most part is overawed by the very mention of the word “national security”. For instance, in the early 2000s, when the Special Protection Group, the bodyguard service for prime ministers raised after the Indira Gandhi assassination, wanted to buy a secure communication system, the Cabinet Secretariat disregarded not only CVC guidelines, but also the a vital scientific parameter which effectively left all future prime ministers’ movements accessible to terrorist organisations. The bureaucrats decided that seeking approval from the DRDO’s Systems Analysis Group (SAG) was “not necessary”. SAG is the only Indian body authorised to grade encryption systems used by government agencies — it tests systems and allots ‘crack resistivity’. Even the vendor admitted before the Cabinet Secretariat that the cypto system which it was hawking was the same as being supplied to other high-end customers.

Two shocking facts emerge from this: Firstly, there seems to be total absence of indigenous skills in developing encryption software in India. This is the result of a deep-rooted fancy for phoren technology. Little do our super sleuths realise that the foreign party which sells you encryption software or an item of hardware loaded with its own source code, then there is nothing preventing that party from retaining the technical ability to crack the same software or hardware once it is applied to sensitive operations in India. Secondly, read in conjunction with the tip-of-the-iceberg NTRO revelations, it is clear that greed has subsumed all other considerations in the intelligence establishment. The agencies entrusted with the duty of protecting the citizen from aggression, whether by State or non-State actors, are routinely selling the country down the river.

Let’s give up our hackneyed ideas and force some accountability at the top.

[The QUEEN]

[Maximus]

[PMREDDY19]