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The Supreme Court expressed its alarm over a government proposal to tap into the social media chatter of those creating a “buzz” on platforms such as Twitter and Instagram to create a 360-degree profile of influencers, make predictive analysis to “mould public opinion” and “inculcate nationalistic feelings,” observing that this would make India a “surveillance state.”The top court was dealing with a public interest litigation (PIL) challenging a notice inviting tenders by the information and broadcasting ministry from private parties to create a tool that will trawl through a person’s public profiles and statements as well as private communications such as email to make accurate “predictive analysis” of such influencers.The intention is to “mould public perception”, “inculcate nationalistic feelings in the masses, improve India’s image and “neutralise” adverse social media planted by the country’s “adversaries” and give a “positive” pro-India “slant” to social media content, the petition said.“We will become a surveillance state (if this is allowed),” was Justice DY Chandrachud’s response when senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi drew the attention of the threejudge bench to the proposal. Chief justice Dipak Misra heads the bench.The PIL has been filed by Trinamool Congress MLA Mahua Moitra who has challenged the move as violative of a citizen’s fundamental right to privacy.Singhvi argued that the government cannot implement such a surveillance mechanism in absence of a rigorous data protection regime following last year’s judgement upholding the right to privacy. It wants to examine every aspect of an individual, which is against the Puttaswamy judgement, he said, referring to the right to privacy case.“A citizen cannot exercise her right to free speech with the knowledge that the state and its agents are monitoring every word uttered by her, maintaining records and logs of the same and using them to profile her,” said the PIL, which sought to have the proposal stopped at the earliest.CJI Misra issued notices to the government seeking a formal legal explanation. “The data protection law of the government is still awaited,” Singhvi pointed out.The CJI also sought the attorney-general’s explanation on the proposal. The government is expected to reply to the court notice in two weeks.The PIL challenges request for proposal (RFP) issued by the ministry on April 24, 2018, as violative of a person’s right to life, equality and freedom.The RFP invites bidders for supply, installation, testing and commissioning of software for a Social Media Communication Hub besides providing service and support. The RFP has been issued by state-owned Broadcast Engineering Consultants India.The PIL alleged the proposed hub seeks to create a technology architecture that merges mass surveillance with a capacity for disinformation. It aims to create a technology platform “to collect digital media chatter from all core social media platforms as well as digital platforms” right down to the level of the individual, the PIL alleged.The platform, it said, “should also support easy management of conversational logs with each individual with capabilities to merge it across channels to help facilitate creating a 360 degree view of the people who are creating buzz across various topics.”The technology is required to have the capability to “listen” and collect data not only from social media platforms but also from email. Specific capabilities mentioned include live search, monitoring, collecting, indexing and storage of personal data including location-based data and metadata, it said.The ability to “monitor individual social media user/account” is a specific mandate being given to the service provider, it alleged. The software is required to have the “ability to crawl social media and world wide web for data mining . Crawling should be comprehensive and should cover all the major websites and social media handles.”Based on this, the software should be able to “identify influencers” and “see historic conversation of each user in a reverse chronological manner along with the ability to merge conversations across channels.” This data is to be fed into a “New Media Command Room”, which according to the RFP “basically means the platform should have the ability to analyse as well as visualise large volumes of data across diverse platforms in real time”.This will be done both electronically and manually, by a team of 716 social media executives to be stationed in every district. “Daily analysis report incorporating local sentiment” would be sent on to higher-ups in the command structure, the PIL alleged.The private party, the PIL alleged, was also required to have the capability of “deleting access logs and removing any audit trail”.