Some notable cases of surveillance

Some names are changed on request

BENGALURU: Vikram and Shalini got married on Valentine’s Day of 2016 after a whirlwind courtship. It was a beautiful wedding, and the young couple seemed to have everything - looks, wealth, a luxurious south Bengaluru home and lucrative banking careers.One year later the marriage was in trouble. Vikram suspected that Shalini was having an affair. At first it was small things. Late hours. Phone calls in the bathroom. Unexplained absences. Vikram asked Shalini questions, but her answers, to him, were evasive. He then decided to watch what she was doing when she was alone in the house.He started looking up spy cameras on online shopping sites – and found a set of small, easily concealable, motion-activated cameras that could broadcast, via his wifi router, to his mobile phone. They were quite cheap, by his standards – less than Rs 2000 each. He bought seven of them. He installed six in the house and one he hid in the hollow of the gate to their house.Vikram would check his phone for the spycam feed every so often. And one day, he found that his suspicions confirmed. The gate camera showed a man with whom she had had a relationship before. Feeds from within the house showed that the relationship still continued.The fairytale wedding is now limping along to a protracted divorce.The story of Vikram and Shalini is not unique. There are hundreds of such stories, taking place across the city today, where suspicion and paranoia and human fallibility form a potent mixture that is catalysed by modern surveillance technology.It’s not just spy cameras – those have been around for nearly a century now. It’s technology that allows people to snoop on deleted texts and WhatsApp messages and record conversations.Vanitha Sahayavani, the women's helpline wing of the Bengaluru city police , is flooded with cases where spouses resort to hi-tech to show the other person is at fault. “Four of every ten cases that we handle are related to technology and surveillance. I would term that as the actual culprit that breaks up relationships. As it is people are on the internet or on their mobile phone all the time. They are also accepting of things like sending each other intimate photos. When one person loses interest in such things, but still remains on their phone all the time, the other party tends to become suspicious. And given the fact that there are so many ways to spy on a person with technology, they find it much easier to look for proof of their suspicions,” says Rani Shetty, head of Vanitha Sahayavani.According to some traders on Avenue Road, the business of spy gadgets was lucrative five years ago, but not anymore, with web portals offering cheap deals and home delivery. “Anyone in Bengaluru with just Rs 1000 in his pocket can purchase spying gadgets. The lack of trust is human and fuelling that the easy availability of these gadgets,” says Anjali Ramanna, a lawyer at the family court in Bengaluru.Ramanna has witnessed a staggering rise in family cases over the past few years where parties use digital evidence to blame each other. “This trend is escalating. There was one case where the husband brought over a thousand pages of printouts of WhatsApp texts he managed to gather using some spying software from his wife’s cellphone to prove she was at fault. It was shocking,” she says.What some suspicious partners fail to realize is that even though digital outputs are used as documentary evidence in family court cases, technology-based surveillance is considered an invasion of privacy and is illegal. People using spycameras and surveillance software could find themselves in jail.Despite this, people often stoop to extreme measures to track the activities of spouses and partners. “Technology, these days, is the breaker of relationships. It makes people irrationally suspicious. I recently dealt with a case where a newly married man drugged his wife and when she lost consciousness, used her finger to open her iPhone to access the contents because he suspected she was having an affair,” says Mahesh Gowda, senior physiatrist and medical director at Spandana Hospital in Bengaluru.According to Gowda, in a suspicion-driven society like ours people in troubled relationships are often paranoid and insecure and are constantly looking for evidence that will confirm their suspicions. “In cases where the partner is innocent, the other person, due to suspicion, develops a delusional disorder following a strong false belief that their partner is doing something wrong. The victim of such disorders will vehemently and constantly search for evidence. Cameras and voice records are their best tools then,” he says.While many use technology to spy, there have also been cases where the spy himself becomes a victim. Bengalurean Manjunatha, a successful software engineer, got engaged early this year. In causal conversations with his fiancé she revealed that she had a boyfriend with whom she broke up with last year. This didn’t go over well with the techie who snooped into her Google account and tracked her previous activity dating back to months till the time when she was involved in the relationship. Manjunatha delved so deep into the phone location activity that he even found she had spent four hours at the boyfriend’s home. He then questioned her about it. This suspicion and obsessive behaviour led the girl to break the engagement. Manjunatha suffered an emotional breakdown soon after and is now undergoing treatment.* A teacher with a famous school in city installs spy cams at different locations in the house to monitor her daughter-in-law. She spots a camera while cleaning house to discover her mother-in-law had partnered with her husband for the surveillance.* Techie snoops on his wife in Bengaluru using IVMS software while seated in his office in Canada over suspicion that she was having an affair. Having caught her on tape, he offers her another chance but keeps her on secret surveillance.* Man uses cloning software to copy wife’s cellphone activity and documents pages of her WhatsApp chats in a bid to use it against her in court.* Bengalurean drugs wife to use her fingerprint to open her iPhone and discovers compromising images and videos of her sent to her paramour. The couple are heading for a divorce.