8th Digital Intimacies Conference - Resisting Digital Surveillance in India

This is a transcript of a conference presentation delivered at the 8th Digital Intimacies Conference was held by the Centre for Global Indigenous Futures on December 1st and 2nd 2022 at Macquarie University on the Wallumattagal Campus, North Ryde, Sydney.

Introduction

Hello everyone, Vanakam. I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land that we are meeting on today, the Wallumattagal clan of the Dharug nation, and I would like to pay my respects to their Elders past and present. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land.

My name is Dhakshayini Sooriyakumaran. I am a queer genderfluid Tamil person who was born in Illankai (known as Sri Lanka) and my ancestors are from the East and North of the island. My family came here when I was just 1, so I am coming from a global north and settler perspective within my research.

Today I’m grateful to be allowed to share really what is very early stage thinking about the topic of PhD research. I have very recently shifted my topic and would like my rationale for doing that with you. I’m really open to any feedback, suggestions and critiques. I’m quite devastated to say I’m not talking about sex, which was sooo fun yesterday. Instead, the focus of my research is on resisting to digital surveillance in India. I am particularly interested in what are the alternative digital futures and regulatory forms that are being imagined within collectives and movements, and how these can contribute to global policy discourses on data protection and AI.

My presentation will be in 3 parts:

1. Digital surveillance, why it is important
2. Examples of resistances
3. Conceptualising prefigurative politics and imaginings

So I will talk through my learning journey about digital surveillance by telling you stories about personal and professional experiences I had that shaped my understanding alongside the review of scholarly literature. I will also make links to the context of India as I go.

4 insights about digital surveillance

1. Digital surveillance expands out from the margins

I first began to think about digital surveillance as a corporate campaigner focused on tech companies who were part of a growing border and surveillance industry. So this is companies such as IBM, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Palantir and who had scaled up public-private partnerships with governments to deploy biometrics, ground sensors, drones etc at national borders. In examining some of these developments what occurred to me was when considering the Uighurs in Xinjiang China, the Palestinians living under Israeli settler colonial occupation, the Kashmiris seeking freedom from the Hindu-nationalist Indian government, not only are they all living under regimes of violent social control but these are regimes that are all digitally enabled. In fact this is increasingly true of all imprisoned and oppressed populations the world over, including here in this colony. I noticed how the experimentation of surveillance tech on those at the margins, then expanded out to the broader populations. We saw this with Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group. And interestingly what we now know as Aadhaar actually began in 1999 as an identity card project for citizens living in border states. For those who don’t know Aadhaar is the Indian government’s digital ID system, which is the world’s largest biometric ID system. It is mandatory for accessing state benefits, welfare subsidies, and to file taxes. When registering for Aadhaar, people are required to share fingerprints and iris scans, in addition to their name, date of birth, gender, address and a facial photograph.

2. Digital surveillance sorts bodies in space and time

What got me thinking about this is when I was interacting with a racist real estate agent who was threatened to blacklist me on a tenancy database, which would mean I would not be able to get a rental property in NSW for 3 years. I started looking into some of the tenancy database companies and saw that they shared data with various government agencies, and even over companies overseas (for example to employee background check companies). This highlighted to me the ubiquity of digital surveillance.

This is also true when you look at Aadhaar. Within a few years of being set up in 2009, Aadhaar became a primary key linking databases of bank accounts, mobile phones, income tax returns, payment apps, email IDs, and so on, even if such a linking is not mandated by the law. Due to data on payments being linked to data on gender, Aadhaar can inadvertently make sex workers more visible in way that puts them at risk, placing an already marginalised group under further scrutiny (Kovacs, 2020).

Surveillance studies (Lyon 2005 and Zuriek 2013) scholars theorise how data functions to sort people into geographic social hierarchies, where some are allowed into zones of privilege, access and opportunity, whilst others are relegated to zones of precarity, debility, and death. Ruha Benjamin calls it ‘coded inequity’(2019).

In the name of efficiency and optimisation, data is used to determine who is a ‘risk’; to sort individuals and groups by their perceived levels of dangerousness, at greater scale and speed than historically possible.

The fact that marginalised communities are overrepresented in contexts that are surveillance is not an accident. Systems of surveillance today are legacies of colonial and even pre-colonial systems of surveillance (in the case of India when it comes to caste). Data extraction and surveillance were central to the classification of people into colonial racial hierarchies and the control of newly acquired territories (Zureik 2013).

It is not just about the maintenance of existing social orders but also about solidifying these into the future, through predictive policing.

We know this is happening in Australia through systems like the STMP, but also India have extensive predictive policing systems in major cities - like New Delhi / Chennai (Shivangi Narayan and Viddushi Marda)  - we needed to think about predictive policing in ways that overlaid intersecting oppressions (Moreton-Robinson 2015, Wang 2018, Eubanks 2017, Mckittrick 2006, Kukutai and Taylor (eds) 2016).

There are long histories of criminalisation of various communities in India - Dalit, Advasi, and Muslim, migrant workers (regional, rural, poor) in particular- colonial and pre-colonial surveillance. We need to consider multiple vectors of oppression in our analyses of surveillance systems.

3. Digital surveillance is obscured by abstraction

Robodebt: for those who are not familiar Robodebt was a classist algorithm that automated welfare debt collection. The abstraction of the violence makes it challenging to resist.

4. Digital surveillance resistance has been co-opted

So my most recent role, that I’ve recently resigned from (so I can say this now!) was as Tech Policy Director at Reset Australia. A think tank affiliated with Reset Global. Being in that world made be realised how many of the large philanthropists who fund what I think they would describe as digital rights work are tech billionaires. They primarily hire policy wonks who are interested in policy interventions where strong regulation holds big tech to account. Yet this is in a global context where most Global South countries and I would say the same for marginalised groups in the global north have a justified deep distrust of the government.

This is certainly true in India where since the government has been using technology to crack down on dissent. India is sometimes self-described as “the world’s largest democracy” despite the display of authoritarian politics where the government shuts down the internet more than any other country in the world, to silence protests and criticism.

When policy proposals are put forward they rarely consider the rights of marginalised groups. For example data protection regulation such as the GDPR has exemptions for migrants and refugees since they are considered a security threat.

And tech regulation experts are rarely across the nuances of how marginalised communities engage with tech. As was spoken about yesterday it used to create spaces where you feel seen and can see others in ways that brings joy and feel liberatory. I certainly don’t know where I’d be without queer Tamil instagram for instance.

All of that largely distressing content on digital surveillance to say that if surveillance systems can be seeded, through experimentation and then grow more powerful with time, then sure the opposite can occur, and the seeds of liberatory systems can be similarly nurtured and grown, taking us to more digital futures  The seeds of liberatory digital systems that allow us to remember who we are and bring us back to ourselves exist within movements resisting carceral technologies and the long histories of data extraction from colonised and marginalised populations.

What does resistance look like in practice?

There are long histories of resistance in India which I don’t have time to do justice to now but to focus on a few examples specific for digital surveillance:

Silencing of Kashmiri activists on social media
Kashmiri activists often find themselves subject to bans, censorship and deprioritization by the content ranking and moderation algorithms of major social media platforms. This results in the silencing of Kashmiri voices about their desire for Azad Kashmir and the killing of Kashmiri bodies (Malik 2018). Digital Rights Kashmir is organising online and offline to hold social media platforms to account.

Biometric data extraction through Aadhaar, India’s digital ID system
There have been several challenges to Aadhaar, including legal challenges in the Supreme Court, as well as petitions and protests against the linking of Aadhaar to other services (e.g. Aadhaar based Facial Recognition for the COVID-19 Vaccination). A coalition of civil society organisations working together had a significant win in 2017 with the Supreme Court declared privacy as a fundamental right.

Surveillance of sanitation workers (known as Safai Karamcharis)
Authorities across India are adopting surveillance technologies (such as GPS-enabled tracking watches) to monitor Safai Karamcharis. Safair Karamcharis are protesting this as casteist, sexist and dehumanising surveillance. This monitoring of attendance and workplace efficiency is being used to further marginalise Safai Karamcharis, majority of whom belong to Dalit, Bahujan, and Adivasi communities (Khaira 2020)

Imagining alternative, anti-surveillance, equitable digital futures
Design Beku is a collective that works in solidarity with marginalised populations in rural India to imagine alternative digital futures. Using a situated and continuous to creating technology projects that resist the Brahanical knowledge structures. Some examples of their work includes: building collaborative wikipedia pages that centre community narratives abbott themselves, imagining a feminist web server and also reducing gender based discrimination in smart cities.

We can see how there are lots of different approaches here - protest, sousveillance (Simone Browne 2015), create tech futures through projects, coalition building. This raises interesting questions about what counts as resistance? What about small scale acts of creative resistance, where does that fit in?

Conceptualising prefiguration / prefigurative politics and imaginings

Prefiguration is the notion that our organising reflects the society we wish to live in—that the methods we practice, institutions we create, and relationships we facilitate within our movements and communities align with our ideals. Many activists argue that prefiguration involves envisioning a completely “new” society…we have already inherited generations of evolving wisdom about living freely and communally while stewarding the Earth from anticolonial commoning practices, anticapitalist workers’ cooperatives, anti-oppressive communities of care, and in particular matriarchal Indigenous traditions (Walia, 2013). For this we can take inspiration from Black speculative fiction including the work of Octavia Butler, and This All Come Back Now: An anthology of First Nations speculative fiction by Mykaela Saunders (2022).

Prefigurative politics is simply, practising the future you want to create (Walia 2003). Concept has an anarchist lineage. There is some incredible Indigenous futuring work when it comes to AI - by some people in this room, Angie Abdilla (2014) and Jason Lewis Edwards (2020). But there are some differences of opinion about the concept. Let's look at two different perspectives:

• Marianne Maeckelbergh argues in her widely cited ethnography of alterglobalization movements:
  Prefiguration is the ideal strategy for the construction of an alternative world without engaging with the state or other powers that be, but movement practice must also incorporate a confrontation with these powers, which cannot always be prefigurative. (Morgan and Cohen 2022; Cornell 2013)
• Or as Raekstad and Gradin elaborate: [A]lternatives to prefiguration include protest marches and demonstrations . . .; parliamentarism . . .; winning legal battles in courts; subversion and parody . . . ; many forms of separatism; and armed uprisings. These . . . tend to be measures that are considered necessary in the current context to enable or promote social progress. (2020, 37-38)

So my question to you all is:

Do prefigurative acts have to be constructive, or can they be dismantling and destructive?