Wanted: an anti-terror ‘Golden Shield’

The serial blasts in New Delhi have shown up two glaring failures in the Indian security agencies: the first is of intelligence, and the second is of a security system that is ill-equipped to combat terrorists in an Internet age. In recent months, terrorist masterminds have demonstrated with every bloody attack that they are streets ahead of our sleuths in harnessing the power of technology in plotting and executing crimes against the state; in fact, ‘tech-savvy terrorists’ are mocking our security agencies whose helpless lathi-flailing appears ineptly inadequate in an era when ‘power’ flows as much from a computer keyboard and an unsecured wi-fi network as from the barrel of a gun. 

India’s claims to being a software superpower and a tech giant count for nothing if these tools cannot be utilised in the most defining life-and-death challenge that confronts us.

For an example of the limitless possibilities that technology offers in defence of internal security, one need look no farther than China. It is, of course, true that in China, technology is invoked to “keep an eye” on dissidents and malcontents and to prevent a mass uprising against the state. The same tools should now be employed in India to create a Police State of the Digital Age. But to the extent that a secular application of surveillance technology can enhance security levels in our cities, there’s a case for considering them. 

China’s surveillance and people-tracking programme, known as the ‘Golden Shield’, is inarguably the most ambitious and the most elaborate in the world. Now being test-run in Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone in southern China that has always been a laboratory for administrative and economic initiatives, it will eventually go nationwide and put together a searchable database of every man, woman and child in China, complete with names, photographs, biometric information, and residence and work details. 

If that Big Brotherly back-end database sounds awesome for its sheer scale, the manner in which it will be compiled and updated is even more striking: it includes surveillance cameras in cities, cutting-edge facial-recognition software, speech signal processing technology and even digital signal processing that virtually lets machines ‘think’ like humans!

In Shenzhen, an estimated 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed, mostly in public spaces; there are plans to put up two million of them over the next three years, which would make Shenzhen the world’s ‘most monitored’ city. Video-feed from TV cameras, which track anyone who comes within range, will be linked to a nationwide network that can identify every face in a crowd. 

The ‘Golden Shield’ also incorporates other surveillance technologies: remote monitoring of computers and the Internet, ‘phone-tapping’ with the facility for speech recognition and searching for key words and phrases, and physical tracking of people’s movements through national ID cards with embedded chips.

China’s ‘Golden Shield’ was tested partially during the March uprising in Tibet, when the police used surveillance footage to track down and arrest 21 “most wanted” Tibetans involved in the violence.  

A ‘Golden Shield’ may not be able to prevent terror attacks, but it will vastly improve security services’ response time and enhance their ability to track down terrorists. If a ‘Golden Shield’ had been in place in New Delhi on September 13, for instance, security agencies could have scanned recordings from surveillance cameras the same evening, secured images of the bomb-planters, identified them from a national database, tracked down their coordinates — and perhaps run them to ground by now. 

Sounds futuristic, for sure, but that future is already unfolding in China. And since it comes with the promise of making our cities a lot safer, it’s worth the effort and the cost. In any case, it’ll be a lot effective than the helpless hand-wringing that passes for counter-terrorism efforts and forensic investigation today. 
venky@dnaindia.net