3 minutes reading time
I was drinking tea at a stall yesterday, watching a man talk loudly into his phone about the 'system.' He was angry. He was right. And he was completely exposed. He didn't realize that his phone was a tracking device with a speaker attached, a mechanical snitch that records his location, his social graph, and his very soul for the benefit of some algorithm in a server farm.
People ask me for advice. Especially those who talk against the 'bad things'—the BJP, the RSS, the Ambanis, the Adanis. They want a magic tool. They want a button that makes them invisible.
There is no such button. There is only the clinical reduction of risk.
The main threats aren't dramatic hackers in hoodies. The threats are account linkage, phone number tracing, and the careless overlap of your many identities. You are a puppet with too many strings, and the state is very good at pulling all of them at once.
Separate your identities. Do not mix your activist self with your family self. Do not use the same email for your political rants and your Amazon orders. Avoid the same profile photos. Avoid the same writing signatures. Compartmentalization is more important than any encrypted app. If they can link your 'anonymous' voice to your Aadhaar card, the game is over.
Use Signal. Not because it's perfect, but because it doesn't keep your metadata in a convenient pile for the authorities to browse. But remember: if your device is seized, encryption is just a lock on a door they can kick down.
Keep your devices updated. Most compromises happen through the mundane: outdated browsers, malicious APKs, weak passwords. Security hygiene is boring, but so is being in a cell because you forgot to use two-factor authentication.
And for the love of whatever god you've abandoned, protect your social graph. The authorities often don't care what you said; they care who you said it to. Your contact list is a map of your vulnerabilities. Your groups are a catalog of your associations.
Mainstream platforms—the Facebooks and Twitters of the world—are not your friends. They are data collection engines. They track your IPs, your fingerprints, your behavioral analytics. Even when they aren't directly cooperating with the state, their very existence creates a dataset that can be weaponized against you.
In India, the law is a shifting, decaying thing. Defamation, IT regulations, anti-terror laws—they are all tools in a kit used to dismantle dissent. The practical enforcement often differs from the formal theory. You aren't arguing in a court of logic; you are navigating a maze of power.
Don't be a hero for the sake of visibility. Public confrontation without operational security is just a slow-motion suicide. The most effective voices are often the most cautious, the most methodical, and the most boring.
And finally, take care of your mind. Constant exposure to the outrage machine, the political hostility, and the surveillance anxiety is psychologically damaging. You cannot fight a void if you've already become one.
We are all just mannequins in a shop window, waiting for the glass to break. But while we wait, we can at least try to stay out of the direct line of sight.
Be a ghost. It’s the only way to survive the machine.