Taking a call

The honourable judges of the Supreme Court who pronounced that “no person living in India is safe” when hearing the case of tapping of Amar Singh’s phones last week, need to be commended for their prescience.

Even if their remarks were not aimed at the more obvious if mundane dangers faced by the public — rising crime rates, potholed roads, adulterated food, etc — the idea that thanks to “master forgers” and “experts in fabrication of records” all sorts of eavesdroppers can have their evil way over the conversations of innocent citizenry should shock everyone.

However, the learned justices should perhaps have been told by the telecom companies of all the checks and balances that they have incorporated into their systems to protect millions of customers from snooping by Big Brothers.

For instance, the lack of sufficient bandwidth and the inadequate number of cell towers, particularly in the high-powered environs of central Delhi, lead to such frequently dropped calls and perpetually bad reception that all but the most reprobate phone-tappers probably find it difficult to persist with piecing together fragmented conversations without going mad with frustration — just like their targets.

The latter can at least hang up abruptly; the snooper has to listen to every syllable. As if the erratic nature of calls in India are not deterrent enough, the content of many of the calls are guaranteed to wear them out long before they gather enough ‘actionable’ information, given that a sizeable portion of the precious spectrum is occupied by the mindless blather of mass text messages and cold calls.

The real danger is that exasperated tele-meddlers may actually get swayed by the promotional bumpf peddled by telemarketers. That would be sweet revenge indeed for the unsafe Indian.