The most enduring of all the famous aphorisms coined by 18th century Prussian general and military theorist Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz is “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”
Of course, we do know the scale tips the other way as well, as evident in our fraught, fractured 21st century politics. Today we find competing sides arraying to battle for power in an increasingly weaponized environment, where the goal has moved beyond mere victory to total annihilation of the opponent.
That zero-sum game is especially stark online, as the digital realm lends itself to manipulation, which brings to mind another Clausewitz insight: “The factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.”
Those lines have been ringing in my head ever since Ayushman Kaul and Devesh Kumar’s January 6 investigative report in The Wire, indicated there are Clausewitz fans working in the BJP’s Information Technology Cell. They have been using the aptly named Tek Fog app to “artificially inflate the popularity of the party, harass its critics, and manipulate public perceptions at scale across major social media platforms.”
The reporters conclude that “the potential scale, sophistication and pervasive nature of the Tek Fog operation provide unprecedented evidence of private actors engaging in the application of dubious digital practices -- typically seen in totalitarian and closed societies such as China and North Korea -- in the world's largest democracy.”
To be sure, this is a breaking story, with further revelations likely to come. Still, what we already know is bad enough. Tek Fog was used to hack and harness inactive WhatsApp accounts, hijack trending sections of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook in favour of “extremist narratives and political campaigns,” and provoke an immense database of private citizens who have been categorized under minutely detailed attributes like "occupation, religion, language, age, gender, political inclination, and even physical attributes like skin tone and breast size.”
How these were utilized becomes clearer in one subset of The Wire investigation, which determined that 10 women journalists were repeatedly targeted for waves of fake tweets that made it seem there was an outpouring of hate against them. The publication’s founding editor M K Venu tweeted a graphic detailing names and numbers, along with this message: “List of women journos who received upto 1 million abusive tweets over 5 months via secret app Tek Fog as per investigation by @thewire_in. Shocking misogyny at play!”
This was enough to prompt the Editor’s Guild of India to make an official statement to “condemn the continuing online harassment of women journalists, which includes targeted and organized online trolling as well as threats of sexual abuse. What is further disturbing is that most of these attacks are targeted at journalists who have been outspokenly critical of the current government and the ruling party, in an effort to silence them under the intimidation of such attacks. This is a travesty of all democratic norms, and in violation of law."
To find out what they thought about this web of charges and counter-charges, I reached out to two of India’s leading analysts of technology in the public sphere, but was startled to find neither was willing to be quoted by name on this topic, and both only agreed to speak on background if we used an encrypted line.
One of these sources drew a direct line between Tek Fog and Cambridge Analytica’s notorious social media skullduggery in recent, successive US and UK elections. He noted that it was the inevitable progression of digital dirty tricks.
The other expert channelled Clausewitz by invoking human nature itself: “We all know that people feel safer to hunt in packs. It is the psychology of the mob. Politicians often resort to stirring up violence in the streets, and now they are simply refining those same tactics for the cybersphere.”
Yet, even if it is in our DNA, and the trends are emerging globally, it is an undeniable fact that we are now in an exceedingly dangerous period for democracy as we know it.
Bloomberg Opinion columnists Tim Culpan and Andy Mukherjee put it succinctly yesterday, “Tek Fog is a military-grade PSYOP -- psychological operations -- weapon. A capability like this has so far been available only to state actors for use against enemy populations.”
At this point, “with such functionality at their fingertips, the technical prowess of the world’s most powerful internet companies -- from consumer-friendly apps to efficient data-crunching algorithms -- could be brought to bear on anyone standing in the way of misinformation campaigns that demonize minorities, discredit political opposition and brand anyone opposing government policies as anti-national. Conscientious journalists, clear-minded citizens, and millions of voters don’t stand a chance.”
Vivek Menezes is a writer based in Goa, India.
