AT PENPOINT
Whoever is releasing video clips of Prime Ministers made sure that the official attempt to brush it under the carpet did not work. After the initial set of leaks had shocked the nation, but perhaps not surprised it, the supposed hacker released two more clips, the day after the Federal Cabinet had set up a Joint Investigation team, and had asked it to report back. The standard formula for stopping a problem dead in its tracks is to set up a committee. The present government is not above using that particular mechanism: it turned over the question of whether to arrest Imran Khan or not to a Cabinet committee,
As has been seen since, Imran remains at liberty. It is not as if the government lacks the motivation: the Prime Minister himself has been arrested, and it is not as if Imran has not caused suspicions to have arisen about his being guilty, It must be remembered that being arrested is not proof of guilt (whatever Imran and those of a like mind might say), However, getting arrested does mean having fallen under suspicion of a crime. If repeated, it might well indicate a pattern of suspicious behaviour.
Unlike the previous Cabinet committee, this committee has representation from the PPP. It might be remembered that in the matter of Imran’s arrest the government has been using the excuse that the PML(N) has to convince the other members of the ruling coalition that Imran should be arrested. It seems that the main obstacle so far is PPP President Asif Zardari, who wishes not to cause any of the unrest that would ensue from Imran’s arrest. However, now the presence of a PPP representative indicates that the JIT is expected to carry the weight of the two main components of the coalition, the PML(N) and the PPP, and to provide findings acceptable to the entire coalition.
The government organisations represented are the Intelligence Bureau, the ISI and Military Intelligence. This would appear a no-brainer, but has become problematic. It is IB that is being investigated, because it is responsible for the security of the PM’s Office.
There will be another consequence of the audio leaks. Politicians are going to enter the fishbowl of an existence where any action might come back digitally to haunt one. None should think that his privacy will be secure if he stays away from politics. Everyone’s dirty linen will be out there, not flapping in the wind, but online.
If Pakistani agencies are anything like intelligence agencies the world over, the three are deadly rivals, even though ISI and MI are both supposed to be military organisations. All three probably have a hidden institutional view that the other two have been thoroughly penetrated by Indian agents, both moles and sleepers.
Therefore, it is almost inevitable that the three will be spying on the other two. There will have to have been a degree of close cooperation on a number of occasions, but there would have to be precautions taken. As famously said by the CIA’s longtime (1954-74) chief of counterintelligence, “I feel we live in a wilderness of mirrors.” Angleton led the CIA when it was suspected that it had been penetrated by a KGB mole.
One of the primary tasks of the JIT will nbe to determine whether the hack could have any foreign involvement, especially Indian. Whether or not a foreign agency did the original recording, could it have become a product for the data? Angleton’s ‘wilderness of mirrors’ becomes even more relevant.
It is going to be inevitable that the ISI and MI are going to blame the IB for responsibility, and may well try to convince the politicians that the leak was probably done by an element within the IB, an agent acting on his own. Instead of contributing positively to the investigation, the IB representative will be fighting his department’s case, and doing his best to deflect the snipings from the other agencies. Because of this, it is unlikely that the possibility of the ISI or MI having used the clout they have as military organisations to overcome the IB, which is civilian, and carry out the bugging, will be properly explored.
That is a pity, for it is likely that that is what happened. However, it is so unlikely as to be virtually impossible, for the IB to have agreed to the bugging at an institutional level, which might have been recorded in correspondence, or the minutes of a meeting. Anything that might have transpired would have been covert, and though Imran Khan is on record as saying that he was being bugged as PM, and he didn’t object because he had nothing to hide, it does not mean that no other PM shared this lack of objection to the invasion of privacy.
Another problem that has been highlighted by these leaks is that bugging is much less cumbersome than ever before. That has meant the data is much easier to replicate. Bugging started out while stealing sounded, and was recorded on magnetic tape, being played on single-purpose tape recorders. Reproducing that tape was relatively complicated. It could be done without special equipment, but it would involve the loss of sound quality, and interference by any sound in the room during the (cumbtsome) rerecording process.
Now, if the data has been stored digitally (and it should not be forgotten that digitization has meant miniaturization, and in turn saving as digital copies), it can all be stored on one or two USB sticks. Reproducing the data is not complicated. The PMO hacker claims to have got away with 8MB of data, which sounds a lot when expressed in hours of sound, but which can be made to fit onto one USB drive stick.
There has also been an anti-Imran bias by the hacker, seen simply in the number of leaks involving him. The possibility remains of the recording agency continuing to play politics, despite all efforts by the Army to claim neutrality. There is also the possibility of someone at a fairly senior level having gone rogue. The efforts being made to monetise the cache, while not completely ruling out the first (agencies need at least some covert funding so that it can carry out operations without having to account for every single rupee) indicate the second (even senior spooks have to eat, or afford US colleges for their kids).
Perhaps the real damage that will come out of the hacks is yet to come. Some of the hacker’s claims, which have got traction on the social media involve serious allegations, as well as promising salacious and titillating videos. So far, there have been no videos released, even though much has been said about them.
Such videos might be something of a game-changer. Apart from a political application, such as the audio leaks have, there is also the purely pornographic angle, where such video clips might survive for decades. More importantly, if such tapes of Imran exist, they would challenge his present Teflon-like invulnerability among his base.
However, it might be remembered that Bill Clinton lived down the Monica Lewinsky scandal, to the extent that his wife later ran for President. Her margin of defeat was narrow enough for this to have been a deciding factor in her defeat.
There will be another consequence of the audio leaks. Politicians are going to enter the fishbowl of an existence where any action might come back digitally to haunt one. None should think that his privacy will be secure if he stays away from politics. Everyone’s dirty linen will be out there, not flapping in the wind, but online.
