The government is making yet another attempt to plough the sea, to reverse the irreversible, to turn the clock back. Fake news is terrible thing, but it is no longer possible to stop the march of technology. Either we prepare to live in a fishbowl, where our every action, our every sin, is open to all, where anyone who becomes even slightly prominent, will be trolled and made to account for anything he did years ago. The other option is to crack down heavily on society, leaving online life open to intrusion by the state. Apparently, those institutions of the government which had been used to tapping, legally or legally it did not matter, because of loopholes in the laws governing mail, telegrams and telephones, are unhappy at the limits the new media have placed on their ability to intercept what is going on. The loss of control, it seems, is hurting egos. However, those making the effort show by their attempt that they are not in control, and thus want to establish it.
This is had one consequence: The Prohibition of Electronic Crimes Act has become a means for the government to hound political opponents. This was most visible under the previous government, when it was used against opponents of the government, and it was further weaponized by amendments that had all press organizations up in arms and which the IHC struck down. Attempts to bring social media under rules, and then register them, were made then, and are now being legislated. The setting up of two separate authorities, one to review accusations and the other to investigate cases, also presumes that fake news is of primary concern to the population. The power of the first authority to shut down a platform does not bode well for the future. There seems a failure to realize that platforms are not merely not supposed to censor the content uploaded to them, but simply can’t.
No one can deny that crimes in cyberspace must be policed. Especially for scammers, it is the new promised land, and every new development is subject to fraud. The FIA Cybercrime Wing has shown that it is probably not up to the task. Whether setting up a new authority, in short upgrading a CIA Wing to a separate authority is probably needed, but for the fact that it is probably going to be used against political opponents of the regime. That has been the history of separate policing institutions, whether it be the FSF in the 1970s or NAB in the 1990s. This time, however, the new force will be dealing with matters too lose to the concerns of the ordinary citizen to be trifled with.
