Imagine a device following you every minute of every day, listening into your telephone calls, reading your emails, intercepting your text messages, shredding any privacy you may have in life. Sounds too Orwellian to you? Well, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Brace yourselves, for the future is now. Thanks to the Indian Central Monitoring System (ICMS) we can all look forward to voyeuristic officials of our so-called “intelligence” agencies being privy to any form of correspondence we may engage in with our loved and unloved ones. So what exactly will the ICMS do? Since April, all communication over telephone or the internet is being monitored and analysed by the government. This surveillance system is second only to the recently discovered PRISM in the United States.

And if you thought PRISM was bad, at least subsequent reports showed that it had a red-tape bureaucratic mechanism which the US authorities had to get approval from before spying on their people. The Indian government, ever mindful of the pain of red-tapism in India, has done away with it for the CMS.

This literally raises the question of “Who will watch the watchers?” According to the Indian government, the watchers will be watching themselves. The questions that need answers are: What are the safeguards that ensure the CMS people don’t misuse their prying powers? Why is there no law protecting the privacy of the netizens of India? What prevents the abuse of the system by interested parties such as politicians? What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Another even more worrying question is: why has the Indian media relegated this story to the back pages? As regular purveyors of the media may have realised, the mainstream media seems to be more focused on the news that really matters. Come on guys, we know you have to grab the latest exclusive about SRK hugging Salman, but some pretense of reporting on what really effects Indians would be nice. Surely matters of invasion of our fundamental rights registers slightly on your radar?

As reported in Medianama, Milind Deora, Minister of State for Information Technology, one of the few to speak on the CMS, said that “the CMS is being set up to safeguard our privacy from mobile operators,and protects the national security of the country. The officer in charge will not have access to information, politicians will not get access”. Which doesn’t make much sense. But since the media seems to not be too interested in asking the questions which need to be asked, the government can get away with saying anything about the CMS. That’s when they deign to speak about it, of course. Their policy seems to be – ask me no questions and we’ll tell you no lies. A policy which the media seems to be quite happy to pay heed to. After all, other than a handful of journalists such as Shalini Singh in the Hindu, Pierre Fitter and Danish Raza in Firstpost and Pranesh Prakash in India Ink, few other journalists and media houses seem to have written in-depth stories on the CMS.

“As a citizen I understand that we must do what we need to do to protect ourselves and such systems are primarily designed to protect the interests of the country. But if the recent past is any indication, the scope for misuse and the impact of such misuse will be, I fear, far more damaging in the long-term than anything this system hopes to prevent”, writes Siddharth Bhansali, founder of the online petition to stop the CMS.

If we go by what Deora is saying and believe that the government has our security at heart, it still doesn’t mean it should occur at the expense of our privacy. Violence (of which terrorism is itself an extremely small sub-set) doesn’t even feature in the top 30 causes of death in India. Suicide is one of the top 10 causes of death in India. Does that mean that the government should criminally prosecute people who try to commit suicide to deter them from committing suicide? Oh, wait…

Doing a second-rate impression of an authoritarian government in a dystopian future is not the way to go about reducing terrorism in India. How about improving the facilitation of information between intelligence agencies? How about following through on your pre-emptive terrorist strike warnings? How about reducing the instance of politicians using intelligence agencies for their own political purposes? How about adequately funding and training covert ops?

These may not be difficult to implement, provided everyone with the power and political will sit down and try to work out non-intrusive ways of doing so. Cooperation you say? Who believes in such archaic concepts? Well I’d like to think that certain concepts are universal and can be present even in the meanest and mindless of beings, even if they may be politicians.

This article was updated on July 24, 2013.