What good is privacy if you're dead?

First the disclaimers: I don’t have a BlackBerry. 

Now the claimers: I have been exposed in my rather limited journalistic career to violence that put at risk my own life and the safety of a city.

I have been caught in riots twice. Riots in India, a decade ago, broke out quite regularly in most cities and towns. They were often communal. They were always ugly.

The first time I got caught I was an innocent bystander and after getting beaten by the police (who in a riot whack anything in sight) was saved by being pulled into a small tea shop by strangers.

The next time I was, what nowadays I guess you’d call an embedded journalist (bless the Americans for the fancy monikers).

In my hometown of Pune (which if you follow my columns regularly you will come to know and love) riots had broken out between Hindus and Muslims. People were dying, houses were burning.

I knew a senior cop, he allowed me to ride with his patrol during a curfew.

The rioters didn’t keep the curfew. I saw blood and fire from very close quarters.

That elaborate introduction to my experience with large-scale violence is simply to suggest that perhaps the security threat being touted by governments is not being personalised enough for BlackBerry users and defenders of online privacy, to see the light.

To appreciate a security threat on a large scale you have to be emotionally invested in a country.

It must mean something to you. Or, why else would you care, leave alone consider the word ‘sacrifice’.

That could sweep all the non-Emiratis out of the BlackBerry security-versus-privacy debate in the UAE. But, we are not given to generalisations.

So, let me speak for myself. As an Indian, and the Berry is an issue in India, I would not for a single second hesitate sacrificing the privacy of my online and mobile communication, if it was going to help secure my country against a terror attack or violence of any kind.

Not for one second.

I have not been personally exposed to a terror situation but my riot experience works well enough to offer a microcosmic understanding of a larger threat.

You see India has been attacked and those attacks have struck too close to home. I knew two people who died in the terror attack on the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai.

When you experience the reality of terror and violence like that, stuff like encryption, servers, violation of privacy, they just become meaningless.

I still eat and live and love in the real world. People don’t die online (and if they do, it’s the only world you can be sure they will be born again). They die in the real world.

When a bomb goes off, it does not kill innocent people on a server. It kills them on the street.

So, while there clearly is the issue of who is policing the online world and how that policing is going to be done, I have to trust my government when they say, “We need this. This is serious.”

However, since I live in the UAE and don’t have a BlackBerry, I can only hope that if there is a ‘security situation’ here it’s online and if anything is destroyed it’s all the secure encrypted data that makes these hand-held leashes so valuable. Yes, it will be a pain.

But life will go on. And life is all that matters, really.
 

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