Kumar Sambhav Shrivastava reports:
On August 3, the Centre withdrew its proposal of creating a Social Media Communication Hub, through which it wanted to monitor the social media accounts of citizens, after the Supreme Court called the plan an attempt at creating a “surveillance state”. But even before this plan of the government could come under public scrutiny, several of its agencies had been using a “strategic” tool that conducts mass surveillance of citizens’ social media activities, show documents reviewed by Scroll.in.
The tool – Advanced Application for Social Media Analytics or AASMA – was developed by the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, Delhi, a Delhi government university, with funding from the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology around 2013-2014. Since then, its use by government agencies has grown manifold without much public scrutiny.
Read more on Scroll.in.
h/t, Joe Cadillic