In December 2019, a year and a half after the arrest of 16 activists in the Bhima Koregaon case, the then editor of the Caravan magazine, Vinod Jose, got a copy of the hard disk of the laptop used by Rona Wilson, from where an ‘incriminating’ email that led to the arrests was ‘found’. Vinod, sitting at a seminar on media freedom and technology at the Freedom Fest – a technology-related event organised by the government of Kerala – spoke of the Caravan’s discovery of a malware that was planted in Rona’s hard disk, which could plant or ferret out any information from the laptop, without his knowledge.
It was an instance, he said, that had shocked the international community, which studied the hard disk further. It also revealed how the government could use technology to create evidence and arrest people. However, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had then submitted to the court that The Caravan should not report on the Bhima Koregaon case anymore.
Veteran journalist Sashi Kumar Menon, who was the keynote speaker at the session, said that The Caravan is one of the few remaining media houses that speaks truth to power. Other journalists who participated in the event included R Rajagopal, Editor of The Telegraph, and Josy Joseph, journalist and author of the books A Feast of Vultures and A Silent Coup. The Malayalam translation of A Silent Coup was released at the function.
While the speakers at the event expressed concerns about the misuse of technology as experienced in the Bhima Koregaon episode, where malware was used to trap activists, their speeches ended on a positive note. “We should not be afraid of technology but use it to make journalism better,” Josy Joseph said.
Rajagopal pointed out that it was not true that people are misled by all the overflow of fake information that is floating around and that they are capable of understanding it. Sashi Kumar spoke of the dangerous algorithms that pushed information to a reader and determined what you wanted to see. “The essence of technology cannot be technological, it has to be humanistic," he said.
Sashi Kumar also touched on the history of fake or unchecked news and the damage it has caused, including the New York Times story about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which led to the American invasion of the country and which later turned out to be untrue. Even recently, they had listed an Indian web portal called Newsclick as one that's pushing Chinese propaganda, letting the government to temporarily shut it down, he said.
Vinod quoted the example of Home Minister Amit Shah publicly acknowledging the ease with which they infiltrate fake news. Amit Shah, he said, admitted planting a story among lakhs of people on WhatsApp groups, about Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav physically abusing his father and party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, while also saying that the two were 600 km apart at the time.