DW 'Warns' of Surveillance as West Perfects the Art
DW notes 'critics warn' India's new data protection law, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023, grants the government broad exemptions to access personal data, raising fears of pervasive surveillance. While the concern is valid, one might wonder why mainstream outlets find such egregious overreach newsworthy primarily when it's happening outside the US/EU sphere. (Perhaps the mirrors
are broken.) The hypocrisy is glaring: Western governments, including Germany, have championed their own mass surveillance programs for decades, often under the guise of national security. The PRISM program, exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealed the NSA's vast data collection from tech giants, a fact largely normalized or downplayed by the same outlets now 'warning' about India. It appears
digital authoritarianism is only truly alarming when it's not wielded by an ally.