West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday raised doubts over the security feature of the Centre’s Digital India initiative in view of the recent hackings of social media accounts of several influential people. She claimed the Narendra Modi-led government’s promotion of digitisation was an attempt to “intimidate and silence voices”.
On Twitter, Banerjee said, “Seeing reports about hacking journalists accounts and bank details. This [Digital India] is not about public interest. It’s about violating privacy. If it is safe, how are hackers making journalists’ bank account details public? Digital India stands exposed, Modi babu.”
Legion – the hacker group responsible for breaching the Twitter accounts of the Congress Party, its Vice President Rahul Gandhi, fugitive businessman Vijay Mallya, and journalists Barkha Dutt and Ravish Kumar – had said that their main objective was to make classified information public. “Right now, the only objective is to put as much classified information out in the public domain as possible,” the group said in an interview to The Washington Post. They said they have plans to carry out similar hacks in the future as well.
One of the members of the ‘Legion Crew’ described the group as “a bunch of computer geeks addicted to crime and drugs”. “We just ended up with access to over 40k+ servers in India, and we decided hey, why not write a tool to sift through them for interesting data?” the member said on chat with the newspaper through an encrypted instant-messaging software.
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