Govt tampered with a server, we with our conscience
Sometimes to tamper the software of a server system you need to have a hard mind. And to literally hack into the server to change its dates, so that some government departments can issue back dated appointment letters, is a sign of sheer desperation. And the complete silence on this from the Chief Minister, the department of IT and most importantly the Chief Secretary is baffling.
Who did this? On whose orders was this done? Who were the officials of the National Informatics Center who agreed to do this criminal act? And most importantly barring the routine inquiry ordered, is the government serious about talking action?
The only glimmer of hope is the Election Commission which has taken this seriously and actually gone on to say that this, if true, is indeed a criminal offence.
To readers still not initiated this is what really happened. The congress was- in a hyperventilating mood- preparing to hand out jobs in its constituencies as if they were going out of fashion. Suddenly vacancies were noticed and posts were needed to be filed up. In the fag end of its term, the government, in a burst of administrative energy, decided to augment its departments with staff, almost completely drawn from the ranks of villages and towns whose votes matter to the concerned minister. When the elections, though due, were suddenly announced, about three months before the government was completed its term, it caught the ministers a little by surprise since a lot of “tying up” was needed. They then realised that dates for job interviews for their departments were after the code of conduct coming into action. Then there were pending appointment letters, initially cleared to enable new employees to join just before the government went out of power, a parting gift in lieu of which votes were expected. This cosy arrangement suited everyone. Thus when the Election Commission played spoil sport, an immediate course correction was needed, so that the job largesse could reach the right people. The urgency to fill up vacancies was never ever displayed in such a manner in the last five years.
So what some ministers allegedly did was beat the system. In any investigation into the issuance of job letters, a vigilant Election Commission will not just look in the dates on the hard print of letters, or the stamp on the registered envelope but the actual date o which the letter was generated through the system. Clearly the date on which the files were created in the system would be recorded. Hence the only way to circumvent this was to change the server date and backdate it by about six days. So if a letter was created and saved on December 26, the date of creation would be recorded as December 20, which was prior to the code of conduct coming into place.
The NIC, which is a central body, hopefully with its own security network, obviously loosened its safety hatch under pressure from some of the departments. But there is another sad truth which we are probably missing. If these government jobs in departments, where there is actually no work, are used to buy political loyalty, then we are sadly a race of voters who are ready to trade their conscience for their benefits. While the act of the government and its ministers is shameful, we too are not without blame. Or shame.
+++
PEOPLE’SEDIT
A year of wonders and another to come?
Kevin Carson
Looking back on the events of 2011, I have to keep reminding myself it wasn’t a dream.
Who would have guessed, in the summer of 2010 when Wikileaks published hundreds of thousands of State Department cables, that it would trigger the overthrow of the Tunisian government? And who would have guessed, at the time of Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia, that the fire would spread to engulf the Arab world? That the Arab Spring would inspire activists in Wisconsin, Spain, Greece, and Palestine? Or that a second great wave of activism, the Occupy movement, would spread from Wall Street to hundreds of cities around the world?
The major Occupy encampments in the United States were forcibly removed — with notable police violence — but the movement continues as a self-organised school of revolutionary praxis, throwing off new innovations in the technology of resistance on a weekly basis.
The Occupy movement set new benchmarks in the culture of video-induced openness, as realization began to dawn on uniformed thugs from U C Davis to Oscar Grant Plaza to Zuccotti Park that everything they do from now on will be on Candid Camera. Local spinoffs of the Occupy movement took the first tentative steps — sure to become a Long March — in reoccupying vacant, bankster-owned housing and restoring it to the control of the evicted, foreclosed and homeless.
Groups like Avaaz and Telecomix, and countless more, developed new techniques for maintaining secure local meshwork communications, internet access, and communications with the outside world, for protest movements in countries whose governments might presume to “shut down the Internet.”
How long ‘til we see a new federal Cabinet department or Fortune 500 corporation hacked every week, with accompanying releases of incriminating emails and documents? Perhaps coming soon to an employer near you. Dozens of encrypted alternative currency projects are emerging all over the world, along with experiments in digital platforms to support networked underground economies. New platforms for networked collaboration, and innovative projects in free online course materials and instruction, are springing up like mushrooms.
All over the world, self-organized, voluntary associations of free people are finding new ways to meet the needs of daily life with unprecedented low cost, agility and resilience. We’re demonstrating the superior efficiency of self-managed networks, in which the work is controlled by the people doing it, without stupid and irrational interference from pointy-haired bosses in the obsolete corporate and state hierarchies.
We’re rendering the enormous concentrations of land and capital in the hands of the ruling class superfluous, leaving them with no one to work their fallow land and idle factories and produce unearned wealth for them. Every day we, the new Children of Israel, show Pharaoh we can make our own bricks without his straw or his mud — and he can’t stop us from leaving Egypt for the Promised Land.
What will the next year hold? If last year was any indication, expect another quantum increase in the possibilities for human freedom and happiness, beyond anything we’ve seen so far. Hold onto your seats.
