{"id":34450,"date":"2021-07-27T08:01:17","date_gmt":"2021-07-26T23:01:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2021\/jul\/27\/spying-pegasus-project-states-arundhati-roy"},"modified":"2021-07-27T08:01:17","modified_gmt":"2021-07-26T23:01:17","slug":"this-is-no-ordinary-spying-our-most-intimate-selves-are-now-exposed-arundhati-roy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=34450","title":{"rendered":"This is no ordinary spying. Our most intimate selves are now exposed | Arundhati Roy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Pegasus project shows we could all soon be ruled by states that know everything about us, while we know less and less about them<\/p>\n<p>Here in India, the summer of dying is quickly morphing into what looks very much like a summer of spying.<\/p>\n<p>The second wave of coronavirus has retreated, after leaving an estimated <a href=\"https:\/\/cgdev.org\/publication\/three-new-estimates-indias-all-cause-excess-mortality-during-covid-19-pandemic\">4 million Indians dead<\/a>. The official government figure for the number of deaths is a tenth of that \u2013 400,000. In Narendra Modi\u2019s dystopia, even as the smoke dwindled in crematoriums and the earth settled in graveyards, gigantic hoardings appeared on our streets saying \u201cThank you Modiji\u201d. (An expression of the people\u2019s gratitude-in-advance for the \u201cfree vaccine\u201d that remains largely unavailable, and which 95% of the population is yet to receive.) As far as Modi\u2019s government is concerned, any attempt to tabulate the true death toll is a conspiracy against India \u2013 as if the millions more who died were simply actors who lay down spitefully in the shallow, mass graves that you saw in aerial photos, or floated themselves into rivers disguised as corpses, or cremated themselves on city sidewalks, motivated solely by the desire to sully India\u2019s international reputation.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/commentisfree\/2021\/jul\/27\/spying-pegasus-project-states-arundhati-roy\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Pegasus project shows we could all soon be ruled by states that know everything about us, while we know less and less about themHere in India, the summer of dying is quickly morphing into what looks very much like a summer of spying.The second wave&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2337,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[457,62,61,474,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-freedom-of-speech","category-india","category-south-and-central-asia","category-surveillance","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2337"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34451,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34450\/revisions\/34451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}