Icebergs of intelligence 

Sanjana Hattotuwa-March 31, 2018, 8:20 pm

As a mandatory visa requirement in order to undertake doctoral studies, I was asked to get a Police Clearance Report, which I had never done before. Online as well as in person, once my application was lodged, I was told to expect a response in around a fortnight. Six weeks passed. In desperation and as a last resort, I approached someone in government to inquire what the delay was about. In the interim, I had emailed the Clearance Branch four times to an official address given by them, receiving just a single response to my first email noting that my application was still being processed. The actual phrase used was that my application was "still under investigation". This, ironically, wasn’t far from the truth.

When on the day of the local government election in February, I went into the Police HQ in Fort, armed with an introduction to a senior Police officer to look into my case, I didn’t know what to expect. The HQ is a maze of corridors and partitioned office spaces, and a visitor, like a Pac-Man, is guided by regular sentries in the general direction of the office one has to end up in. After much theatricality in good spirit – references to how such delays always happen to the best of citizens, inquires as to what I did professionally, where my village was, whether I was related to others with my surname and in case I forgot, how busy they were on that day but yet felt it imperative to help me and my case – I finally discovered the reason why I hadn’t received my clearance. Technically, I was till then under investigation by the State Intelligence Service (SIS).

A file opened on me during the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), five years ago, had never been closed. I was told that the reason for the file being opened in 2013 was threefold – one, the fact the I worked at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. Two, the fact that I ran the Groundviews civic media website. Three, the fact that I had appeared in a BBC programme, aired just before CHOGM, which painted the then government in a negative light as one unfit to host the event. None of this I knew. What particularly struck me was that the file was opened at all based on the stated reasons. Here, in a very corporeal form, was evidence of the deep or dark state. My file I never saw – and it could have been physical, digital, or some combination of both. I didn’t ask and do not know what being under active investigation entails – whether I was followed, whether all open communications were logged and monitored with the complicity of my ISP and telco, or whether family, colleagues, visitors and friends also came under the official surveillance dragnet.

The senior Police official’s dismissal of the investigation was an interesting one, noting that it was opened by the previous government and thus had no relevance or merit at present. Interested only hastening the issue of my Clearance Report, I smiled and nodded. It did cross my mind however as to why he said this, unless it was known internally that investigations launched by the SIS under the Rajapaksa regime were politically motivated and had no real value after January 2015. Once the problem was flagged and cleared, my Clearance Report was issued in a matter of two days. My enduring thought is around how many more – dozens, perhaps hundreds – may be technically under active investigation, and worse, unknown today even to the agencies that opened their files in the first place, years ago.

Though there are obvious dangers to any generalisation based on personal experience, this interaction was a reminder of dangers in waiting under two types of government. One, the easiest to pin, is a reversion to the Rajapaksa regime. Dormant files will be reactivated, re-assessed and in most cases, escalated, because soon after regaining power will be the all-encompassing task of retaining it, taking out as early as possible those who are a threat to authoritarian entrenchment. This is why I fear and oppose Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. His political campaign, pegged to what is clearly a vision for what government under him can and will do, already espouses violence, murder and even torture without any qualm. When in power and supported not just by a sliver of society, but a far broader coalition of even elites in society, the lessons learnt in how power was lost in 2015 will be leveraged to design comprehensive and pervasive architectures of power, control, censorship and containment. To recall what was done from 2005-2015, both within and outside the theatres of active war, is to project the blueprint of what will be in store if and when power is regained – a process already well underway and succeeding to boot. The glitter and glamour of economic development will be to the rapid and sustained detriment of human rights, with a pendulum shift away from the incumbents in essence supporting the establishment of government that only if conformist, supine and silent, delivers la dolce vita.

Speak out, and you

are killed, or worse.

There is a second danger. Or more accurately, two combined into one - the enduring role and relevance of the dark or deep state – a euphemism really for the intelligence apparatus – and its anchors within the present government. Threats against a state, arguably, outlive the tenure of governments, so there’s logic and merit in institutional memory that retains surveillance records over the long term. But given we live in a country without any constitutionally or legally guaranteed right to privacy, where surveillance as an exercise of coercive power and control is largely invisible, intelligence services and those in them have unbridled authority to do as they see fit. It is clear that oversight and accountability are weak, if they exist at all. Political allegiances of those in the intelligence community may well be with those outside of the incumbent government, which then calls into question the information senior decision makers get.

The violence in Digana alone makes it obvious that there are serious issues around the accuracy, relevance and timeliness of actionable intelligence given to senior figures in government. The hidden hand of the deep and dark state is also evident in the substance and text of the Emergency Regulations in operation during the violence in Digana, the more recent draft Bills to govern civil society, as well as imprecise, overbroad and entirely unnecessary legislation being proposed to combat the generation and spread of hate speech. What is projected and presented as benevolent or beneficial to society, are in fact dangerous instruments of censorship and control.

Who benefits? Who are the architects of these draft Bills and legal instruments? In what guises do they appear in government, civil society and academia? What role do intelligence agencies play in all this, greatly animated by the degree to which they can control information flows as a consequence of the myopic decisions of this government? The dangers around a return to the Rajapaksas are well articulated. The greater danger of the intelligence operatives, never fully visible, never accountable, their tentacles extending to socio-political terrain we don’t know, embracing those who are close to us, corrupting trust and influencing policymaking is not known, studied or resisted.

Personally, the generation of my Police Clearance Report was extremely illuminating, and in hindsight, tragi-comic. More broadly, it reinforced my belief that true enemies of the people are not those most visible under Yahapalanaya or Viyathmaga, but others, always in and close to power, who like icebergs, wait for democracy to sail past, to wreak havoc from beneath.