Entries Tagged "India"

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AI and the Indian Election

As India concluded the world’s largest election on June 5, 2024, with over 640 million votes counted, observers could assess how the various parties and factions used artificial intelligence technologies—and what lessons that holds for the rest of the world.

The campaigns made extensive use of AI, including deepfake impersonations of candidates, celebrities and dead politicians. By some estimates, millions of Indian voters viewed deepfakes.

But, despite fears of widespread disinformation, for the most part the campaigns, candidates and activists used AI constructively in the election. They used AI for typical political activities, including mudslinging, but primarily to better connect with voters.

Deepfakes without the deception

Political parties in India spent an estimated US$50 million on authorized AI-generated content for targeted communication with their constituencies this election cycle. And it was largely successful.

Indian political strategists have long recognized the influence of personality and emotion on their constituents, and they started using AI to bolster their messaging. Young and upcoming AI companies like The Indian Deepfaker, which started out serving the entertainment industry, quickly responded to this growing demand for AI-generated campaign material.

In January, Muthuvel Karunanidhi, former chief minister of the southern state of Tamil Nadu for two decades, appeared via video at his party’s youth wing conference. He wore his signature yellow scarf, white shirt, dark glasses and had his familiar stance—head slightly bent sideways. But Karunanidhi died in 2018. His party authorized the deepfake.

In February, the All-India Anna Dravidian Progressive Federation party’s official X account posted an audio clip of Jayaram Jayalalithaa, the iconic superstar of Tamil politics colloquially called “Amma” or “Mother.” Jayalalithaa died in 2016.

Meanwhile, voters received calls from their local representatives to discuss local issues—except the leader on the other end of the phone was an AI impersonation. Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) workers like Shakti Singh Rathore have been frequenting AI startups to send personalized videos to specific voters about the government benefits they received and asking for their vote over WhatsApp.

Multilingual boost

Deepfakes were not the only manifestation of AI in the Indian elections. Long before the election began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a tightly packed crowd celebrating links between the state of Tamil Nadu in the south of India and the city of Varanasi in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Instructing his audience to put on earphones, Modi proudly announced the launch of his “new AI technology” as his Hindi speech was translated to Tamil in real time.

In a country with 22 official languages and almost 780 unofficial recorded languages, the BJP adopted AI tools to make Modi’s personality accessible to voters in regions where Hindi is not easily understood. Since 2022, Modi and his BJP have been using the AI-powered tool Bhashini, embedded in the NaMo mobile app, to translate Modi’s speeches with voiceovers in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi.

As part of their demos, some AI companies circulated their own viral versions of Modi’s famous monthly radio show “Mann Ki Baat,” which loosely translates to “From the Heart,” which they voice cloned to regional languages.

Adversarial uses

Indian political parties doubled down on online trolling, using AI to augment their ongoing meme wars. Early in the election season, the Indian National Congress released a short clip to its 6 million followers on Instagram, taking the title track from a new Hindi music album named “Chor” (thief). The video grafted Modi’s digital likeness onto the lead singer and cloned his voice with reworked lyrics critiquing his close ties to Indian business tycoons.

The BJP retaliated with its own video, on its 7-million-follower Instagram account, featuring a supercut of Modi campaigning on the streets, mixed with clips of his supporters but set to unique music. It was an old patriotic Hindi song sung by famous singer Mahendra Kapoor, who passed away in 2008 but was resurrected with AI voice cloning.

Modi himself quote-tweeted an AI-created video of him dancing—a common meme that alters footage of rapper Lil Yachty on stage—commenting “such creativity in peak poll season is truly a delight.”

In some cases, the violent rhetoric in Modi’s campaign that put Muslims at risk and incited violence was conveyed using generative AI tools, but the harm can be traced back to the hateful rhetoric itself and not necessarily the AI tools used to spread it.

The Indian experience

India is an early adopter, and the country’s experiments with AI serve as an illustration of what the rest of the world can expect in future elections. The technology’s ability to produce nonconsensual deepfakes of anyone can make it harder to tell truth from fiction, but its consensual uses are likely to make democracy more accessible.

The Indian election’s embrace of AI that began with entertainment, political meme wars, emotional appeals to people, resurrected politicians and persuasion through personalized phone calls to voters has opened a pathway for the role of AI in participatory democracy.

The surprise outcome of the election, with the BJP’s failure to win its predicted parliamentary majority, and India’s return to a deeply competitive political system especially highlights the possibility for AI to have a positive role in deliberative democracy and representative governance.

Lessons for the world’s democracies

It’s a goal of any political party or candidate in a democracy to have more targeted touch points with their constituents. The Indian elections have shown a unique attempt at using AI for more individualized communication across linguistically and ethnically diverse constituencies, and making their messages more accessible, especially to rural, low-income populations.

AI and the future of participatory democracy could make constituent communication not just personalized but also a dialogue, so voters can share their demands and experiences directly with their representatives—at speed and scale.

India can be an example of taking its recent fluency in AI-assisted party-to-people communications and moving it beyond politics. The government is already using these platforms to provide government services to citizens in their native languages.

If used safely and ethically, this technology could be an opportunity for a new era in representative governance, especially for the needs and experiences of people in rural areas to reach Parliament.

This essay was written with Vandinika Shukla and previously appeared in The Conversation.

Posted on June 13, 2024 at 7:02 AM • View Comments

Cheating on Tests

Interesting story of test-takers in India using Bluetooth-connected flip-flops to communicate with accomplices while taking a test.

What’s interesting is how this cheating was discovered. It’s not that someone noticed the communication devices. It’s that the proctors noticed that cheating test takers were acting hinky.

Posted on October 4, 2021 at 9:40 AM • View Comments

New Hacking-for-Hire Company in India

Citizen Lab has a new report on Dark Basin, a large hacking-for-hire company in India.

Key Findings:

  • Dark Basin is a hack-for-hire group that has targeted thousands of individuals and hundreds of institutions on six continents. Targets include advocacy groups and journalists, elected and senior government officials, hedge funds, and multiple industries.
  • Dark Basin extensively targeted American nonprofits, including organisations working on a campaign called #ExxonKnew, which asserted that ExxonMobil hid information about climate change for decades.
  • We also identify Dark Basin as the group behind the phishing of organizations working on net neutrality advocacy, previously reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
  • We link Dark Basin with high confidence to an Indian company, BellTroX InfoTech Services, and related entities.
  • Citizen Lab has notified hundreds of targeted individuals and institutions and, where possible, provided them with assistance in tracking and identifying the campaign. At the request of several targets, Citizen Lab shared information about their targeting with the US Department of Justice (DOJ). We are in the process of notifying additional targets.

BellTroX InfoTech Services has assisted clients in spying on over 10,000 email accounts around the world, including accounts of politicians, investors, journalists and activists.

News article. Boing Boing post

Posted on June 19, 2020 at 6:38 AM • View Comments

Suckfly

Suckfly seems to be another Chinese nation-state espionage tool, first stealing South Korean certificates and now attacking Indian networks.

Symantec has done a good job of explaining how Suckfly works, and there’s a lot of good detail in the blog posts. My only complaint is its reluctance to disclose who the targets are. It doesn’t name the South Korean companies whose certificates were stolen, and it doesn’t name the Indian companies that were hacked:

Many of the targets we identified were well known commercial organizations located in India. These organizations included:

  • One of India’s largest financial organizations
  • A large e-commerce company
  • The e-commerce company’s primary shipping vendor
  • One of India’s top five IT firms
  • A United States healthcare provider’s Indian business unit
  • Two government organizations

Suckfly spent more time attacking the government networks compared to all but one of the commercial targets. Additionally, one of the two government organizations had the highest infection rate of the Indian targets.

My guess is that Symantec can’t disclose those names, because those are all customers and Symantec has confidentiality obligations towards them. But by leaving this information out, Symantec is harming us all. We have to make decisions on the Internet all the time about who to trust and who to rely on. The more information we have, the better we can make those decisions. And the more companies are publicly called out when their security fails, the more they will try to make security better.

Symantec’s motivation in releasing information about Suckfly is marketing, and that’s fine. There, its interests and the interests of the research community are aligned. But here, the interests diverge, and this is the value of mandatory disclosure laws.

Posted on May 26, 2016 at 6:31 AM • View Comments

High-tech Cheating on Exams

India is cracking down on people who use technology to cheat on exams:

Candidates have been told to wear light clothes with half-sleeves, and shirts that do not have big buttons.

They cannot wear earrings and carry calculators, pens, handbags and wallets.

Shoes have also been discarded in favour of open slippers.

In India students cheating in exams have been often found concealing Bluetooth devices and mobile SIM cards that have been stitched to their shirts.

I haven’t heard much about this sort of thing in the US or Europe, but I assume it’s happening there too.

Posted on July 10, 2015 at 12:44 PM • View Comments

Electronic Surveillance Failures Leading up to the 2008 Mumbai Terrorist Attacks

Long New York Times article based on “former American and Indian officials and classified documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden” outlining the intelligence failures leading up to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks:

Although electronic eavesdropping often yields valuable data, even tantalizing clues can be missed if the technology is not closely monitored, the intelligence gleaned from it is not linked with other information, or analysis does not sift incriminating activity from the ocean of digital data.

This seems to be the moral:

Although the United States computer arsenal plays a vital role against targets ranging from North Korea’s suspected assault on Sony to Russian cyberthieves and Chinese military hacking units, counterterrorism requires a complex mix of human and technical resources. Some former counterterrorism officials warn against promoting billion-dollar surveillance programs with the narrow argument that they stop attacks.

That monitoring collects valuable information, but large amounts of it are “never meaningfully reviewed or analyzed,” said Charles (Sam) Faddis, a retired C.I.A. counterterrorism chief. “I cannot remember a single instance in my career when we ever stopped a plot based purely on signals intelligence.”

[…]

Intelligence officials say that terror plots are often discernible only in hindsight, when a pattern suddenly emerges from what had been just bits of information. Whatever the reason, no one fully grasped the developing Mumbai conspiracy.

“They either weren’t looking or didn’t understand what it all meant,” said one former American official who had access to the intelligence and would speak only on the condition of anonymity. “There was a lot more noise than signal. There usually is.”

Posted on February 12, 2015 at 6:57 AM • View Comments

Unusual Electronic Voting Machine Threat Model

Rats have destroyed dozens of electronic voting machines by eating the cables. It would have been a better story if the rats had zeroed out the machines after the votes had been cast but before they were counted, but it seems that they just ate the machines while they were in storage.

The EVMs had been stored in a pre-designated strong room that was located near a wholesale wheat market, where the rats had apparently made their home.

There’s a general thread running through security where high-tech replacements for low-tech systems have new and unexpected failures.

EDITED TO ADD (5/14): This article says it was only a potential threat, and one being addressed.

Posted on May 2, 2014 at 2:00 PM • View Comments

Indian OS

India is writing its own operating system so it doesn’t have to rely on Western technology:

India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) wants to build an OS, primarily so India can own the source code and architecture. That will mean the country won’t have to rely on Western operating systems that it thinks aren’t up to the job of thwarting cyber attacks. The DRDO specifically wants to design and develop its own OS that is hack-proof to prevent sensitive data from being stolen.

On the one hand, this is great. We could use more competition in the OS market—as more and more applications move into the cloud and are only accessed via an Internet browser, OS compatible matters less and less—and an OS that brands itself as “more secure” can only help. But this security by obscurity thinking just isn’t true:

“The only way to protect it is to have a home-grown system, the complete architecture … source code is with you and then nobody knows what’s that,” he added.

The only way to protect it is to design and implement it securely. Keeping control of your source code didn’t magically make Windows secure, and it won’t make this Indian OS secure.

Posted on October 15, 2010 at 3:12 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.