Around 1.20 pm Wednesday, a woman put out two tweets.
In the first, she said her computer and email have been hacked.
This was followed by another in which she stated that she has filed for mutual divorce with her husband and plans to marry Digvijaya Singh, the leader of the Indian National Congress.
The second tweet began to circulate furiously – it was retweeted 890 times in the next five hours – while the first went largely ignored.
What matters to most people who have discovered Amrita Rai through the unseemly leaks of her pictures with Digvijaya Singh is her age, profession and marital status.
That she is married, works for a government TV station, and is many years younger than Digvijaya Singh is seen as worthy of comment, most of which is nothing but crude misogynist humour. For those in rival political camps, there could not be a better opportunity to get even with Singh, if not directly, then through the army of fake Twitter handles that they employ.
In election season, attacks on rival politicians are par for the course. Digvijaya Singh does not have a reputation for thinking about propriety in speech. He has been vocal in questioning Narendra Modi’s silence on his wife.
But this is not about the choice of words in political attacks. Nor is it about the relevance of a politician’s personal life to his public conduct.
It is about the nature of the attack.
Someone has hacked a woman's computer to gain access to her private pictures. The pictures and messages that she exchanged in complete privacy with a man have been strung into a video that has been put out in the public.
In the past, there have been cases of politicians being secretly filmed while in the company of women.
But in the age of porous data, as this case shows, you need not take the trouble to set up an entrapment with hidden cameras.
All you need to do is hack private communication between consenting adults – if you are ruthless enough.
And you can rely on the public to get so busy cracking bad jokes that few would care to ask: how did the pictures leak?
Even fewer are likely to pause and consider the possibility that this could happen to them too.
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In the first, she said her computer and email have been hacked.
This was followed by another in which she stated that she has filed for mutual divorce with her husband and plans to marry Digvijaya Singh, the leader of the Indian National Congress.
The second tweet began to circulate furiously – it was retweeted 890 times in the next five hours – while the first went largely ignored.
What matters to most people who have discovered Amrita Rai through the unseemly leaks of her pictures with Digvijaya Singh is her age, profession and marital status.
That she is married, works for a government TV station, and is many years younger than Digvijaya Singh is seen as worthy of comment, most of which is nothing but crude misogynist humour. For those in rival political camps, there could not be a better opportunity to get even with Singh, if not directly, then through the army of fake Twitter handles that they employ.
In election season, attacks on rival politicians are par for the course. Digvijaya Singh does not have a reputation for thinking about propriety in speech. He has been vocal in questioning Narendra Modi’s silence on his wife.
But this is not about the choice of words in political attacks. Nor is it about the relevance of a politician’s personal life to his public conduct.
It is about the nature of the attack.
Someone has hacked a woman's computer to gain access to her private pictures. The pictures and messages that she exchanged in complete privacy with a man have been strung into a video that has been put out in the public.
In the past, there have been cases of politicians being secretly filmed while in the company of women.
But in the age of porous data, as this case shows, you need not take the trouble to set up an entrapment with hidden cameras.
All you need to do is hack private communication between consenting adults – if you are ruthless enough.
And you can rely on the public to get so busy cracking bad jokes that few would care to ask: how did the pictures leak?
Even fewer are likely to pause and consider the possibility that this could happen to them too.
