Hyderabad: The habit of copy-pasting and poor security for documents owned by the Bharatiya Janata Party’s IT Cell showed the party in a bad light on Wednesday when BJP state unit, a Union minister and other members of the IT Cell tweeted that “Modi government has not made inclusive development as the focal point”.
Some other tweets read, “Modi government has destroyed all villages in India” and “Modi government has made women a slave.”
The IT cell has documents containing a set of predefined tweets along with a hashtag.
Many Twitter accounts associated with the BJP tweeted the exact updates present in these documents without even checking the contents for sanctity.
The BJP IT cell left this word document with a set of tweets prepared for a hashtag #Modi4NewIndia on Google Drive open for editing without locking it, making it accessible for anyone. Pratik Sinha of AltNews who got hold of this document edited parts of the document which was blindly picked up and tweeted by Union minister Ponnar Radhakrishna’s twitter handle and several members of the IT Cell.
Mr Sinha said that while he tried to make the tweets look silly, even a person in Pakistan could have got access to this document by the IT cell and easily controlled the tweets of the BJP.
While people might take this with a pinch of salt, Mr Sinha noted that the purpose of this exercise here is to demonstrate that a non-government entity sitting in the BJP’s office is controlling what a Union minister is tweeting.
“It is a grave security concern that the BJP folks are blindly copy-pasting the content on the internet without thinking of the ramifications of international relations. For suppose a tweet on another demonetisation would have created chaos,” he warned.
Mr Sinha not only demonstrated the issues with cloud computing and shared access, but also that in the run up to elections, the online battlefield in India is not secure from foreign interference.
