WHY TECH SOVEREIGNTY IS IMPORTANT

Sovereignty basically implies the ability of the people of a country to be able to enforce their collective will on its resources and its destiny.

- Jaijit Bhattacharya

Sovereignty is one of the cornerstones for ensuring the security of the country and ensures that we as a nation can stand up to pressures from other countries. Sovereignty is critical to ensure our economic independence.

So, what is technological sovereignty? Is it the same as Atmanirbharta? To understand the fine difference between the two concepts, one only has to look at the cyber-bombing of the Iranian centrifuges that happened in Natanz in 2021. This was the first time that a cyberattack was used to degrade the nuclear capabilities of a nation.

As is widely known now, the attack was carried out through a malware called Stuxnet. This malware was injected into the nuclear centrifuges through a USB drive, and it used eight backdoors of an operating system provided by a US-based tech company, to infect the programmable logic controller (PLC) that controlled the speed at which the nuclear centrifuges would spin. It made the nuclear centrifuges spin extremely fast and self-destruct.

It is extremely difficult to find one back door to an operating system. Finding eight back doors is nothing short of a miracle. Or as was in this case, it required the wilful cooperation of the American company. The PLCs were from a German company. One had to have cooperation from these companies, in order to be able to infect the PLCs to make them spin faster. The code for Stuxnet itself was purportedly written by an Israeli company. The entire operation was apparently run by the US government.

Arm-twisting Acts

And this explains what technological sovereignty is. The US did not have ownership or atmanirbharta of all the technologies involved in this attack. But had the ability to get access to these technologies and weaponise them for its own benefit. It did not have the need to own all of the technologies.