We are excited to release the first iteration of Watchtower, an interactive map of the Indian government’s cybersecurity institutions!

This visual tool gathers an alphabet soup of bodies in the Indian government working on cybersecurity- it includes mass surveillance projects masquerading as enhanced security and welfare measures, centres monitoring content on social media networks, citizen databases created without sufficient data protection guarantees and up-and-coming bodies that seek to specifically go after botnets. Then there are those bodies who are not obliged to disclose any information about their budgets or operations.

We give an overview of the institutions and the ministries where they belong, and make it interactive and fun to understand their preoccupations. Give it a go!

The data set is available here.