We missed this earlier: An Andhra Pradesh House Committee on September 20 submitted a report (final, interim) before the state legislative assembly concluding that a large volume of data was transmitted from eighteen government servers to several external servers between December 2018 and March 2019 under the previous government's regime. "The Committee has come to the conclusion that it appears that there was unauthorized and improper transmission of large amounts of sensitive data from State Data Centre," the report stated. To whom was the data transferred: It is not certain to whom the external servers belonged. The IP addresses of the external servers were owned by Google but the company was not able to identify the users of these IP addresses, the report stated. The Committee Chairman MLA Bhumana Karunkar Reddy, however, claimed that the data was sent to an app called Seva Mitra used by the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), the former ruling party. Why does this matter: While presenting the report in the assembly, Reddy alleged that TDP used the data in question to rig elections. "The data has been directly sent to the TDP leaders who have used it to gain unlawfully during the elections held in 2019. The TDP leaders have misused the data. There was a large-scale deletion of voters’ names before the election,” Reddy claimed, suggesting that the data was used to delete names from voter lists of those who might have voted for the current ruling YSRCP party. What data was allegedly transferred to external servers: The State Data Centre (SDC) is the…
