Do you believe in life after death? Like an afterlife after death? If you don’t here is something for you to look at, and to comprehend what you are thinking and believing is right or not! Gauri Lankesh is active on Facebook. It is 51 days since the murder of left-wing activist Gauri Lankesh happened. And going by the common practice with all the deceased people, their social media profiles go down with them. Since people don’t usually share their social media credentials with others it is normal to see the profiles being inactive after the death of a person.
However, the Special Investigation Team, SIT that is investigating the Gauri Lankesh Murder has made a shocking revelation that Gauri Lankesh’s facebook profile was active yesterday. This raises a few questions and concerns about the SIT investigation and the process that is followed in tracing the murder back to her assassins.
1. Why is the account active: Now that the SIT has found that the social media profile of Gauri was active yesterday, 50 days after her murder, we have very simple questions of why the account was active. It could be a very systematic approach by someone who either
• Wanted to erase all possible evidence from her social media profile.
• Facebook provides a feature to change the date on which a post was made. Are the perpetrators of this social media “Hack” are trying to create new pieces of evidence to blame the murder on someone
• To delete, change or to add on to some of the social media posts made by her. We have to keep in mind that Gauri had written some personally defaming posts on certain celebrities on her profile.
2. In any murder investigation, the first thing that police look into these days is social media activity along with phone calls and messages. Has the SIT done that? Have the dug into the social media profile of Gauri Lankesh? Police and certified ethical hackers can even get into her social media profile with ease. They even have access to her phone. Or they could have sought help from Facebook to help in this regard.
3. Why is SIT publicizing these details in the Gauri Lankesh case? IP address tracking or the mobile device tracking can easily identify the person or people who are controlling her profile. Why isn’t SIT investigating that rather than spilling these details to the media?
4. SIT says that Gauri Lankesh hadn’t shared her profile credentials with anyone. However, a person by name Kuntady Nitesh had written a wall post explaining how he had asked Gauri to open a Facebook page and how she had told him that she was unaware of the way Facebook functions and how her understanding of Facebook was only limited to writing and posting stuff on Facebook. She had just given him her credentials instead and asked him to do the required things. This person could have just spoken to Gauri in order to get hold of her account credentials! This is a popular way of hacking into one’s account by collecting details from the same person. This is termed as Social Engineering. Could this be the case! And going by his words, it is possible that Gauri was unaware of the need to change the profile password and she could have maintained the same password until recently and that could be used by others to log in to her account. Has SIT investigated this person?
In this era of social media dominance leaving behind the social media profile of a person murdered unprotected and out in open just adds more doubts about the way the investigation is carried out. It is now simply a case of social media tampering which can make any evidence on social media waste because it is modified/used or erased by someone else. Is SIT considering this as a serious issue which needs to be looked at? SIT coming out in open to the media about these sensitive issues doesn’t make sense unless they want the people targeted alert and help them take an evasive action.
Let us hope that SIT takes this details in this case seriously and gets some seriousness in handling this investigation in a more matured and scientific way at least now.
