Slashdot Mirror
Cyber-Policing In India: Bye-Bye, Anonymity
The Zapper writes: "The Mumbai (Formerly Bombay) Cops now want to control the Cyber World. In what they call a 'Step to curb hacking and proliferation of Pornographic Email ' they are going to introduce I-D cards issued on basis of passports and driving licenses without which no one will be able to have internet access in Cybercafes all over Mumbai.
If this gets implemented, and it seems it will, the Mumbai netizens can kiss anonymity good bye for ever. The I.T bill recently passed by the present Government makes hacking and accessing pornographic sites a crime punishable by imprisonment for more than an year.
Here is Link to the
story on Yahoo India."
Wow. One year for coming across a pornographic site. What if it was an accident, such as a site forwarding the browser to a prono site, an unwanted pop-up, unsolicited email?
Seems like the site moved the page. Anyways this is the link for the company who suckered India's goverment into buying highly priced honeypots.
http://www.peakxv.net/InterOp/interop.html
The more uninformed goverments are, the more likely cruddy laws will be passed that hinders tech sectors such as those in the industry on a security related basis. Well thankfully I don't have these laws in the US oh so great land of the free && *snicker*
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Recently the Indian government was suckered into buying honeypots and in January for those who don't recall they hired a dozen script kiddies to handle security (I couldn't find the link sorry), so what I see happening is, goverments are getting scared by technology, and instead of coming up with logical solutions, they feel harsh punishments will deter someone's future actions.
Instead of creating such broad laws which can also hurt innocent people somewhere down the line, hardcore studies should be done before such broad laws are created, and every 5 or so years another study should be done to ensure the laws are working to the benefit of the people as opposed to throwing something out because of fears, or because its almost election time $WHEREVER.
Sadly it looks like we are going to have a complete world full of drones who'll either be afraid to interact, or a world full of what the government will view as anarchists if things continue with these trends.
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Where then do they get the models for this site?
I see a lot of Yanks talking as if it couldn't happen in the U.S.
I did some consulting for a U.S. government agency a few years back. Their network was using DHCP but the higher-ups were quite upset because they couldn't associate user with IP address. They spent millions ripping out their old network operating system and implementing another just to get this capability.
The government of the U.S. hates anonymity. They would like to be able to track absolutely everything and as soon as they can see a way to do it without getting too much noise from their citizens that's precisely what will happen.
Don't chortle too much about India.