India Shuts Down Mobile SMS For 'Security'

Hemant writes: "On Friday, March 15th, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) in India surprised the cell-phone users by asking the mobile operators to block the highly popular short message service (SMS) for security reasons! The dorks at IB think that underworld dons (mafia and terrorists) within and outside the country were using SMS facilities to coordinate with anti-social elements to spark communal tension across the country. The officials of IB, police and other intelligence agencies believe that SMS facilities should be withdrawn till they can tap a technology to monitor messages. It is easy for the police to 'monitor' a mobile phone, but almost impossible to check SMS. So if you from mafia, you can do email, voice chat, streaming video, anything you want but for sending out vanilla 160 character ASCII text messages!"