Slashdot Mirror
Indian Police Demand Internet Monitoring In Bombay
h4rm0ny writes "Both the BBC and the Houston Chronicle are running stories about planned monitoring of customers at cyber cafes in Bombay. Cafe owners have responded by organising into a group to oppose the moves.
The police want cafes to demand photo id, a home address and maintain records of access for at least a year. The Great Deamons of Justification have been invoked - Terrorism, Paedophillia, Hackers and in this case Users of Adult Sites. On the cafe owner's part - they are countering with questions of liability for verifying customer details and the issues of privacy.
India remains a country with a very low percentage of the population having their own internet connection. Bombay's 3000 cafes are used by approximately 1.5 million people so these new laws would give the police much larger scope to monitor people's online behaviour than in other countries.
Other Indian cities are watching the results closely."
The police want cafes to demand photo id, a home address and maintain records of access for at least a year. The Great Deamons of Justification have been invoked - Terrorism, Paedophillia, Hackers and in this case Users of Adult Sites. On the cafe owner's part - they are countering with questions of liability for verifying customer details and the issues of privacy.
India remains a country with a very low percentage of the population having their own internet connection. Bombay's 3000 cafes are used by approximately 1.5 million people so these new laws would give the police much larger scope to monitor people's online behaviour than in other countries.
Other Indian cities are watching the results closely."
Other Indian cities are watching the results closely.
Hell, I'm watching it closely. How is this too different from what presidential candidate Howard Dean proposed for this country?
Oh, right, Dean proposed that all computers, whether in an internet cafe or in your home, be equipped with a card reader to scan your national id card* prior to letting you access the internet.
* Ok, inter-operable state-issued id cards.
(Please note, up until hearing about this I was leaning Dean in my search for the right "Anybody But Bush" candidate. But since my major problem with Bush is his administration's willingness to abrogate our civil rights, I want to be sure that the Democrat I vote for will protect our traditional American rights. And Dean had already raised concerns with Vermont's ACLU when he announced that views about privacy would change post 9-11.)
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
In any case, the YahooGroups incident, methinks, is actually shows that the situation isn't as dire as you might think; consider, for instance, the fact that CERT-India's discussion fora themselves were flooded with angry protests from Indians worldwide, as also the massive negative publicity for a government that wants to project the country as an IT "superpower" (and indeed, the ban, I'm told, has been quietly lifted anyway, although it perhaps can be commented on better by someone like you who is currently in India). This, I believe, is indicative of the very real restrictions that GoI has to face, if it does indeed try to do anything funny; it will be a very long time indeed before CERT-India ventures to ban any other website.
Incidentally, and I pointed this out in another web forum, it's interesting to note a delicious irony regarding American and Indian legal histories:- the First Amendment to the US Constitution gaurantees free speech, while the First Amendment to the Indian Constitution placed restrictions on speech that the original Constituent Assembly didn't call for. Food for thought.
More than mere navel gazing.