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India's Cops Meet Technology
TopherTG writes "Do cops told to seize computers to return only with monitors, stapling pirated floppies together or arresting CEOs for their customer's crimes sound familiar? It would in India. Wired is running a rather humorous article on the minglings between cops and techies."
Do cops [...] arresting CEOs for their customer's crimes sound familiar?
Why yes. It sounds like torrent tracker sites, which host no files, being taken down for the crimes of their users.
sticker equaling shoddy quality stereotype back in the early 1960's, just before they started to kill American manufacturers.
Yeah, let's laugh at the silly Indians and their computer inexperience, while they start grabbing more and more outsourced IT jobs.
As it will hinge a lot of what can be done with India. They could easily set themselves back a few years if they keep this up and head down this route
1. Outsource IT department to India.
2. Department computers siezed by Indian government containing US customer info.
3. Indian government now has full access to the detailed financial, demographic and medical information of US citizens.
Not everyone can be a computer geek
Well, no, not really. They just know how to tell you to insert the restore CDs, follow the onscreen prompts, and call back when you're done.
Oh, and we won't bother to tell you that what you're doing will in fact wipe your hard drive.
(not that I've had this problem, but I know people who have)
I don't find an ignorant police force beating confessions out of people with a belt that humorous.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
In other news:
Those goofy Westerns who cant even figure out how to use a non-western toilet in the rest of the world!
Video at 10:00
I hope everyone realizes the issue at hand is rampant poverty not blatant stupidity. The west is infusing money into India's economy but the money isn't really spreading to everyone, just the techno-elite. I'm not saying that it could or should be spread evenly because the population is so enormous, but think about the situation India is in before you judge and mock.
Personally I think this is just a transient period while the country adjusts. What will happen down the road? Probably even wider economic disparity.
This is Jon Katz quality reporting. Stapled floppies containing pirated software? Two years ago? Nonsense. Even in the thirdest world places of the third world, there is no way anyone was using 5.25 or 8 inch floppies two years ago. And certainly not to hold application software.
This is just a racist jab at "those comical brown fellows".
yup, most indian cops are still on the learning but remember the ones who do the dirty work of confiscating stuff get paid ~$100 per month and don't know anything about a computer forget internet and storage (floppy).
It would also be a wise idea to first check the tech horror stories of the 80s in the us and uk before making fun of indian cops..
if you are so much against india and the tech support that we provide then stop using these products and start using "prouly made / supported in the us" products.. don't whine.
- dhawal
...Senior Executives in some of the companies I've worked for. Like the Senior VP who insisted he needed a faster more powerful PC - we bought him a bigger monitor and he was well pleased. Or the one who couldn't live without an upgraded PC - I told the tech to stick it on her desk but not plug in the AC and wait for a complaint. Never happened. Or the Senior Executive VP who never, ever figured out how to read e-mail (unless it was printed out by the secretary first). On and on.
But you see...
It isn't irrelevant to them. It is their job to know what they are doing, and they don't.
They are trying to enforce old school rules in a way that doesn't make sense in modern times.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Plus Apple provides handy documentation about how to carry its computers, in four different languages.
Yeah, because torture is always so funny.
Really, did anyone read the whole article?
Hint: If this had happened in the US or Europe, slashbots would be up in arms. But it happened to "oh, those quaint indians" and suddenly it's funny.
one of my favorite service calls was an accountant who complained that a journal entry screen was flashing. It turns out he dropped a cookie crumb in the keyboard and the return key was jammed thus queueing up repeated "postings."
You're right, it's pretty weak. Granted that most Indian cops don't know their arsehole from their armpit when it comes to computers, they don't really need to. What i mean is that this issue can easily be solved by setting up a dedicated cyber-crime unit. All the dummkops need to do is to redirect any computer/internet related crimes to the concerned department.
Guess what? There's already such a unit in place (at least in Mumbai). Quoth the article:-
"It was a triumph for the Cyber Crime Investigation Cell after the public embarrassment of having its own website defaced."
Recent articles in Indian newspapers have also mentioned some very good successes by the Cyber Crime Cell.
Another thing: The belt-beating sadly is very commonplace and IMHO, is very mild compared to the other police brutality incidents. However, in all fairness, there is a bit of background behind this. Mumbai has always been know as the organized crime capital of India, and with very good reason. In a country where gun related violence is quite rare, Mumbai was going crazy with a spate of shootings.
In response to this, the mayor, police chief, and the top brass decided to wage war on organized crime. Their MO was simple: Catch the buggers, shoot them dead, and call it an "encounter" death. In fact, the "encounter" squad of the Mumbai police was so successful that they completely broke the back of most of the major crime syndicates. My point of this digression being that this official acceptance of police violence does have a trickle down effect.
Another aspect to the excessive violence is that in India, the majority of the crime commited is petty in nature and the thieves are often dirt poor compulsives. Very often, the police simply decide to give the common thief a "sound thrashing", lock them up for a couple of days, and then release them. They don't have much experience with white-collared criminals and don't have a clue of how they should behave with them.
It's easy to ridicule something that seems very quaint or barbaric. A lot of it is justified as well. However, please also realize that social systems in different countries often have a history of their own. Usually, these are borne out of good reasons, and they only seem barbaric today because the reasons have become outdated.
Having said this, i do shudder to get into the wrong side of the law in India, especially in the really backward states like Bihar or UP. Which reminds me, back when i was in high school, a couple of friends of mine were caught drunk driving by the Delhi police. They were made to squat frog-legged with 2 heavy bricks on their backs! All night. Now, that's a backache for you!
I think the guy with the article might need a bit of clueing too. To make the point that a part of India is very technically advanced, he calls it "the Taj Mahal of outsourcing."
The Taj Mahal is a TOMB!
Some cops just seize everything remotely relevant to the warrant. They aren't stupid. It's easier to just take everything. It punishes the target of the warrant and disrupts their life/business. Why bother with a trial?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Um no, that is 100% wrong. You are not ever required by law to rat out anyone who is doing something illegal. Now, if the cops ask you and you refuse, and they CAN PROVE you know exactly the answer they are looking for, you can be prosecuted. Otherwise they can't do anything.
Japan has been, since the Shogunate, a pretty centralized operation and a land mass about equal to that of California. It has one ethnic group, Okinawans and other tiny minorities aside. Until the arrival of missionaries, the dominant religions (Shintoism and Buddhism) got along ok. By contrast, India is a large nation with many languages, violently opposing religions (Hinduism and Islam).
Americans see the (academically speaking) creme de la creme of India, and sometimes we forget that most of India, both in land mass and population, is third world. Look at a street in Tokyo, then look at one in Calcutta. If that isn't a big enough contrast, just look down. Better yet, just take a deep breath and smell. Japan was able to do what it did, IMHO, because it was able to educate and modernize itself quickly and pervasively. Whether India can do that, or even if it is willing to do that (They throw away their best engineers, who graduated from a massive, publicly-funded university system! Does this sound like a sane government to you?), remains to be seen.
Yeah, some of my friends in Mumbai wer beaten by coppers too when they drove drunk, but they deserved it at least. The trouble with Yanks is that they suffer from this strange hallucination that their christian god has declared them to be racially superior to us and, consequently, their police are incapable of acts of brutal barbarity. In this great state of Texas where I now live, coppers have been known to sodomize prisoners and force them to fellate other coppers and often even to themselves (a task that is anatomically unsafe, so say the least). Furthermore, in nearby Williamson County, the police cover you with blankets and beat you with their nightsticks. The blankets prevent any external injuries, so all the mess is in your internal organs. That way, it is more difficult to prove brutality in court. Welsome to the land of the free and the home of the brave and all that bullshit!
l'Homme n'est Rien l'Oeuvre Tout: Gustave Flaubert to George Sand