Slashdot Mirror
Google Aids Indian Goverment Censorship
An anonymous reader writes "Google's Orkut has made a deal to provide IP addresses of posters of content deemed objectionable by Bombay police. They object, among others, to posts against certain Indian personalities, young women admiring Indian mobsters, and, amazingly, "anti-Indian words" (!)."
....Whats that knocking at my door?
I'm usually in the "whatever, they have to do business" crowd with google, but this isn't in any grey area, it's downright black.
Well if Google doesnt bow to the Indian government they will lose money. The "dont be evil" mantra would seem to contradict this move.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
It's *Mumbai*, you anti-Indian clod!
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: slashdot.org
Address: 66.35.250.150
It hasn't been named Bombay in years.
/no-karma anon
Then again, that's not how you spell "Government" either.
Also - read the end of the not-so-fine article. Yes, undoubtedly there's evil at play. On the other hand, if something illegal was done (the police were involved, one can only sadly assume the 'posting of picture with derogatory comments' was of an illegal nature over there), there shouldn't be any reason for Orkut protecting the suspect perp. Though filing a subpoena for the information (thus not bypassing the judicial system) would be much preferable.
Great news. The sooner Google acts like a real corporation the better.
It's time to stop this "Don't be evil" BS and get on with its obligation to its shareholders.
Having said that, if DBE actually does bring in more profit, or BE brings down profit, Google is then expected to DBE.
In short, act like a business and protect the bottom line, not teh "line".
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
Thats nothing. Read below the comments on the article, where police blame Orkut for helping organize a party where drugs were used.
Seriously. Orkut used to organize party = Drugs used at party = Orkut bad? I don't think so.
I thought India was atleast a pretend democracy?
Does Google leadership believe that "Do no evil" "Obey all laws"?
Or have they simply abandoned "Do no evil" in favor of, "Do not much evil, and even then only do it if you want to gain a foothold in countries with rapidly growing economies."?
I've defended Google's China policy, but it seems like they're just flat-out in the wrong on this one (assuming, that is, that we're getting the whole story here.) I am having a very hard time seeing what greater good is served here. In China they are withholding information their users want. Not great but they are at least servicing the users' requests, just not as fully as one would prefer. Here they are giving out information their users presumably expected to remain private, in direct opposition to their users' intentions. Bad Google.
In addition to the fact that many Indians are not as urbane, tolerant, and well-educated as those one encounters in the US, one has to take into account the fact that India is much more diverse ethnically and religiously than the United States, and that many potentially hostile groups live in close proximity. While I don't agree with such censorship, I can understand the desire of the Indian government to keep everybody happy and avoid bloodshed.
17th century, actually: 1680.
Expect a similar move from the Turkish government soon.
Precisely. I am an immigrant Indian living in the US and I personally feel insulted by that bias, positive as it may be. It results in a weird kind of prejudice wherein if you do something outstanding people are like "well, duh, they're all like that. Big effing deal :P". And under achievement (relative to the OTHER Indians) is reportedly grounds for deportation in some IT companies. To be perfectly clear, I have experienced the first one personally. Since I don't work in IT (merciful Deus :P), I have only heard of the latter (probably hyperbole so please don't bore me by responding to it all at once :P)
It's quite simple - Gaussian distributions are fairly universal. We have our share of nut cases in India, as also religious fundamentalists that could make Pat Robertson blush (well, that's not possible, but you get my drift. Luckily, no one like Ted Haggard as yet =D), awful movies that seem to be cast out of an industrial mold, and idiots of every variety. Also of note are the "lazyass armchair historians" who feel that it is enough to have a rich heritage but who make no effort on their own part to build a better present or plan for a glorious future.
In short, India is just like any other country, including this one. There's good folks and bad folks. There's eminently sensible people on the one hand and the farking idiots on the other. Am I surprising anyone here? :P
More to the point, I am a member of the social site they mention (Orkut) and it's a little silly that someone actually sues Google for "anti-Indian sentiments". Sheesh, get a thicker skin FFS :P. Why would any sensible person be offended by the comments of some random hate monger? Too much time on their hands I suppose :P. Treat opinions like spam people. You just don't read them all. *roll*
The thing about the underworld dons is a horse of a different color. What non-Indians should know is that the "underworld" in India is NOT exactly analogous to the mafia here or the drug cartels in South America. It's a far worse problem than that. To be more precise, the specific don named Dawood Ibrahim can probably be characterized as the Indian version of Osama Bin Laden crossed with Al Capone. In other words, terrorism coupled with the usual kind of racketeering. And there's more noobs like this guy. The Mumbai (erstwhile Bombay) blasts of 1993 is a good example (I was actually in school near where they happened back then *brrr*). There's some more recent stuff as well, which I have not been following much in the news.
Suffice to say, if Indians wanted to establish something akin to the Patriot Act, these are the dudes who'll be first on the dinner menu :P. So, not SO crazy in this PARTICULAR instance. I would suggest that they not try to close them down though. Illegally hacking into them and monitoring them might be more profitable in the long-term ;-). What are Intelligence Agencies for anyway? LOL
List of nifty little phrases that have bitten their speakers in the ass:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
So far Google has caved when secular governments have gone after people for civil disobedience.
I wonder what they'd do in an officially Muslim like Iran if someone posted a blog saying, "I was a Muslim but I converted to Christianity", and the government demanded that Google turn over that person's identifying information?
If Google refused, then they're giving up on the broad claim that their presence a blessing to a country regardless of what censorship / person-finding they assist with. If they went along with it, then they show the true vacuousness of their "moral" reasoning.
I don't want such a test case to arise, but I'd be (morbidly) curious to see how it plays out.
After reviewing the articles I've come to the conclusion that while I don't condone investigating people for hate-speech against India that I see no problem with investigating the source of a mob boss fan club. Even applying the U.S. constitution (which of course India is not held to) I would see no problem with this. The police can and should investigate something like this. If it turns out it's someone not connected to the criminal then that's fine. But if it turns out that it's part of a conspiracy to drum up public support and poison the jury pool then that is an entirely different matter. Who's to say that this anonymously submitted article is not part of that conspiracy?
I believe Google did the right thing by turning over records to the police. Anonymity is not sacrosanct. Freedom to say what you want is, and if that is not allowed in India then that should be changed. However, impeding a criminal investigation is not a good way to bring about change.
I wish I could point out a specific attribution but it's not a new concept that one must work within ones societal rules to change society for the better. I believe it is mentioned at least a few times in the new testament and most likely in other religious and philosophical texts as well.
Don't be evil (to white people living in western nations.)
-GiH
So, should they stop their UK operations as well, since UK is a 'surveillance society'? Should they close their French and German departments, because these countries censor pro-Nazi and revisionist websites, among other things? Should they abandon Russia because Putin is building his 'vertical of power' with sometimes questionable methods? Should they say goodbye to the United States as well because the US is the world's largest aggressor, and has killed millions of foreign civilians in the past 50 years? FACE IT. All governments are evil. That's not good, and that's not bad: it's a fact of life. A government cannot behave like a Barbie-playing girl. Governments are there because they have might, and as soon as they lose their might, they are displaced by a revolt or an invasion.
Then change the system, don't hold on to the old days when the real world didn't know about the internet.
I come from the BBS era and as such have gone through that magic time when the internet was just for techies. Nobody knew about it and it was a grand time. No ads, no spam, no leet speak, just men, real men and stuff geeks cared about. (Star Trek ASCII Porn mostly)
And then things changed, more people found out about it and with them came the coorperations, the criminals (often hard to tell the difference) and finally the politicians.
The early days of the net are over, no longer is it free and unregulated because nobody knew about it, it now has to live in the real world.
What you describe above has always been illegal, good or bad, that is the way your country is run. For a couple of years the internet was a safe heaven, a new playground were the rules were not yet enforced. Great BUT it sadly has made many of us think that this was going to last forever or even worse, that this was a normal state of affairs. That somehow it is NORMAL for there to be a HUGE and PUBLIC yet totally unregulated segment of daily life.
Simple example, child porn. Trading it in the real world has been illegal for decades in most countries, if you were caught sending it through the mail you would be prosecuted and the laws for the police to be able to check the mail are well established. I believe in the US they even got a special police force for doing that. NOBODY seems to protest this capability. Your postal mail CAN and will be checked, customs officials especially can open any package they want. When was the last time you succesfully protested your luggage being seached? Hell, they can even do a full cavity search with absolutly no evidence of wrong doing.
Yet somehow, for a period of time we could send digital data across the globe without anybody paying the slightest bit of attention. It was great but it was not going to last, sooner or later the real world would notice it and demand that the same laws that apply in the physical world be applied to the digital world. That email should be able to be checked in the same way as regular mail.
Just because the Internet operated in a grey area doesn't mean that this has become the law.
Think of it like this, if a black market operates in your area and stays unnoticed/unhindered for years that does NOT make it at any time legal, when the police after a decade finally moves in it is NOT a valid defence to say, "but we got so used to it, please let it stay the way it is".
We are now faced with the reality that real world laws are finally being applied to the net, no longer do we have this safe heaven that the police hadn't figured out yet.
We can now do two things, cry about it, pray that the police will somehow loose their memory and forget about the internet once again OR change the laws. Not just the laws regarding the internet but ALL laws that affect us.
Don't fight for the right of bloggers, fight for the rights of ALL journalists. Don't protest against snooping on email FIGHT against ALL snooping laws.
There was a time when you had publicly available usenet groups were people openly posted child porn without even bothering to hide were it came from. That era is past us. It would do a pedofile absolutly no good to protest an arrest because the internet should be free. If a pedophile wants to do what he does he should change the laws in the real world, just because the internet has given them a safe heaven for ten years does not mean that is going to continue.
Change the world, don't hang on to the past.
Game over for free-speech on the internet in India? No, it was game over for free-speech in India long ago, the internet just gave you an excuse to ignore it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Who sets the rules, then? Did Google do a referendum or even a poll and determine that, indeed, the vast majority of Indians vote for "we want to be censored, thank you very much"?
Now I'll admit that I have no experience with India or Indians, but I do have some first hand experience with the USSR (back when it was called that way) and eastern europe, and have co-workers from all over that area. Plus some from various arab countries. And I can tell you that so far I've yet to see major differences. People are people everywhere. Yeah, there are cultural and education differences all right, and even culture clashes when you put people from different cultures together, but at the end of the day most people want the same things.
Even the exceptions are, strangely enough, not much different from our or your exceptions. E.g., if you want to point out some of the religious fundamentalist nutcases from some area as somehow representative, I can point you to religious fundamentalist nutcases in the west (e.g., southern USA) which are strangely similar. For every Khoran-thumping "we should bomb America/Israel/whatever for Allah" nutcase, there'll be a Bible-thumping "we should nuke the Middle East for Jesus" nutcase on the other side.
Even if you want to point out some resistance to new ideas in some areas, I can point out at people ranting about the "good old days" and rejecting the new in the West too. There is the same resistance to change everywhere, some just got a head start in accepting it. But if you let them have what they want, overall all societies tend towards the same thing. E.g., for all the Party's moaning about western decadence, China tended to adopt Western consumerism and other supposed bad habits very very quickly when it had a half a choice.
Etc. As I was saying, I've yet to see any evidence that people are fundamentally different anywhere.
And more importantly, to get back to Freedom Of Speech, I've yet to see any evidence that people from any area actually cheer at the idea of having the police watching over their shoulder.
Sure, there'll be plenty who want to tell _you_ what you can and can't say. (Same as in the west.) But they'll tend to not appreciate when someone tells _them_ what they can and can't say.
And sure, group-think exists everywhere. Doubly so if you can bully them into an "if I say I disaggree, the others will think I'm a pervert/criminal/whatever and ostracize me" state of mind. You have them chest-thump and proclaim any idiocy just to seem like popular/responsible/whatever members of the community. (Again, in the west too.) But again, move them out of that environment, and they'll tend to snap out of it in no time.
In fact, the funny thing is, a lot (maybe most) cultural clashes with immigrants tend to be centered around their snapping out of it too fast and too far. People coming from areas where they have to watch out what they say or do all the time, often seem to turn to a sort of a "woohoo, here I can say and do _everything_ I want to" state of mind, and proceed to appear thoroughly impolite and disruptive to the locals. If you will, they end up appreciating the whole freedom ideas a bit too much, and not knowing where to stop exercising them.
So based on those impressions I'll go and say that the freedoms probably _are_ universal truths that all humans can appreciate.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It seems to me that you all think that the Indian police are incompetent and evil. The way it's *supposed* to be is: Police = good guys. So helping police = good move. But we've all become cynical (probably with reason), and now helping police/governments = evil move. The real question is whether Google says in "Terms and Conditions" whether they are allowed to do it, and if they are, well, you "signed" it. This whole thing depends on what Google are willing to give, and what the Indian police are doing with the information. So from Google's point of view they are giving information (what their main aim is), what's being done with it is the Indian government's responsibility. Same as when you use Google to search for how to make a bomb... You're the evil one not them. As a side note... it says no-where that Google are getting paid for this, and I have no reason to believe they are.
The groups with banners like 'I hate India' are clearly enganged in hate speech. Tracking them down and stopping them is not cencorship, but is rather required of any responsible government. It is really disappointing to see a portion of usually enlightened slashdot crown defending hate speech or being flippant about it.
It is not evil to search for how to make a bomb. It is not even evil to make a bomb, or to set off a bomb. What's evil is to set off a bomb where it will hurt people or their property.
Assuming you do it with appropriate precautions in appropriate places and times and with appropriate permissions (per local laws), making big booms is good, clean fun.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.