Slashdot Mirror
Mandatory Keyloggers in Mumbai's Cyber Cafes
YIAAL writes "Indian journalist Amit Varma reports that Mumbai's police are requiring the city's 500 Internet cafes to install keystroke loggers, which will capture every keystroke by users and turn that information over to the government — nearly in realtime by the sound of it. Buy things online, and the underpaid Indian police will have your credit card number. 'Will these end up getting sold in a black market somewhere? Not unlikely.'"
Depending on the key logger's capabilities, an easy way to improve your security is to open another edit window (for example notepad) next to the password input window. Enter a character of your secret password, credit card number, etc), then, using the mouse, switch focus to the second window, type in a bunch of random characters, switch back, rinse and repeat. The logger ends with a bunch of gibberish, some of which is your key. If you do it right, extracting your secret from the resulting log will be really difficult (especially since the mouse allows you to add new characters in the middle of the already typed string, which means the characters in your secret won't even be in order).
About 10 years ago in Bangalore a software company got a piracy operation raided by the police with a bunch of floppies being the major evidence collected. When evidence was presented in court the police had punched the floppies and filed them like paper. The pirates literally laughed their way out of court.
These days the police in India are technology savvy and most serious crime cases are solved quickly within days. This is possible because criminals use technology like mobile phones and internet to plan and coordinate. For the most part people are thankful for all this - a few years ago it was looking like criminals were smarter than most people.
India had a law named Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) that had draconian provisions and was repealed by the current government. Right now there isn't any law in India to arrest people on the basis of suspicion alone. The police need solid evidence to book people under regular laws.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
From personal experience, most Indians are either unaware, or don't care about online privacy. This probably has to do with our culture, India being a 'high contact' culture that places more importance on family and societal ties than the individual. In real life as well, privacy is something unheard of for many. In a city like Bombay, it's not uncommon for families of upto 10 people to be living crowded in a one or 2 room tenement. Even among the educated and affluent, the general attitude is one of 'who cares'.
You can see this in the tone of the linked article on mid-day. The concerns on privacy are added as an afterthought, especially the comment that privacy violation is ok if it's done on a public computer. The uproar over orkut being censored in India was disturbingly in favor of censoring orkut (in india, not on slashdot). I haven't come across any citizens groups or any sort of anti-censorship activism here.
You(US) guys are really lucky to have your First Amendment. There's nothing like that in our constitution.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Assuming the translation is correct, Karl Marx wrote this:
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by
the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."
While I am indeed an idiot, I can still read and understand what "forcible overthrow" means and implies (especially given the context).
"gewaltsamen Umsturz" = Revolution by force.
My claim still stands - a "Communist Revolution" is one of the best ways to create a dictatorship.
India is still a democracy (they don't use Diebold voting machines the last I checked), so they can and should still fix things in nonviolent ways. The many communists in India might prefer the Marx approach but if they choose that they're being ignorant or evil.