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India Sleepwalks Into a Surveillance Society
An anonymous reader writes "ZeroPaid has a fascinating roundup of news stories surrounding the latest surveillance laws passed in India, including a first-hand account of someone writing from inside India. The legislation in question is the Information Technology Act's amendment bill 2006, which was recently passed in the Indian parliament. Things you can't do with the new legislation include surfing for news in Bollywood and looking up porn on the internet. The legislation also allows all transmissions over the internet to be monitored for any form of lawbreaking and permits a sub-inspector to break into your house to make sure you aren't browsing porn on your computer."
Actually, the evidence would suggest that the reason for the Mumbai attacks was not to establish a pretext for creating a panopticon state. Rather, it was a strategic move on the part of the Taliban in Pakistan to get Pakistani troops moved to the border with India and away from the Afghanistan border, so that the Taliban could act with impunity there. And that is precisely what has happened.
Next phase? Get rid of all the non-madrassa schools. Those are the ones that allow girls to attend. Then the entire region becomes a recruiting zone for more suicidal terrorists.
Meanwhile, back in India, this sounds like a typical piece of crap from the legislature, which often overreacts when bad things happen and writes legislation like this. Then there's a big public cry of outrage, and the legislation is withdrawn.
Anyway, India is the last place for a panopticon. Do you have any idea how many people there are there? It's simply not feasible.
This reminds me of an incident where a TV show was taken off air because the show parodied Gandhi. It's sad that people of India have to depend on the abysmal incompetency of law-enforcing bodies to keep their privacy and freedom of speech alive.
Yet another law enacted by the british. This one was written about 148 years ago.
Its just that no politician wants to risk legalising sodomy. It offers no returns in terms of votes, and is more of a risk.
If enough people want something, then the politician HAS to vote in favor of it, otherwise he will be voted out of office, and someone else will replace him.
I think the GP's point was that politicians tend to act based not on whether "enough" people want it, but on what a particular small group of people wants. The silent majority may be more permissive about the sex-and-drugs-on-the-Internet issue than you think. I don't know either; it's hard to find a real dialogue on these "objectionable speech" issues in this society.
this is what happened recently in California on proposition 8, where the majority of voters decided that gay marriage is not something they wanted (for the record, in case you care, I voted against prop 8, although I really don't care much either way). So gay marriage is illegal. Sucks if you're gay and want to get married, but well, you have an option, you can convince enough other people that gay marriage is a good idea and put it up for vote again.
Your example may be undermined by the underlying issues around voters being able to override constitutional principles by passing amendments with only a simple majority. (That is: The supreme court is supposed to be able to make decisions like "equal protection implies that gay marriage is legal" and have it stick even if it's unpopular. A majority vote by the people is not the last word in a constitutional republic; it's subject to checks and balances like everything else. That a 52% majority had the power to circumvent that by amending the constitution is troubling.)
Once again, this is what happened in California when lots of people in favor of proposition 8 cared enough about it to go call their neighbors and reason with them why it was a good idea. The opponents of prop 8 didn't have the same ambition, which is why at the end of the day they lost.
That's not true. The campaign for Prop 8 didn't owe its success to grassroots support; most of that work was paid for by out-of-state religious interest groups with deep pockets (who cared very strongly, for reasons I can't fathom, whether people neither from their church nor from their state could get married). The campaign against Prop 8 was quite ambitious, with many impassioned supporters whose lives were changed by its passing, which unfortunately wasn't enough.
Most terrorists outside the Middle East are doing it for purely secular (usually wanting a seperate state or something simlilar) causes. Examples:
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam: the masters of suicide bombing. Want a separate state with a secular consitution.
IRA, INLA, UDF, UVF etc. Loosely affiliated with religious groups because the ethnic groups they represented followed different religions, but no religious content to their nationalist ideology.
Basque separatists: want a separate state.
FARC: Marxist Leninist
Abu Nidal Organization: Secular Palestinian
Shining Path: Maoist
Various spin offs of the Revolutionary Organization 17 November (Greek communists)
Various separatist groups in India: some may have a religious motive, most are nationalists.
Defenders of many of the above may say that they are not really terrorists (e.g. because their main activity is fighting against armed forces). however all have made some use of undoubted terrorist tactics (i.e. bombs targeted against civilians without the sanction of a state party)
Look at a map of Israel as created by treaty, in comparison to the areas occupied by Palestinians. Then look at a similar map of the current areas.
Who are terrorists? Who are not? The issue really is debatable.
Palestine needs its own established state borders, if only to prevent further encroachment by Israel. (Note: this would also benefit Israel, by eliminating disputes over territory.)