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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 Then there's a big public cry of outrage, and the legislation is withdrawn.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.
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)