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India To Have Automatic Communications Monitoring
angry tapir writes "India plans to set up a centralized system to monitor communications on mobile phones, landlines and the Internet in the country, a minister has told the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of Parliament. Indian laws allow the interception and monitoring of communications under certain conditions, including to counter terrorism. A pilot of the new Centralized Monitoring System (CMS) is to be started by June next year, subject to clearances by other government agencies."
Your call may be monitored for quality control purposes.
I feel bad for whoever has to read the transcripts from all those tech support calls.
At least we know that there will be a system like this. In many countries it is suspected, there's a "wink and a nod", someone says there's such a system, etc, but there's no proof. In India, there will be no doubt.
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
Look for "SITEL" in Spain, the actual government monitorizes the communications without judges control.
For a country of 1 billion people where even the remotest of villages are obsessed with mobile phones, it is highly unrealistic to expect complete mobile monitoring. The money probably is much better spent in other more deserving development efforts. Add to that 26 official languages and thousands of regional dialects for which speech to text hasn't been properly researched yet, it is completely unresonable.
Also, finding loopholes in such a huge system, I think wouldn't present a problem. A simple word substitution would do the trick?
Plus the lack of privacy would probably mean the corruption in the government _will_ work against the idea. (Maybe high level politicos can wriggle out of it, but the rest?)
So they want to spend the money and effort to roll this out while people are pissing and shitting on the streets in holes, and showering with buckets?!
Kind of interesting seeing India go into spheres of protectionism like China`s firewall... early stages Sounds like a major blow to the Indian outsourcing industry. What major company would want any government organization intercepting their business. Back doors implemented by the government are never good for the consumer or general Indian population.
New View Media - Custom Website Design
So now CMS stands for "centralized monitoring system"... but Indians are doing an amateur job here, because anything centralized is doomed to become the single point of failure.
Real (social-)Engineers knows better: don't put all your eggs in one basket. E.g. Decentralized, distributed, p2p web of surveillance in the clouds. (Grep for "Web Of Distrust" to see the relevant part.)
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I remember 5 years back, there was this group of kidnappers that had to be nailed in Northern India and police had no proper equipment to trace their communications. Finally, some geeks and a professor were hired by police and they were successfully nabbed. Such a system is essential in India considering terrorist threats from Islamic and China supported socialist maoist extremists.
However, I am nervous as well, as I certainly wouldn't want corrupt govt. agencies snooping up on me :(
The humans rights workers who expose things like this: :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaswant_Singh_Khalra
Burning thousands of bodies in double funeral pyres.
With the help of big telcos their work and contacts can be found.
A chat about national security and all is fine again
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
god knows how are they planning to implement this.. i seriously doubt if this can be implemented, lot of such ground breaking/interesting/first of its kind/mouth-watering/first-time-in- the-world "Projects" are announced but they seldom see the light of the day..
And so the only people encrypting their email will be people with something to hide, so encryption is an instant "Get picked up by a black donkey" card.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Seems like India's version of the Patriot Act has given them some ideas on what to do with their newly-legalized abilities. At least they have the courtesy to be forward and open about it (unlike other countries {cough} USA {cough}). At the least, very few nations beyond China have instituted punishments for Thoughtcrime. Big Brother is watching you!
(((dB)))
Why do you leave the third obvious country out of your list?
One that builds nuclear weapons.
One that wastes money on the race into outer space, while being in the deepest debt in the history of mankind.
One that is nationalistic to a fault.
One that sends spies to India and China.
One that kills fetuses and adults all around the middle east.
One that monitors private internet and phone communication inside and outside its territory.
Great. Another American high horse. Because democracy in the US of A is the gold standard by which the free world should measure itself.
- The US builds and holds more nuclear weapons than the rest of the world combined
- US military spending accounts for 60% of the total world military spending, outpacing all other industrialized nations by more than double on a per-capita basis.
- An American calling another nation nationalistic is beyond pot calling the kettle black.
- The CIA and NSA have hundreds of stations on every other continent, and that's just what's published.
- Killing fetuses? Sorry, I got nothing on this one.
The only difference between the USA and China is that Americans *think* they are free, and no people are more hopelessly enslaved, as those who truly believes he is free. How often do you think "honor killings" actually happen? Its a crime there, called murder. The murder rate in the USA is far higher in per capita terms than in India or China.
I hate printers.
The overlords of spying welcome you now as one of the "advanced" countries of the world.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Considering that all SIMs and landline phones must be registered to a particular person--down to the PAN (like SSN/SIN) or passport number of foreign nationals, which is then actually verified--this has some pretty frightening implications.
How do you come to this conclusion without knowing what the policies will be?
World's largest democracy!
World's largest democracy!
World's largest democracy!
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
...Russia?
Well, at least they can't blame it on the 2-party system in India, eh?
Kinda takes the wind out of the sail out of a lot of the parroted arguments made on /..
A country with so many languages and gods probably needs such a system, but implementing it would be a nightmare.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
The Research & Analysis wing in India has always had significant electronic intelligence hardware and has always been looking for more funding & more engineers to work for them. I know in some sense that they are indeed working their things to let me live my life in some sort of passive ignorance. The thing that pisses me off about this is the day and time they decided to announce this.
I haven't touched yesterday's copy of my paper (the hindu), because it is very likely that the mass hysteria about the last year's terror attacks in Mumbai will overcome any real news that they have to say. I feel sad for the victims of the attack, but in the fight between the government and the terrorists (well, militants for the 90s people), the rights that really being eaten away are mine.
So, pushing this legislature yesterday was an act of emotional blackmail on an entire country. To do this while they're still feeling vulnerable and to ensure that anyone opposing it will get vilified in the press.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
Why worry about this when we're already en-masse handing over all our private information to gmail? You don't think these communications are
monitored? Of course they are, at least for advertisement-purposes.
I say we need encryption at the client-to-client level. Something by which we can still use gmail, but in such a way that even google cannot inspect our communications.
I guess that some simple extensions to javascript/html would do the trick (in principle it could be done in javascript, but you'll also want to encrypt attachments).
However, I have the feeling that at least in chrome we won't see such an extension coming soon... perhaps firefox... (there's already a plugin called firegpg but I'm not sure if it encrypts attachments).
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
They've also embarked on a population registration database and ID card scheme - for a population of nearly a billion. Given the scepticism critics have expressed here in the UK about the technical feasibility of the British Government's similar schemes (the National Identity Register and Interception Modernisation Project), I can't help feeling that the Indian officials have succumbed to an even larger dose of snake-oil than ours have.
France
You think he's American? He sounds to me like the Indian dissidents I know, who whoever they fall on the spectrum believe that the highly touted "democracy" of their nation is a farce.
Since this is happening not just in India, what measures can we take to protect ourselves? For example, with the Nokia 900 Linux-based phone or iPhone etc....do any apps exist, that will encrypt the conversations (similar to cryptophone, just actually affordable)? Anyone got any suggestions and/or experiences?
Problem solved.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just relax. That was supposed to be sarcastic.
If you meet anybody from India ask him for his CASTE to let him know that your country is concerned about RACISM in India.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Are they going to create a Google to index & search those communications?
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga