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Indian Government Threatens RIM, Skype With Ban
gauharjk writes "India's Department of Telecommunications has been asked by the government to serve a notice to Skype and Research In Motion to ensure that their email and other data services comply with formats that can be read by security and intelligence agencies, or face a ban in India if they do not comply within 15 days. A similar notice is also being sent to Google, asking it to provide access to content on Gmail in a readable format."
The terrorists used mobile phones and tools like Google Earth to plan, coordinate and execute the operations, India and Israel have been howling about those tools ever since.
How will they post their homework problems on comp.lang.c++ for us to solve?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Glad I don't correspond with anyone in India.
Yeah, you're doing it wrong. Just use MITM DNS attacks to use fake SSL certs.
Love, China.
The Bush administration violated a few constitutional laws in its effort to close the barn door after the terrorists had burned the barn down. They wanted to impress upon us how earnestly they believed in thwarting the terrorists, so they decided that we needed to give up our rights so that they could score political points.
But, as everybody knows, the Bush administration had more than enough information to do the job long before the terrorists ever hit us. What was needed isn't more information, what was needed was better use of the existing information. (Notice that I'm not using the word intelligence. Clearly, Bush needed more intelligence, but that would not be forthcoming.) But we can expect our leaders to make lazy, self-serving choices rather than to take on the hard jobs they seemed to want so badly.
India is an authoritarian state, perfectly comfortable with internal corruption and cronyism. This choice, to compel telecommunications businesses to open up their data for 'security and intelligence' agencies, will surely be abused for political reasons and its impact on security will be marginal.
Best regards.
they have no right whatsoever to read email traffic. Terrorists have officially won as government is leveraging attacks to increase their power over all. Wake up people, government is the problem. Terrorists, even when very successful, effect a tiny percentage of a population. Yet, the government grows more powerful over all in order to supposedly protect the population. This is about control, not protection. Such a shame that so may are willing to throw away their rights in the face of terror. The terrorists have won. Now they are fighting over who will control the levers of power. The citizens have already lost all liberty.
We have outsourced some of our repetitive grunt work to a company in India. Once we got the glitches and language barrier out of the way, they have proven they can do the job so long as they are told EXACTLY what to do. Otherwise they will halt the moment they go off-script and not continue until we have made a decision. Sometimes I think they "get confused" just to get a break on some of the shittier work, but there's no way to prove this. It doesn't make them extra money to do this, since they have more than one job in the pipeline at any given time.
The problem is that we have to use e-mail to communicate with them. It's hosted on our own server, and they use a VPN to access it. Will WE have to comply with these conditions as well? If so, they can kiss the contract goodbye because we are bound by privacy laws to keep this information out of the hands of third parties -- including foreign government agencies.
For example, one of the things they will do is check to make sure an insurance policy has the same drivers and vehicles on it that we submitted to the carrier. In order to do this, they must cross-reference the driver list containing the name, date of birth, driver license number, and state of residence. The middle two of these four are considered protected information under both state and federal statutes.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
The problem is that RIM can't comply - their system is designed so that only the customer has the decryption key. The customer creates the key, not RIM. If India wants the key, they have to sue the customer, not RIM.
The proper response from Google should be a simple "Your terms are acceptable.". Followed by all IP addresses assigned in India getting only a "403 Forbidden" page when accessing any Google service, and all search results leading to sites located in India or operated by Indian entities being removed from the listings. For extra Bastard points, all e-mail originating from Indian addresses gets rejected and all phone calls from India get a no-service tone.
Hello? Yes, this is technical support for gmail applications. Am I having talk with government of India?
Yes. I understand that you are having difficulty with reading emails of your populations.
Have you been plugging your monitor into the plug on the back of the computer?
Excellent. I am so very sorry you are still having the problems. We are checking now your network cables......
Etc....
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
The whole thing that makes Blackberry's so popular in the US is their security features. Not just with the public either, the US Government loves them some Blackberrys. They are a major customer and threatened to intercede in the patent case (patents are an explicit right of the federal government, and the law allows them to take them away for various reasons). There are several reasons they like them so much, but the security is a big one. If you look at the BB lineup you find they nearly all are FIPS 140 complaint. Now most people wouldn't give a shit. You can have superb crypto without that extensive verification process. Well, the feds care, it is their standard after all.
So I can't imagine RIM is at all interested in weakening their security as it is a major selling point to their major customer.
As long as as a Web based concern doesn't have a bricks 'n mortar presence in the relevant country/state & does no banking/investment in the relevant country/state, it has nothing to fear from the country's legislature/courts/regulatory regime except a jurisdiction based web-filter, a la China, Iran, Australia, & that's a problem for the relevant country/state's own citizens/residents to deal with or work around.
Why web based concerns worry about the laws of countries they're not operating from is beyond me..
Just like any other country, India has some brilliant people, some not so brilliant and a whole lot anywhere in the middle.
Do you think it is really about fighting terrorism?
The British government justified spying powers "to fight terrorism", but they were actually used to fight minor offences (dog fouling, fly-tipping, government employee false sickness claims).
Just like the British government, the Indian government cannot really say they need to compromise human rights to make it cheaper to police minor offences, or too keep an eye on people doing perfectly legal things the government and police disapprove of (which also happened in Britain).
What keeps countries like India poor is the corrupt politicians. India can afford to build a nuclear arsenal but they can't manage to provide clean water to all of their people? That's India's fault and no-one elses'.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.