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India Now Wants Access To Google and Skype
crabel writes "A couple of weeks ago India went after RIM and its mail service; it has extended its hunger for data now to all telecommunications. All telecom companies have to give them access to all voice over IP services that go in/out or happen within the country. Heck, they are even going after VPNs used by corporate employees working remotely."
Demanding access to all the corporate VPNs is a great way to make companies more skittish about outsourcing there!
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Maybe this is a good thing, in a way. maybe if India requires access to corporate vpn, it will dissuade security-conscious companies, such as a large, multinational, 3-lettered one, from outsourcing to india
If only all google, skype, and others would just stop service for 1 day, maybe the Indian Government would reconsider. But that would probably be called collusion or something and branded illegal. Were is the State Department? Are they trying to defuse the situation? I ask because I don't know if they have any involvement.
Conservative, mod down for violating
Considering how many businesses still flock to China with relatively little protection for their IP, I doubt this will affect business relations much as long as it is more profitable to do business there than elsewhere.
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Given that the "Seven Deadly Sins" are a Christian construct and only 2.3% of India's population is Christian, I don't think a nation state with polytheistic Hindu as it's official religion will care much about your datum.
They could potentially do some real damage to their economy while still not being able to monitor all electronic communications in their country. Hopefully they're not putting all their security eggs in the "monitoring" basket, because people will find a way to communicate under the radar. Any terrorists that monitoring catches are probably not the ones you have to worry about.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Flamebait?! This is a VERY valid statement. If have sensitive documents and do a lot of work in India because you own a call center there or something, you would most certainty need to look at this.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
so let me get this straight. the indian government thinks it has a RIGHT to intercept all communication that it wants to (sans warrant, mind you).
does that essentially make personal end-to-end encryption illegal? it has to! the concept of you being able to conceal your comms is in the process of being ILLEGAL there.
people are commenting on 'well, just use SSH or SSL or ...'.
but you are missing the point. if they insist on getting access to all comms, you think they'll tolerate people doing an end-run around this?
the VERY next step is to identify users who side-step this with their own encryption layer and persecute them, one way or another. it has to follow. first you require all data to be sniffable and then you go after those that won't agree.
I remember about 20 yrs or so ago, it was illegal for french citizens to use encryption (details are fuzzy; I may not have this exactly accurate). but france was some kind of exception and vendors had to do all kinds of backflips to sell to french companies. are we going back to shit like this, again??
I think we are. its absolutely coming that encryption will be deemed 'munitions' again. or, encryption that WORKS; the bullshit encryption you think you can trust but is breakable will be 'allowed' to you to keep you feeling like you have some control.
I guess its now: any encryption that is legal is encryption you cannot trust.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
India Now Wants Access To Google and Skype
Google and Skype should just say no. In fact, if everybody said "NO!" then India would condemn itself to being a third world country. It would also give BlackBerry an incentive to say "NO!" too, because if your competition isn't making money off of evil, then BlackBerry isn't losing any business from competition. Of course India (et al) could always just continue to steal technology, but at least that would give trading partners an incentive to retaliate.
When the democracies start spying on there own citizens then being in a "democracy" is quite useless. Warrants, oversight and checks and balances are what made America (on paper at least) a great nation. Too bad everybody is falling for the lowest common denominator repression that used to be the primary domain of dictatorships.
This level of monitoring without transparency will just make corruption easier.
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I'll second that because I see you got modded flamebait as well. It's nothing against Indians or companies that operate in India, but data disclosure is something you need to be aware of. If a company is going to be distributing your information you need to know who it goes to and why they want it. The fact that this would apply to every company that operates in India seems very relevant.
Maybe you decide it's ok that the Indian government gets ahold of your data. Maybe your data is sensitive and you don't want any government obtaining it. It's worth paying attention to at the very least.
our CFO's will outsource the 'mundane' coding, sure. but sensitive stuff? any smart CFO will rethink this.
Yeah right, the executives that work their way up to CxO are the guys who would save a nickel today to get their bonuses and take a golden parachute out tomorrow when the company tanks.
Or a "National Security Letter" where you can't neither talk nor complain about?
bickerdyke
Unfortunately, for anyone who cares about how their data is used, it's the companies who will make the decision. I might switch my bank to one I consider more secure only to find in two months time that they intend to outsource key parts of the business. I wonder if we'll eventually see a niche market in organisations which guarantee to keep your data within the boundaries of your own country (then you only have to worry about your own government getting their hands on it).
And Indian civil society is not going to take it
Sure they will.
Over the past ten years the government of the USA has eroded the civil rights in your nation, and the citizens by and large have said "meh" and gone back to watching Kate Gosselin on "Dancing with the Stars." Why should India be any different?
Actually, they make a lot of sense. If you rely on blackberry encryption, you have no idea when your privacy is being invaded by the Indian government. With S/MIME, they can't even attempt to spy on you without you being aware. They won't go fishing through your correspondence. They won't data-mine you. They would need to be specifically targeting you and admitting to you that you're under investigation to even have a chance of seeing your mail.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
And that patent in China means far less than it does in the US. In China, companies copy products and ideas from other companies all the time, with little risk of losing more than they stand to gain by doing so.
Now in India you may lose trade secrets (schematics, blue prints, secret recipes, etc.) simply because your email is intercepted by a corrupt government official that hands it off to your competitor for a kickback.
Either way your company loses something that you can't easily get back. These situations are not all that different.
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