Slashdot Mirror
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."
Fuck doing business with India or Indian corporation/nationals.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
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
trying to look at the bright side (sort of). selfishly, I realize that-
but if there is fear in US companies that they can no longer trust people in india (eg, tech workers) because the risk of losing their competitive edge either to the government or other companies might be too much.
if I had signature authority on outsourcing for a company, I'd strongly reconsider pulling back any 'sensitive' work that is being done there. as of now, its no longer 'secure' (not sure it ever really was but now its totally worthless as a trustable domain).
this could actually help tech workers in the US. in a left-handed kind of way, that is.
suddenly, I'm all for india filtering and spying on its citizens!
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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
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.
When I was doing my masters(in India) , my friend through his relative was able to get a project with DRDO(One of India's Defence Research Department).
His project was to develop a GUI in QT in linux for the Data Packet Sniffer program they already had in place, yes it reads all the incoming and outgoing emails of all the employees
, and everybody knows about this and nobody cares about it.
India has bigger problems called Corruption,Terrorism,Communal Conflicts to deal with that everyone is treated Guilty until proven Innocent.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
There is a solution: Use S/MIME. This is the email encryption standard supported by all major mail clients without need for plugins. It can even work with web-based gmail using a firefox addon: http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-smime/gmail-smime.html
You can create your own certificates or get free certificates from places like Comodo.
One quirk of S/MIME is that the subject line is not encrypted. This is a good place to add the text "India can suck my beef jerky" to every encrypted message.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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?
Only way the government is getting access to my VPNs in the US is with a court order and warrants, and even then they're only getting exactly what is spelled out to the letter in the warrant and nothing more. Any vague sweeping requests will be punted back up stream.
Seems like the Indian government has found a more effective way of building a great wall around its borders - let the people outside build it.
virtual private network, surely.
Or did some group decide to replace a perfectly good name with a crappy one?
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.
You wanted to be the greatest source of ICT Professionals in the world.
You started low - call centres - but hoped high.
Now you just shot yourself in the foot with a rocket launcher.
As long as they got a good bounce they'll reach the Quad Damage and be rocking despite the minor health loss up front.
our CFO's will outsource the 'mundane' coding, sure. but sensitive stuff? any smart CFO will rethink this.
finally, a competitive advantage. at least RIGHT NOW, the US won't demand that all US based VPN's be sniffable at any time and without a warrant.
we finally have a good reason to NOT offshore; that CFO's can understand.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
They'll never want to eavesdrop on private communication data again!
What nonsense. The only reason India was closely allied with the Soviets was because Pakistan used to suck up to the USA, and used to receive all kinds of assistance from the US. India wasn't as powerful then as it is now, so there weren't really too many options with us. That does not make India any less democratic, so STFU - or is critical reasoning a bit too tough for you? Going by that logic, since the USA and Pakistan have had. and continue to have, this long love affair, one could say that the US is a terrororist-sponsor nation, just like Pakistan!
Shouldn't mean you will necessarily get. Certainly if I were subject to EU or even the lower US privacy standards, I'd have grave concerns about out-sourcing *anything* to a locale that so cavalierly violated the most rudimentary notions of privacy and security. More pro-actively, to the extent a mere slashdot-peon can, I'd encourage RIM to go back to their pre-agreement stance and begin negotiations with other telecommunications providers and ex-pat companies with an India presence to present a united front at both the political and technical levels - implementing further and hardened security and privacy measures rather than undermining the often-minimal security in place today.
Governments are like puppies. They keep crapping in the middle of the floor until you rub their nose in it a few times.
"It is morally wrong to initiate the aggressive use of force.." Of course, defensive force is fair game...
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
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?
"Lean toward?" India took billions of rubles in Soviet military equipment and actively participated in Soviet intelligence activities. Yeah, that's just "leaning toward."
never works. It only emboldens that aggressor.
Ok, I admit, I'm only thinking of one or two executives in particular right now, but it can't be too uncommon.