Slashdot Mirror
India Wants To Monitor Twitter, Facebook
swandives writes "India's home ministry has asked its communications ministry to monitor social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook amid fears that the services are being used by terrorists to plan attacks. The request suggests that the Indian government is trying to broaden the scope of its online surveillance for national security. Under new rules to the country's IT Act that came into force earlier this year, websites and service providers are required to provide government security agencies with information on private accounts, including passwords, on request without a court order."
me asking: Is there anything that terrorists can't use?
http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/
Most likely outcome: Dodgy regex being used on large (unoptimized and inefficient) datasets with no real way to check whether any tangible results will be produced. Also hundreds, if not thousands of false positives will pop up. Best result? You nab a few terrorists. If you spend the resources and time however, on a different, more verifiable and tried-and-tested goal (like education and women's rights) you stop many, many more terrorists from ever existing.
Wouldn't it be smarter to use IRC or any other instant messenger rather than two of some of the most popular and heavily monitored social sites on th--
Hold on, someone's knocking on the door....
"we've got trenchcoats and bad attitudes" - John Constantine, HellBlazer
Exactly what is your ISP internet password going to provide except for some professional paranoid agent to cheat on your internet account and, to put false entries into your account. The only passwords your ISP should have are the ones to need to access their network and of course your email account. The email account is of course completely arbitrary as it is not encrypted. There is also web server accounts but are the government going to hack these.
This sounds like the professionally paranoid are expecting ISPs to harvest all the passwords you use on the internet or they intent to plant false information to ensure political and promotional successes.
The whole idea of warrants is to protect citizens from out of control law enforcement, from investigator who will corrupt cases for revenge, for promotion or even for payment. Which country now claims perfect police officers, those saintly individuals who never lie cheat or steal, keeping in mind that includes 100% of the police force or other investigatory agencies, including political appointees and of course the politicians that control them.
Warrants were never about gaining access to a citizens private information they are all about protecting citizens from criminal access to private information, from accessing for personal advantage, to distorting it by selective editing it and especially from planting false information. The courts must prove that law enforcement did not tamper with the evidence, the I say so defence is not good enough for us and it should not be good enough for them.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Doesn't the NSA or whatever intelligence agency in the Western world monitor all of you traffic? USA's the most paranoid about terrorism.
How much of your social activity is monitored by intelligence agencies? Does your democratic process expose any of it?
I know /. likes to mock and laugh at India, this happened before with the Blackberry encryption case.
As an Indian citizen living abroad I know about this now, what's your congress doing behind closed doors?
lol gonna blow up a building u guise brb theyl never know what hit em #terrorism #bomb
They just 'friended' a number of the terrorists in the 80s.
I live in India and I've witnessed a lot of this asshattery by the clueless so called 'IT/ cybercrime' department of the goverment. Last month they were asking RIM to provide them access to any communication on BlackBerry phones(messenger and browsing) in India, I simply have no idea why they think 'terrorists' will use a particular medium when they have announced they are watching it. Almost all 'terrorist' communication is carried out on phones registered with fake IDs or encrypted email, nothing which they can control. Just sounds to me like a scam for saying 'we put Rs xxxxxxxxx into this effort' and pay .00000001% of it to some barely qualified programmer to write a few regexes on a single server which never is able to process the whole data of whatever they plan on monitoring.
Given that the Indian government has a tough time doing what it should be doing, why add stuff to their list ? I dont think they are ever going to have any one monitoring the way it is supposed to be done. Maybe they use it for illegitimate reasons like against political enemies etc. But in the end nothing ever happens to the bad guys in India and the remaining folks in India just dont care about the government anymore. So keep piling on those rules!!
This is just a waste of time and money by our government. There are people who dont get to eat , who get denied basic human rights and who dont get safe water to drink. None of them have the time, the energy or the means to come on Facebook and Twitter and crib/complain about it. This is just Indian politicians and bureaucrats trying to sound "cool"
Seriously, is anyone else still buying the "terrorist" card any more.
The only thing those social network sites have been used for in the past year is to organise lots and lots of protests against corrupt governments around the world.
Nice try.
All the comments have been about ISPs but the request to disclose passwords applies to websites as well. Indians will say goodbye to storing hashed passwords, they must be clear text or encrypted with a password stored on the server, which is a little more inconvenient for an attacker. So this is a request that enforces a bad practice and lowers security for everybody, even for people outside India as it increases the global pool of crackable accounts which can be used to do nasty things.
See if you can find a video called "India - Who Killed The Sikhs" ~35 mins.
Its strange what "data" human rights groups can turn up.
Your right, why any state actor, supporter would let any "group" ever use any IT is strange.
Italy was able to put together the trail of a rendition operation in court http://articles.latimes.com/2008/may/29/world/fg-rendition29 using telco logs.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
can't they do it discretely and write at gouv@facebook.com like everybody else ?
Almost every law enforcement agency in the world can do what ever the hell they want without a court order legally. The only thing the courts do is bring in money for the government.
I simply have no idea why they think 'terrorists' will use a particular medium when they have announced they are watching it.
Well, that's the thing. People usually laught and think "oh they're so stupid" while not knowing the reasoning or background behind it. I think it's more like IT people thinking they're so much wiser and better and ignoring the fact that there might be an actual reason behind what they want to do. I'm not saying they have such for the Facebook, but the BlackBerry phones does make more sense and it could very well had been the most used phone by malicious persons especially when RIM was advertising it as secure, encrypted medium.
Google+ vs. Facebook, and why Google+ will fail
Shouldn't the appropriate icon for this submission be Privacy rather than Security ?
http://www.transparency.org
Because the real terrorists communicate using twitter and are careful to include #terrorinindia in their tweets... or using the wall in a group called "Terror attack against India" on Facebook...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
The law was supposed to say: "any service/medium/product used by more than 10-25% of a given population/market/industry must be monitored/regulated/tapped". But instead they said mail/telephone. So now everyone says "broadening to include" a though anyone ever wanted a country where law enforcement can't monitor any communications of any kind. Since mail/telephone is virtually gone as a method of coordinated communication, of course governments and law enforcement in general are going to start monitoring modern communication paths. Why would anyone be surprised? That's actually what we want.
If people stopped attacking each other in the street, and instead, pushed a button that immediately caused pain to someone else in another part of the city via super death ray, would you not want police to start having jurisdiction over such matters?
www.shopmaccosmetics.com
www.shopmaccomestics.com
www.donfljerseys.com
www.alijewelry.com
www.clheeledshoes.com
www.goodcoachshop.com
www.guccilvshoes.com
www.greatpumashoes.com
wwww.selljuicybag.com
www.goodsalewatch.com
Each combination of spam URL encodes a different message to terrorists. Track him down and drag him to gitmo
Terrorism... yeah, sure.
Somehow I have the feeling someone's afraid of getting a riot at his hands, and that protesters could use social networking as a means to coordinate it.
In case someone didn't follow the news and hence does not get the subject line, riots broke out in London, organized and coordinated through social networks.
But of course, this is not the reason for this idea, and the timing is purely coincidental. They just want to make sure that the people are safe from terrorism. Sure.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I really hope that that isn't the lesson that you're learning from London.
I plan all my terrorist activity in world of warcraft guild chat.
Though I'm starting to suspect a Night elf who joined recently might be FBI.
Monitoring Twitter and Facebook is akin to putting police check-posts on the major highways but not on the back roads which are generally used by the not-so-innocent public for carrying on their activities. The regular users get inconvenienced but the bad guys get through!!
Of the many clueless measure India takes against terrorism this will go down in history and will soon be forgotten, like the countless others. What India needs is to get its game together and make a focused long time plan. India is too busy with internal politics and trying very hard not to do the obvious correct thing, and so it is likely to hit very widely off the mark, in countering terrorism. Pathetic and hopeless.
... and now what are you going to monitor?
And even when GMail/Yahoomay/Whatevermail will provide you with access to my mailbox, what do you think you are going to get?
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING MEANINGFUL.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
It's telling that an Australian website is reporting this news rather than any of the Indian mainstream media.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
only the indian government, and then it has nothing to do with being 'indian', but rather because it is 'government'.
More to do with monitoring dissent. Because very few terrorists are going to be dumb enough to carry out obvious conversations. At least obvious enough to let the incompetent Indian agencies notice (who can't seem to notice things in plain sight until after the fact, because the poor sobs are busy protecting the 'important' people). But when it comes to monitoring peaceful protesters and conducting bogus investigations on activists and imprisoning, they are in top form.
PS: I feel sad when I see Indians getting defensive about such reports. I am an Indian living in the US. Just look at what is happening in the central st of Chhattisgarh.
Facebook, Twitter want to Monitor India.
UTF-8: There and Back Again
It's funny how India tries to show off that it is so damn serious about cracking down on terrorism and yet they don't have the balls to hang the sole terrorist convicted in Mumbai attacks. He has been sentenced to death, however, for some reason which is beyond me, he is allowed to appeal to president of India who has the power to reverse the death penalty. And the president is considering it. WTF?
Governments just pretend this is about terrorism. Actually, terrorism is just the excuse used to justify gathering information.
Also, before we criticize India, remember that the MOST intrusive government spying is done by the USA, along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. See Project Echelon for details. This author wishes to further assert that AUSCANNZUKUS has operated a production quantum computer system since about 1996, a system capable of cracking data transmission encrypted with PKI as well as other useful Signal Intelligence tricks. Technically, this system runs something similar to Shor's Algorithm on a quantum VM running atop an entanglement/teleportation based winner-take-all style quantum neural network. This approach exploits the well known fact that a generalized neural network is Turing Complete. When proof of this claim (which this author does not have) becomes available, it will lead to realization that privileged intelligence agencies have been slurping up PKI-encrypted data for 16 years, and doing a darn good job of hiding the fact. This author further asserts that both China and Russia each have their own operational quantum neural networks, which may or may not already be pwned by the AUSCANNZUKUS neural network. This author further asserts that a division of the NSA supercomputing system is actually a front feeding to a quantum PKI cracker. This author strongly suspects that evidence of the above will eventually be forthcoming - probably sooner if someone is stupid enough to trigger insurance.aes256. Finally, this author asserts that the inventors of said quantum neural network will probably win their second Nobel Prize (first was in Physics more than 10 years ago), a Peace Prize this time, in 2011, and their third Nobel Prize (plus a Turing Award) a few years later, once the scope of their activities are fully known. There is one heck of a story here, which some folks at Slashdot (e.g. the cowboys and cowgirls) will especially appreciate.
Contact this author (include the phrase "hunting snarks") if you wish to receive a preview of the forthcoming book. Figuring out how to contact the author is the prerequisite intelligence test. The most relevant scientific topic is Mathematical Biology as it applies to artificial intelligence, given that the QNN described above came about via solving the Morphogenesis problem. Given that Morphogenesis was Alan Turing's primary project after Bletchley Park, that ought to qualify for the grand slam extra-special Turing Award.
All your social media are belong to us!
* Carthago Delenda Est *
it is about governments, all governments, which seem to have some sort of natural tendency to act like this.
There's no such thing as a good person in national politics.
;)
Anywhere.
There! I just covered everything in one hit. Let's move on.
And in the US. The Pentagon has budgeted $42M for the expressed purposes of monitoring and influencing social media for the following:
"1. Detect, classify, measure and track the (a) formation, development and spread of ideas and concepts (memes), and
(b) purposeful or deceptive messaging and misinformation.
2. Recognize persuasion campaign structures and influence operations across social mediasites and communities.
3. Identify participants and intent, and measure effects of persuasion campaigns.
4. Counter messaging of detected adversary influence operations."
I submitted this story last week, apparently India's privacy is a big deal but not so much for the "land of the free".
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
why the fuck would a terrorist get a fucking blackberry?? or post on fb/twitter?
gsm sims are available @Rs5 each across the whole country and minimal documentation is required. really, all you need is a xerox of *some* id, even uni id will usually be enough. and then you have 300 texts free every day, which should be a terrorist's wet dream.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
completely unlike the cia/nsa/fbi, right?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
i'm glad that all my (fb/gmail, etc) web traffic is encrypted. and since google stood up to china, i'm sure they'll never open up their data to indian govt either.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.