India Rolls Out Central Monitoring System To Snoop On All Communications

hypnosec tipped us to news that India is rolling out a new intrusive monitoring system, using the authority of a 2000 telecom law. Quoting The Times of India: "However, Pavan Duggal, a Supreme Court advocate specialising in cyberlaw, said the government has given itself unprecedented powers to monitor private Internet records of citizens. 'This system is capable of abuse,' he said. The Central Monitoring System, being set up by the Centre for Development of Telematics, plugs into telecom gear and gives central and state investigative agencies a single point of access to call records, text messages, and emails as well as the geographical location of individuals." Privacy advocates are worried about abuse, partially because India has no effective privacy legislation, and the "...Indian government under PM Manmohan Singh has taken an increasingly uncompromising stance when it comes to online freedoms, with the stated aim usually to preserve social order and national security or fight 'harmful' defamation."

Comments

Re:This is necessary to defeat terrorists.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Did you miss the bit where proper controls and judicial oversight aren't in place?

as an american

[nimbius]

i can offer some perspective to India. At first the whole thing seems a bit absurd and draconian, you might even be outraged over it. eventually stuff like this just becomes routine enough to find its way into inane stuff like farm subsidy bills, and aside from the occaional GPS device snuck onto some college kids car you really dont notice it at all. After a while you start to actively ignore the fact that your country runs secret torture camps and foreign prisons for people who say or do the wrong things. Finally you just stop challenging it alltogether and praise it as being something, hell anything your highly factioned, ineffective government can unilaterally agree upon as passable legislation. after a few years and high profile criminal acts like shootings and bombings, you begin to look back and conclude the entire spy-on-everyone thing as being a hopelessly useless effort on the part of the government to keep no one safe.

Re:as an american

[gstoddart]

That is one of the most depressing things I've read in a while.

It's pretty accurate, but it's depressing as hell.

Ah, those primitives

[argStyopa]

Ahahahaha, I love it when some shithole 3rd world insolvent country rolls out a new method to keep control of its teeming masses.

Maybe instead of trying to watch everyone all the time like a giant prison ward, they'd be more successful at preventing sedition by I dunno, maybe making their country a better place to live so people wouldn't be so angry all the time?

They could start by - instead of their parliament and grand poobah (or whatever they're both called) wasting their efforts on trivial political point-scoring against each other all the goddamn time - passing a fucking budget since they haven't passed one in the last 4 years?

Wait, are we still talking about India?

Progress?

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile 600 million Indians still have to schlep down to the nearest river or railway to take a dump in the morning because there aren't enough toilets for everyone. But I'm glad they've got their priorities straight.

So now all tech support calls are monitored?

[oic0]

So now every tech support call in the world is monitored by the indian government? If I defame their leaders while on the phone with Dell, will their be consequences?