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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."
Copycats! The US Government has been doing that for years.
Well at least India is open about spying on their own citizens.
So do you mean India does officially what the US does unofficially ?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Did you miss the bit where proper controls and judicial oversight aren't in place?
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.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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?
-Styopa
The government is inefficient, that's why, here in the US, we've privatized it!
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.
Bah, details!
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If people incorrectly call Native Americans, "Indians", what would they call Native Indians?
As long as proper encrypted communication protocols and communications tools with source code available for peer review are in place, there really is no problem with this.
There, fixed that for ya'.
Ezekiel 23:20
call center employees
I know in actual fact that the US and Canada aren't much better for tracking communications but at least the governments don't come right out and say it. How can you deny people the right to free speech? When you can go to jail simply by speaking your mind or taking liberty to view a document / picture then we have a problem.
The internet is an open resource and it should stay that way, just because you can find offensive content doesn't mean it should be blocked. What offends you won't always offend me and vice verse, if you don't like what you see then stop viewing it, but to have an entire country force censorship and monitoring on there people is just sad.
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?
Of all the things India needs to spend money on right now I'd put this near the bottom of the list.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
So do you mean India does officially what the US does unofficially ?
No. The US government doesn't do that, the article you linked to is a bunch of bullshit fearmongering by people with no knowledge or insight into how the communications industry works.
Specifically, the US has the capability to sniff International communications only. When it comes to domestic communications, the only way they can get access is either to submit a warrant for a CALEA tap, which mirrors specific phone numbers over a trunk to a local LE facility, or submit a subpoena to have the Telco/ISP turn over records. They do not have any kind of pervasive monitoring ability and even if they wanted it there's no common point of intercept.
What India is talking about doing is installing pervasive monitoring gear at every ISP and telco which would allow real-time government traffic snooping, the US does not do this.
U.S. Marshall ... does not believe in conspiracy theories. But is pissed at the direction this government is going.
The Bill of Rights. How quaintly old school. What nonsense did they teach about that back when he was in school?
That's a buzzword from back in India's socialist days. I guess the free market, democracy talk is just all a bunch of bullshit.
Have gnu, will travel.
Maybe we'll actually start to see implementation the end-to-end encryption that should have been there on everything from the beginning*.
*Admittedly, it wasn't really practical in the beginning but those days are long past
they are typically referred to as "east indians".
"Is it legal"
"I will make it legal"
Legality is the cloak of tyranny. It always becomes legal, that which tyrants need to rule. And before some leftwing nut quotes this, I'll do it for you.“They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.” -Says the man trying to remove the restraints against tyranny.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
China pretty much does the same thing, they even block incoming and outgoing traffic through their "Great Fire Wall". In a nation state like India, which is a union of essentially 24 different cultures, the only way the govt found to keep people together and stay as one country is through coercion, and free people might not let that happen. Given a chance India will split into 500+ princely states like before independence from the British. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_princely_states_of_India
Indeed. Didn't read the link deeply enough... should be logically flamebait-ed :-)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Selling the information to the CIA, MI6, Mossad, etc may partially help to pay for the Central Monitoring System... Oh, who am I kidding? It'll go straight to the pockets of a few insider employees.
If I had a company that outsourced development of my product to India, I'd be pretty nervous.
> with thestated aim usually to preserve social order
I do believe this is the reason dictators give.
>and national security
Hmmm. Maybe it's about memes to placate sufficient quantities of the masses.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I will respond to this obvious troll since there is an informational opportunity. I went for gratis Internet classes in 1996 (gopher, veronica, archie - remember them?). The cybercafes were in full force by 1998.
Cheapest unlimited & WiFi Internet access now is $5/month. Rural areas get cheaper rates. Smartphone Internet plans are at $4/month. In India, even a poor man on a bicycle can afford a mobile phone. I know people in huts who have 3 of them (no, they are not being spendy). Unlike US, there actually is a free market when it comes to telecom and even the dirt poor of us can afford it.
99% Indians are living off the grid
Casteism