Slashdot Mirror
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.
They'll be spying on you, too. You have no idea exactly how much stuff is outsourced to India. Well, now it's all fair game.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
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 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?