Slashdot Mirror
Indian Government To Ban Use of US Email Services For Official Communications
hypnosec writes "The Government of India is planning to ban the use of U.S.-based email services like Gmail for official communications. It will soon send out a formal notification to it half-million officials across the country, asking them to use official email addresses and services provided by India's National Informatics Center. The move is intended to increase the security of confidential government data and protect it from overseas surveillance."
Frankly, I dont think the US should use gMail etc for governmental communications either.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I bet plenty
Interesting headline given the level of corruption in the Indian Government. Given that, the headline makes sense. More secrets to keep.
Diversification is good. For all the death, destruction, and injustice resulting from a world of 200 distinct governments, it would be orders of magnitude worse if there were only one. So let's keep them seperate, for the same reason you don't invest all your assets in a single company: the risk of disaster would be through the roof.
That they can't be the ones spying. Corrupt govt hating on another corrupt govt.
This seems total sensible, after all if you let a foreign entity run your email you don't really own the data and any data that you don't own is at risk. The real surprise is that it took the Indian government this long to realize that. Even the company I work for only lets employees use there email servers for official communications.
it seems like a prudent move on behalf of the indian government considering the NSA has all but said they were spying on other governments. though there is the question of what system the indian government will switch to and if it gets hacked by other governments. realistically, they should be using encryption on 100% of their emails.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Thanks Obama.
And centralize for national surveillance
Its not to 'protect the data' it's to get people to use services that they have direct access too.
Every government does this.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
"So now we have 1.2 bilion terrorists in India"
USA's authoritarian, Orwellian stance is hurting American companies' ability to compete in the global market, domestic and international. It hurts the American economy.
This seems total sensible, after all if you let a foreign entity. on the cloud, run your email you don't really own the data and any data that you don't own is at risk. The real surprise is that it took the business world this long to realize.
Reap what you sow, Google. As an American, I can't wait until Startmail or another non-U.S. email provider provides a decent alternative. GMail's days are numbered for me.
Here we see the beginnings of real, hard evidence of just how disastrous the NSA's recent actions are to the best interests of the country.
It used to be that American IT companies were the gold standard, to the point that there almost wasn't even any pretense of competition. Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook -- American companies ruled the Internet.
And the NSA has turned that all to shit. Now, you'd have to be an idiot to trust any American company not to hand your data over to the NSA. And the NSA has most emphatically been demonstrated that it cannot, under any circumstances, be trusted with that data; just look at not only the overt corporate espionage, but the pervy stalking culture of the degenerates working there. Even if not for official policy directives, you can bet that some low-level flunky at the NSA will be placing insider trades based on what he reads in your executive's emails.
In other words, the NSA has utterly devastated the greatest industry the United States has ever created, and the very backbone of our economy. It's worse than if they had bombed all our ball bearing plants; infrastructure can be rebuilt, but trust? How the fuck are we supposed to rebuild that? ...and the corporate heads and legal departments wonder why they shouldn't have refused to play with the NSA and gone public at the first hint of this malfeasance, writs of classification be damned. Had Google insisted it be taken down swinging rather than play lapdog to the NSA, their brand would have been unimpeachable; rather, it is untouchable.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Since we have to live with what was once a great nation now fallen in corruption, at least we should have some fun with it.
The old meme "in soviet union" is becoming obsolete. I suggest we start a new meme: "in nazi america".
First Post FAIL.
The NSA has a lot fewer legal problems intercepting foreign mail than
it does domestic.
Only now, it simply means they wont have good spam filters,
and money will now be flowing out of india to nigeria $26,000,000 at a time.
Using regional based email providers won't solve anything if your data is traversing circuits of ISP's and telecoms that are co-operating with a the NSA or other foreign intelligence agencies.
Of course India is setting up the Central Monitoring System (CMS) essentially India's version of PRISM:
I disagree, in the US Copyright is automatic and thus you do own the data, any unauthorized use by the ISP's should open them up for civil damages based on unlicensed use of copyrighted material.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The reality is, I expect to see more governments doing this.
With the Patriot Act and all of the revelations about the NSA spying, American companies are not things you can trust. All of the cloud services ran by US companies are covered by the same thing.
I've said it before, but when you turn your corporations into arms of your security apparatus, those corporations cease to be trustworthy.
So in a few months when US companies start feeling the pinch as people do stuff like this, when they start whining about it (and the state department starts trying to pressure those countries into buying it again) ... the only reasonable response will be "sorry, but given your current laws we simply can't do that".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Doesnt that pretty much defeat SSL? And what on earth would make you believe that they weren't compromised.
most tin-star sheriffs don't want anybody else doing their snooping. lot of that going on in the InterClouds these days.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I agree. It is despicable that my boss can order me about via email.
I would have posted first, but the NSA is spying on my connection and caused me to have 10ms of latency which made me late to post.
"Maximizing graft in your new government position"
"Deodorant: Learn it, Love it"
"Danger for Jitney drivers: Yaks in the Middle of the Road"
"5 steps for rising above abject poverty to just poverty"
"Writing obfuscated code the Indian way"
"Coming trends in 2030: Indoor plumbing"
"Call Center University: How to sound like a dumb Texan in 30 days"
"10 Fun vacations in Kashmir"
"Saving money on sundries: Using Rupees for toilet paper"
There is so much spin in that headline I am doing a barrel roll.
Consider a growing company trying to play with the bigger dogs. As this company establishes it's presence, people are going to do everything they can to keep progress. If this means setting up a throw away gmail account while internal company infrastructure is developed so you can keep in touch with clients, then you setup up a throw away gmail account. Eventually a memo comes out telling everyone to start using their company provided email.
The fact this is a government company instead of a corporate company is the only reason they were able to spin the "hey, we got a memo" story into a headline that feeds off the distrust of the NSA.
This explains why so many nations are behind.
Instead of worrying about the routing, they should be pushing for all clients to encrypt the contents (not web-based either). Worse, they should be getting off windows and Macs, and moving to Open Source such as Linux and BSD. In addition, the hardware should be produced in their own nations with Logic chips from their nation or the west, instead of China. The bios should be openbios on flash ram that was produced local.
But focusing on the server shows how poorly thought out their IT is.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Great, they key is signed and you agree to trust it. Then somebody steps into the middle on the next connection attempt and hands you a new key. Signed by a trusted authority that has been compromised. Does your client check the manually accepted keys before the CA signed keys? Does it do a redundancy check? Or does it just merrily proceed and let you give the MITM your password.
I really dont think the client is checking to see if the key changes. And that would be a very bad thing.
great Indian gov't is worried falsely US ISP's would never share data with anyone and all the hops going through other countries are just as safe as in US... o wait.
Sorry about my poor reading skills. I dont know enough about a new CA to be able to tell if this would work.
If you're still speaking English, I can assure you that the intelligence and military complex are doing their job adequately.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You know why the NSA has gone to wiretapping US communications? Because they're done tapping into all of the international communications.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Obama's actions and the actions of Congress are detroying the United States, and that is clearly their goal.
It's time somebody stepped up and put an end to it.
What alternatives to gmail, yahoo and hotmail are there that are not based in the US or its intelligence-sharing partners, and offer encrypted connections?
American politicians use GMail because goverement accounts are archived and the contents are considered public property and not private communication.
Not here in Ontario, the premier and his accomplices deleted all their e-mails and wiped out their computers. Since there were no backups several multi-million dollar fraud charges couldn't be pressed. So yeah, no use of GMail or Hotmail for crooked politicians (excuse my pleonasm) here in Canada.
This leads to a new avenue of attack on NSA snooping. Presumably some of the data being intercepted is copyrighted works belonging to big media. So all we have to do is convince the media companies that massive copyright infringement is happening, sit back, and enjoy the popcorn.
Of all the inherently useless and broken protocols in use today SMTP email takes the cake.
Anyone can impersonate anyone else with impunity. Phishing and PC zombification via Email is boundless.
Anyone can send you whatever useless garbage they want without your consent.
No useful security of any kind.
Inability to transmit large content and no way to facilitate realtime communication.
Message delivery is a crapshoot thanks to hapazard proliferation of automated filters with minds of their owns.
The failure of SMTP on all levels and massive operational costs it has incurred for administrators and users is mind boggling.
Spy on me all you want (my own govt, NSA, whomever)... Nothing's gonna happen except losing some storage and time! As for the laws that allow these kinds of unethical behaviour to go on, as long as we (people of the world) remain ignorant and divided by and large, there's nothing that can really be done. We *need* carrot-and-stick rulers and hence that's what we get. If the world were to become all nice and a paradise tomorrow it'll be too good for most of us, and we'd fuck it up and bring it down to the current level soon enough. So meanwhile people are fighting with various means to educate and enlighten on the one hand, and take corporates and governments to courts on the other hand, but this is going to be a long struggle. Unethical digital behaviour is *nothing* compared to the unethical real-world behaviour and no one's even been able to do anything about the latter yet...
personally i could care less what this bunch of idiots do. Hopefully they are thankfull for all the jobs their 3rd world country has that were outsourced from the good ole USA
Was it a problem to follow a common sense and an accepted international laws? To wiretap only the criminals on a court order? With discipline and self-restraint?
Such irresponsible behavior harms the US companies and the Internet network in general.
"Others do it..", but the USA is the leader, it had to show an example.
Every regime fears transparency and hates people who can think out of the box. http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/untouched-by-justice/article4340725.ece
Casteism
split internet per major power. There have already been voices in europe about this, this might give a little more incentive and fuel that fire again. Wether thats a good or bad thing my crystal ball wont say
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?