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."
What's the point? It's not like you can control which packets will and won't be routed through the US.
What they ought to be requiring is encryption, but we all know that's not going to happen.
Nobody should use email for official anything.
Benjamin Franklin was right. It's the Post Office. I mean, does any email provider say they will deliver through rain, sleet, snow or hail? Do you see that on anybody's TOS? Given the uncertainties of the climate these days, you'd be a fool to do it any other way.
Besides, it will slow the government down. That's always a plus.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
American politicians use GMail because goverement accounts are archived and the contents are considered public property and not private communication.
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.