Slashdot Mirror
Under Public Pressure, India Withdraws Draft Encryption Policy
An anonymous reader writes: The government of India withdrew its draft policy on encryption owing to public responses just a day after releasing the document. The Communications and Information Technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said — "I read the draft. I understand that the manner in which it is written can lead to misconceptions. I have asked for the draft policy to be withdrawn and reworded." While it is encouraging that the government recognized it mistake and withdrew, many fear that this is part of a larger problem when it comes to this government taking technology policy decisions. Recently, the government was in the dock for its lack of clarity on Net Neutrality.
They yanked the link posted yesterday, but how's this for a pretentious domain name?
>> "DIETY.gov.in" - http://deity.gov.in/sites/uplo...
"I read the draft. I understand that the manner in which it is written can lead to misconceptions. I have asked for the draft policy to be withdrawn and reworded." .
Translation: "This was a blatant power grab and we got caught. I have asked for it to be reworded so that people won't notice the problem next time."
Oh, it's not "yeah, this proposal a horrible thing, we shouldn't have thought that this was a good idea", it's "You misunderstood what we are trying to do, we will do it again with more obfuscated language this time". No, we fucking didn't misunderstand. Your stupid proposal makes a nationwide backdoor into anything encrypted. If this were to actually happen, it would certainly be abused - India's government is notoriously corrupt. The Indian people need to tell their government in no uncertain terms that this is unacceptable.
Enigma
So they're going to reword it, masking the law's intent through verbose legal jargon? At least they reacted at all, I suppose.
What misconceptions? It seemed to be a pretty clear F U to anyone that might use encrypted communications as part of standard business practices.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
If this were to actually happen, it would certainly be abused - India's government is notoriously corrupt.
It wouldn't just be abused by the government. Backdoors cannot be restricted to just the groups you intend - i.e. just the "good guys". It's simply not possible. Governments find this fact to be highly inconvenient and keep trying to find some way to weasel around it. This is just one of the more blatant attempts at weaseling.
No country can call it a democracy if the people's communications are controlled through threats and intimidation. A people unable to communicate freely without censorship or privacy are not living in a true democracy or free state. Unfortunately many 'democracies' in Europe which claim to be free are not. They censor and punish holocaust deniers, censor communications online (for the 'good of the children'/decency, 'copyright', and in the name of 'privacy'). Unfortunately the evidence is these tools are being used to squash speech. And even in the United States we don't have a true democracy because the government enables parties to easily censor others via DMCA take-down requests and similar actions.
One of the biggest mistakes I think of our 'founding fathers' was to implement copyright. The only time copyright should be permitted is when it doesn't involve violence against individuals (ie applicable to corporations only as it is in exchange for other legal protections) and copyleft (where the people are not threatened, but corporations can be).
Under Public Pressure, India Withdraws Daft Encryption Policy
CAP = 'socially'
It wasn't public pressure.
It was the realization that all the American companies that offshore tech work to India would have to offshore to somewhere else instead.
I have never seen an example of the Indian state successfully enforcing anything, whether it be in the technological sphere or in the realm of keeping Indian men from gang-raping Indian women or tourist. Nothing to see here, folks.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Which is why governments do stupid stuff like this they demonstrate they're clueless idiots who don't understand the technology
Sometimes they are clueless but more often I think they understand just fine. Their "ignorance" is willful. They could easily reach out to parties that can explain the technology and the arguments for and against but they clearly are not doing this. So I think it's malicious instead of ignorant or if it is ignorant it is SO ignorant that there is effectively not difference.
The police don't like encryption because it makes their job harder. They don't really care about the knock on effects. They only care about their ability to catch criminals and what politician wants to be against that? The politicians only care about staying in power. They don't really care about the knock on effects either so long as they don't affect their ability to stay in power. Easiest argument in the world for a politician to make is to be against criminals or terrorists. The collateral damage from their simplistic sound bite arguments gets brushed under the rug.
I have never seen an example of the Indian state successfully enforcing anything....
Selective enforcement is worse than no enforcement.
Intermittent enforcement can give India all the downsides of the law without most of the (for them) benefits. The threat of occasional sporadic success, for instance, can cripple or kill outsourcing of anything with sensitive information to India, while the general failure of enforcement can still cause it to fail in its stated purpose of detecting planned attacks on the government and the like.
As someone whose employment prospects and pay levels are severely impacted by outsourcing of technology work to India, it's tempting to cheer them on in re-wording and re-promulgating the regulation, and spiking the outsourcing. But that would probably just push the work to an even riskier to secrets country like China, rather than bring it to the US.
Yes I know it's not a zero-sum game. But with the current US laws it's a massively sloped playing field, too.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Maybe now the government can devote some funds to providing basic sanitation to the hundreds of millions of Indian citizens who lack it? It's shameful that India proclaims its power and prowess by engaging in what amounts to little more than pissing contests, while neglecting to provide for elementary dignity of its citizens.
Please update your link.
India tries to destroy its only competitive industry
They should go through with it so the rest of the world will have them as a 'case study' on what not to do. How much of their GDP will this epic rippling failure cost them.