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 I have asked for the draft policy to be withdrawn and reworded."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.
"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 I have asked for the draft policy to be withdrawn and reworded."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
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.