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India Wants Tech Platforms To Break Encryption And Remove Content The Government Thinks Is 'Unlawful' (buzzfeednews.com)
India's government wants to make it mandatory for platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Google, to remove content it deems "unlawful" within 24 hours of notice, and create "automated tools" to "proactively identify and remove" such material. From a report: It also wants tech companies to build in a way to trace the source of the content, which would require platforms like WhatsApp to break end-to-end encryption. India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) published [PDF] the proposed rules on its website following a report on Monday by The Indian Express revealing the government's proposal to modify the country's primary IT law to work them in. The report comes days after India's government seemingly authorized 10 federal agencies to snoop into every computer in the country last week. The proposed measures have provoked concerns from privacy activists who claim they would threaten free speech and enable mass surveillance.
[...] If India does work these rules into its IT law, it would have precedent: Earlier this month, Australia passed a controversial encryption bill that would require technology companies to give law enforcement agencies access to encrypted communications, saying that it was essential to stop terrorists and criminals who rely on secure messaging apps to communicate.
[...] If India does work these rules into its IT law, it would have precedent: Earlier this month, Australia passed a controversial encryption bill that would require technology companies to give law enforcement agencies access to encrypted communications, saying that it was essential to stop terrorists and criminals who rely on secure messaging apps to communicate.
Well, I'm a globalist, and I want them to drop those countries as well. No country should be trusted on the basis that only individuals and not organizations are worthy of trust, but no country which has deliberately compromised cryptology should be trusted even slightly.
We know what it looks like when each country is more localized, and it's not pretty.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It looks like the world's largest democracy is coming into some bumpy times. The Indians have a strange love-hate relationship with the British due to the lasting influence of the British Raj there, but they are now showing an unhealthy tendency to emulate the UK in its snooping, anti-privacy attitudes. No government needs to control what its citizens can read and write unless it has totalitarian aims. Clearly, the UK does want to control its people just as Orwell predicted, but until now the Indian government has not been visibly interested in this sort of control. It's ver sad, and very bad news for the people of India.
This is yet another reason why centralizing onto just a few massive platforms run by ad companies is a disaster in the making.
We need to re-establish a decentralized internet, with strong user-controlled end-to-end encryption. It must allow public or recipient-restricted messages, and be censorship and mass surveillance resistant.
If we don't do that, we will lose the free internet, as more and more countries clamp down on the ad companies the public is centralizing onto.
Companies, governments, organizations. These things are not trustable, stop pretending they have your best interests in mind just because they give you things you want.
These things are not moral centers, they arnt continually benevolent and they always need moderation and oversight
Stop being lazy and stupid
If India (or any country) wants Facebook (or any big social media platform) to do something stupid like break encryption or censor content, Facebook could rally the impacted citizens by blocking all access. On the home page or app startup screen put something like: "Your government is making an unreasonable request, because of this no citizens of India may use Facebook until this changes." Imagine if instead of removing search results for "objectionable" content Google just said, "Fine, if you don't want your citizens looking at this, your citizens can't use Google at all, and we are telling your citizens why."
Republicans love giving power to government for law enforcement purposes. Democrats love giving power to government for social justice purposes. Libertarians are against big government in case it ever becomes corrupt, but were always ridiculed because "that could never happen here." Well, now do you believe it could happen here? The only real check on authoritarianism is to prevent government from amassing that much power in the first place.
Yes a benevolent oligarchy or a benevolent dictatorship can be more effective than a democracy. But the tradeoff is a higher risk of turning into an authoritarian oligarchy or dictatorship. The Libertarian argument is that it's better to just suffer with less effective government, than to give government more power and risk it turning authoritarian and abusing that power. Every time you the thought "there aught to be a law against that" crosses your mind, the next thing you should think about is how such a law could be abused by the government. Only after you've considered that full range of possibilities can you impartially decide if things really would be better with such a law. Otherwise you end up like China, which has thousands of behavioral laws that are never enforced. Unless you piss off the Communist leadership, in which case they throw the book at you and either send you to a labor camp or chop off your head.