
In India, Prism-like Surveillance Slips Under the Radar  - gits1225
http://cis-india.org/news/time-world-anjan-trivedi-june-30-2013-in-india-prison-like-surveillance-slips-under-the-radar
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sudhirj
India has a very complicated relationship with censorship that's compounded by
underlying communal and religious tension. It looks idiotic when you hear
about people being arrested for tweets and likes, but what gets lost is the
fundamentalist barbarianism that underlies it: the grim truth that people
might die otherwise. That unemployed youth will take to the streets and
violently protest at every imagined slight to their <insert religious ideal /
figurehead / motto / policy here >. That leaders will tacitly encourage the
violence and terrorism that their own minions commit.

We don't care too much about privacy rights yet because we haven't got that
far on whatever pyramid diagram of priorities you'd judge by. A majority of
the population lives in poverty, is hungry and thirsty, does not have access
to non-toxic food and water. The urban population is still very concerned with
making ends meet, putting their kids through college and hoping that their
dreams will be fulfilled through the lives of their offspring.

Those with money, influence and clout don't care. They can either simply buy
their way out of this kind of monitoring or laugh at it over dinner.

Besides, we really don't have the capability to pull this off well enough to
be a danger to anyone.

~~~
revelation
Countries have never morphed from oppressive regimes into democratic
wonderlands without violent overthrows in between. The idea that you would
oppress now while you are poor so you can be free later on is bizarre.

~~~
throwawaykf02
Fact is, in India, the poor are _already_ oppressed, just nobody realizes it.
They have no real rights, they have no food and they have no prospects. The
only thing they have is votes, which are a sham, because they are given away
willingly to the politician that makes the most encouraging promises, which,
of course, are never fulfilled. However, when your constant concern is
"where's our next meal coming from", keeping track of empty promises is
probably pretty low on your list of priorities.

So, the real choice is being oppressed and desperately poor... or being
oppressed and making progress. I personally believe democracy is not suited to
India at the moment because (or so it seems to me at least) politicians spend
all their efforts in fighting amongst themselves to stay in power (and on the
side, siphoning away money for themselves), while no real progress ever
happens.

The rich get richer, the middle class continues along in blissful ignorance,
and the poor get poorer.

On the other hand, in China (or so, again, it seems to me) politicians do
engage in corruption for selfish reasons, but the rest of the time they are
focused on _bringing their country ahead_ , and I believe that's in a big part
because they don't have to worry about staying in power.

I, for one, would welcome an "oppressive" regime if it meant progress.
Oppression is not a good thing, but when your alternative is half a billion
people starving every night, I don't think it's all that bad.

~~~
anoncow
>I personally believe democracy is not suited to India at the moment

(I don't know which oppressor you want to hand over the country to.)

People vote along lines of caste and religion. People vote for money and
liquor. But people vote. They throw parties out of power when they want to. A
benevolent, even if he promises to turn India back into a golden bird, will
not want you to vote.

Democracy is often a mess, but is better than the rightless life under a
benevolent. India is in a mess, lets not make it any worse. There are
alternatives if you look close. You can educate people, unite instead of
divide people. You can contest elections or vote for the voices of sanity.
There will be difficulties and we will always be a work in progress, but we
will have to try. Democracy is not a panacea, you still have to work to make
it better. Giving away all of your rights and responsibilities, hoping some
benevolent oppressor will save you is not the way to do it.

Many of my friends have been saying the same thing. Indian messageboards are
overflowing with hate. A certain benevolent has been identified as well. One
who has proven his credentials. The chanted name has divided a state
successfully, and I fear permenantly, across religious lines. The bet is to do
the same thing across the country. If you don't feel the poisonous atmosphere,
it is because you are wilfully ignoring the obvious and concentrating on the
made up.

How long should we continue living as people of a certain religion or caste?
How long should we continue hating people who are of a certain religion or
caste, knowing that the other person had as little a choice in selecting their
religion/caste as we had in selecting ours?

Xenophobia has never been India's big problem, but we know it simmers in most
households, in one form or the other. We take pride in what our ancestors did
and forsake everything to maintain that pride. We close our eyes trying to fit
in, not believing that this life may be the only life we get. That there may
be no rebirth or afterlife. That love is its own reward and hate its own
punishment.

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general_failure
A lot of people here saying that the India govt is too incompetent to do this.

This is naive thinking. The indian govt might be slow and corrupt but rest
assured when it comes to implementation they are actually quite decent. See
the amount of work that has gone into computerization of various things like
personal tax, property tax, education etc. Other governments can move much
more quickly because they only have 1% of India's population. India has so
much paper records and most of them lost. For example, can you imagine what it
takes to move the property tax system online? Most land records don't exist on
paper with the goverment. This is not just a data entry and technology problem
anymore.

No, what I am worried about is that if they pull if off, you cannot keep the
politicians off this. And it's guaranteed to be misused. It's dangerous to
build a monitoring system because a security hole in such things endangers
everyone. If the richest companies in the planet like apple, google, sony
cannot build secure governments, I highly doubt government can.

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thex86
This is particularly bad for a country like India where the police already has
too many powers: they don't need a warrant for many things. By "need", I mean
it's not that the Constitution doesn't require them to, but it's not enforced.
So much so, if you are a "no-one" (means you don't have any "political
connections"), the police can come to your place, search it, and arrest you
and put you in lockup. All without requiring a warrant. Good luck complaining.
(Of course the police requires a warrant when dealing with politicians, since
they can't touch them.)

Now given the police state India already is, this is more dangerous. Why?
Because the police has too many powers, they don't need warrants and now the
state has the capability to spy completely on its citizens. I can only see
glaring human rights violation coming out of this.

~~~
mknits
Rightly said. If citizens don't raise such issues soon enough, politicians and
other bad guys will make India fall.

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scdoshi
This makes all the difference:

"Yet India’s Central Monitoring System, or CMS, was not shrouded in secrecy"

Doesn't make collecting all that data ok, but the fact that it's not all cloak
and dagger means that people know what the government is doing in their name
and they can vote for a change if they disagree.

~~~
geekam
India has a very bad history in dealing with such issues esp when they involve
technology. Remember when they asked Google, Facebook, Twitter et. al. to
preemptively delete undesired messages?

~~~
scdoshi
To clarify again, I am not saying this is a good thing. I was just pointing
out what seemed to be a major point of difference between this and the US
situation.

A lot of the unrest and anger here is because mass surveillance was approved
to be carried out in secret and the companies were not even allowed to talk
about what type of data they were providing to the government.

~~~
gits1225
The Government is trying to do the same thing with similar tactics as the US
counterpart. They don't make any noise, or put any effort into making people
aware of what is actually going to be done to them. As a result, there is
virtually no media coverage, and only a couple of vigilant people who care
about it are even aware of this.

They just barely mention it in passing, is ambiguous and can be interpreted
however they want it to:
[http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=70747](http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=70747),
like: "Hey, we are going to monitor every aspect of your life, and keep the
records forever, and will be used against you for the interests of various
corrupt people; in effect, shutting you up. No big deal :)"

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ppradhan
Not exactly on this topic, but somewhat relevant when I see articles like
these from Indian media.

Media in India is weird in how it feels the need to emulate American events
etc and draw parallels to illustrate their case. It's like they need a
reinforcement framework to validate what they are saying. And for this, they
love to look up to everything American (it's a complement to USA I guess, but
also shows the insecurity india has towards modernisation). For example..
media routinely labels controversies as 'something-gate' when Watergate had
nothing to do with india, and indeed most people in India probably don't know
anything about it. The mumbai terrorist attacks are referred to as 26/11\. Now
their government surveillance is 'PRISM-like'.

India is insecure like this and looks for validation by trying to find
'standard' versions of what they are talking about, in the form of an American
parallel. It's regular enough that I thought it worth pointing out.

India used to be like this before too, with British parallels. I guess the
colonial hangover in India has proven to be a very long one. Be more confident
in your own ways India; to improve and to progress, you don't always need to
emulate.

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amazedsaint
The real problem is, recently there are lot of instances in India where
government is trying to enforce restrictions around social media more or less
to protect its own interests. There are no clear guidelines regarding how
you'll classify something as free speech or hatred speech. Most politicians
are too ignorant about internet, social media and the emerging crowd power,
and they are very anxious about the same. Giving such a system for a set of
people who don't really understand what it is and how it can be used, is the
real danger. They'll always use it to protect their interests.

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asitkumar
India's media is the only one allowed to openly lie on television. True
stories are never shown. And me, who laughed on conspiracy theories like
"Illuminati" as childish imagination, I know how foreigners are ruling India
even today. To keep control over the population you have to first monitor
their activities! This is what they do

~~~
markdown
> India's media is the only one allowed to openly lie on television.

USA's FOX News sued in court for the right to lie... and they won.

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yashkadakia
I am really not too worried about this because - I know that corruption and
incompetence will ensure this system never comes into place effectively.

On the few occasions that the government has tried to ban certain URLs - its
almost always been simple DNS filters that can be bypassed by using Google
DNS.

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snambi
can the indian govt can do anything? I haven't seen it can execute anything.
so, don't worry about such programs, they will build something, which will be
so useless, it will be only used to bill the govt.

~~~
ankitml
yes they can do anything. Anything to protect their interests.

