

To avoid Indian ban, BlackBerry maker allows govt. access to encrypted messages - SolInvictus
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/india/100831/blackberry-research-in-motion-ban

======
todayiamme
Note: This isn't supposed to be a political comment. I don't like politics and
I don't want to indulge in it neither am I interested in patriotism and other
such things. What I do care about is the suffering of human beings and finding
solutions for their problems. This comment is such an observation of a
pressing problem I see around me.

\----

This is precisely why I don't want to stay in India beyond a certain point.
This isn't just something about privacy, but it's the symptom of a cancer
that's spreading through the system. That might sound like a sweeping
statement, but it isn't. The Indian state is slowly disintegrating due to the
cause and effect caused by _decades_ of corruption (see:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India> ) and growing discontent.

As of now in India there are Kashmir separatists to the north who want to
overthrow direct rule of the Indian state after decades of conflict and the
rise of oppressive practices by the Indian state (see:
[http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,PAK,,3ae6a8558,0...](http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,HRW,,PAK,,3ae6a8558,0.html)
). I see stories like these (
[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7973499...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/7973499/Boy-11-shot-
dead-in-Kashmir.html)) depressingly often in the news. These people are want a
solution and they are willing to spill blood for it.

In the south there is a growing communist insurgency consisting of
impoverished people who have been long denied their rights and have taken up
arms in protest (see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naxalite-
Maoist_insurgency> ). The interesting thing is that these groups have
entrenched their power by acting like an ad-hoc government collecting taxes,
dispensing justice and winning the confidence of the villagers through
goodwill schemes that the government should have implemented.

What fuels it is the fact that outside the metros there is no visible
infrastructure development and government functioning is reduced to the
distribution of voter cards. Most people attribute this to a lack of
resources, but that isn't quite true. More than $ 125 mil. are spent on
creating rural health centers yearly and budgets are allocated based upon need
by bureaucrats with little or no accountability to the people there are
supposed to serve [disclaimer: my mother is such a bureaucrat and I read her
files at times]. However, no one knows what's going on "over there" on the
ground and recent reports aren't too encouraging. In fact, it's treated as a
fact that most of the allocated money is swished off into a few pockets
through a network of scams that often prey upon the illiterate.

Anecdotally, I know of villages just a few hours outside New Delhi in which
ingenious scams take place. For example, the state has promised food and
ration for school going children with uniforms. So, what happens on the ground
is that a few officials come together and sell the provisions on the open
market and buy substandard food instead. This wouldn't be bad if it weren't
for the fact that the education system in the villages is so broken that many
of it's graduate are still effectively illiterate. In fact, the teachers
themselves under new schemes are often high school graduates who have been
taught under the same system.

The list goes on and on, but the trend in general is that these "facts of
indian life" come together to form a potent environment which ferments chaos.
What will emerge out of this chaos is something that no one can predict, but
what is certain that India won't have a congenial atmosphere necessary for
stability and wealth creation (wealth over here means things that matter, not
money). What is far more disturbing is that few are willing to even look at
the problem let alone start developing solutions for it.

tl;dr: Basically, the odds aren't on the PR guys side.

~~~
moultano
The number of times you are getting downvoted reminds me of a disturbing trend
I've noticed in online discussions about India, and in the papers when I've
visited the country. There's a crazy nationalist streak there that doesn't
seem to be familiar with the idea of "loyal opposition" or the value of
dissent. That worries me a lot more than the corruption.

~~~
lewstherin
Get surrounded by neighbours like India does, have your workplace called as
chop shops, be the butt of several "stealing jobs" jokes and you will
automatically feel a little touchy when some armchair critic sits and posts
twenty things wrong in the country and basically calls your nation unfit to
live. What I see above is not loyal dissent by any means.

~~~
todayiamme
Um, I am not exactly an arm chair critic. I actually think that in order to
find a solution to a problem you need to look at the truth first.

I can't tell you how I feel when I walk by a child slaving in a teashop. That
child doesn't know the meaning of loyal dissent. That child doesn't have
people speaking up for him/her. That child needs to have a future and I am
willing to spend a large part of my life trying to give them one. However, in
order to do that you need to see the truth.

I have not written a single opinion in that post except for the observation
that this state is slowly disintegrating and although I might be wrong I have
tried to prop it up with data. If you feel hurt by it then I am sorry, but
this is what the cards are and I would rather spend my time deciding how to
play the hand.

~~~
lewstherin
I am making the below post assuming you are Indian citizen. Lets look at the
truth then.

> when I walk by a child slaving in a teashop.

You know quite well that child labor is illegal in India and we have a huge
enforcement problem. When you walk by such a child, why don't you report this
to the cops? Why don't you pass on this information to CRY or some such NGO.
Have you tried speaking to the guy who employs the kid and tried to get the
child enrolled in some school?

My point precisely is that as a dispassionate observer, you are not doing
anything to solve the problem. I will state why I believe there is reason for
hope.

When I had gone to get my driver's license in Hyderabad, I was turned down on
the pretext of not knowing some archaic clauses because I did not come through
an agent and hence had not bribed the person incharge. However, next time
round, there was a redhat system on which I had to give my test (no more
answering questions to some guy). Now there is a very clean smooth system with
very little scope of corruption.

A billion plus population and a poor one at that will lead to chaos. To jump
from that to a country disintegrating calls for quite a leap of faith. I
highly doubt that there has been a study of failed states to definitively
conclude that your figures lead directly to a disintegrating state.

~~~
todayiamme
Have you ever realized that we are all addicted to hope?

I think that you ought to read Collapse(see:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed)
by Jared Diamond ). Whatever he has written is so profound that I still
haven't finished the book i.e. I need time to assimilate it in. You see,
everything is a part of a complex chain of causality and in order to figure
out anything while avoiding infinite recursion we need to create mental models
of those interconnections and analyze upon that. I can't go into the data ad
infinitum to prove the point. I need to pick up blocks of concepts and hold
them up as black boxes in order to observe how the bigger box behaves with
them.

This means that my comment can extend as long as I want and I can write entire
books on the constructs of this scenario, but we need to stop it somewhere.
This is why I have taken that so called "leap of faith". I am open to the
possibility that I am wrong, and I hope that I am wrong, but that doesn't make
the problem any less pressing.

~~~
lewstherin
That book does sound extremely interesting. Will definitely be reading that.

------
av500
Somehow I fail to see how this is "shocking" news. India is just kindly asking
RIM to provide to them what they did provide to the US and other western
governments for years, namely the ability to snoop on the message traffic.

And of course a real criminal or terrorist can just use any encrypted IMAP
server in a remote location to exchange messages in secrecy, completely
bypassing RIM and the snooping effort...

~~~
zeteo
Sure, if by "kindly asking" you mean "we'll shut you down unless you comply".

And the fact that "serious" criminals will not be impeded makes this even more
of a suspicious measure - looks more like it's aimed towards snooping on
innocent parties, such as journalists and political opponents.

~~~
akshayubhat
Can US government do the same? If it can I see no problem in Indian government
expecting a similar capability.

~~~
zeteo
The US government has an implicit capability to eavesdrop because RIM servers
are located in the country. _Requiring_ that servers be placed in your country
with the _only_ purpose of being able to eavesdrop is simply despicable. You
have no problem living in a country that freely imitates the human rights/
privacy record of Saudi Arabia?!

~~~
psranga
The Indian (and other govts) asked for the server to be placed in their
country because otherwise RIM will invoke the technicality that that don't
have to honor Indian govt's snoop requests since the server isn't located
within Indian jurisdiction.

Complying with foreign snoop requests for a server located in the US _may_
(IANAL) make it possible for somebody to sue RIM in US courts for complying
with a request that didn't come from US law enforcement. So RIM is highly
unlikely to honor snoop requests for servers outside the country making the
demand. Hence the demand to place servers within countries interested in
snooping on their citizens.

------
SoftwareMaven
I'm following this story with some interest because it may have an impact on
my startup. There are conflicting reports on this[1]. RIM appears to be saying
they haven't given anything up, and there is some question whether they _can_
give anything up, given BES is based on PKI and RIM doesn't have the keys.

[1] [http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech-
now/entry/indi...](http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech-
now/entry/india-s-blackberry-farce-there)

~~~
iuhjytgfbnjhmk
It isn't needed for BES, if you have BES you have a corporate office that they
can turn up at with a warrant (and or a battering ram) and take all the
messages they want.

This is about John Doe mailing John Smith and discussing things they don't
want the government to know about.

~~~
draebek
Well, if your corporate office is in e.g. India, at least.

So this whole hullabaloo is just about whether or not India will be able to
sniff messages going through RIM's servers? (I think I've seen this referred
to as BIS?) Do they just want the ability to do this without having to go
through procedures first with RIM; that is, without telling RIM that they're
going to decrypt messages?

~~~
iuhjytgfbnjhmk
If your corporate office is outside India, then A) they probably don't care
and B) if they suspect you of some sort of tax evasion/crime they can always
serve your Indian office.

The problem is that if they try and intercept John Doe's (or Patel's) email
and have to serve a warrant in Canada it becomes an international incident.

They just want the same cozy relationship that the US/UK/Canada etc have with
each other where they quietly share all your communications with NSA/GCHQ/CISC
anyway.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
My startup is working on making endpoint-to-endpoint security for email really
easy. I'm wondering what that cozy relationship is going to look like for us
(of course, that is a Lamborghini problem ;).

------
known
Some hidden issues in Indian society

    
    
        Zero social mobility 

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility>

    
    
        One of the most corruption nation in the world

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_India>

    
    
        836 million people live on 20 cents a day   

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India>

    
    
        Pakistan is a better nation to do business than India

<http://www.doingbusiness.org/economyrankings/>

    
    
        Indians among most corrupt while doing business abroad

[http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-
among-...](http://business.rediff.com/report/2009/sep/24/indians-among-most-
corrupt-while-doing-business-abroad.htm)

------
phunel
It would seem the best method to negate this intrusion would be to utilize
tools already in existence, PGP being the most obvious. To date though, there
is no working beta (that I'm aware of) of a mobile solution in the
thunderbird/openPGP vein. I understand the inherent vulnerability of having
your private keys on a mobile device, but is anyone working in this space? Is
it possible within the confines of the iPhone, Blackberry, etc. mail client? I
know personally I would pay quite a bit for an app that mimics the
thunderbird/openPGP integration on a mobile device.

~~~
av500
There is an android app that does that: <http://pgpmanager.blogspot.com/>

~~~
phunel
Thanks for pointing this out. Looks like a promising new project, but I
wouldn't say it quite mimics openPGP on thunderbird - i.e. no integration with
a mail client.

~~~
Estragon
I believe k9 mail has gpg integration.

<https://code.google.com/p/k9mail/issues/detail?id=13#c68>

------
cryptoz
I disagree that a message is _encrypted_ in the first place, if more than the
two end parties can read the message! If RIM can "decrypt" a message meant to
be private between two parties, the message was never "encrypted" in the first
place.

~~~
iuhjytgfbnjhmk
The call from your GSM cell phone to the base station is encrypted - the link
to somebody else's landline phone isn't.

------
akshayubhat
Can US government decrypt the messages or get them via Warrantless
Wiretapping, or force RIM? If the answer is yes, then I do not see any reason
why India or some other country should not be allowed to do the same.

