India Wants To Ban US-Based Email Systems For Government Communications Over NSA Concerns
from the pissing-off-our-allies dept
Back in June and July, during much more innocent times, Glyn Moody and Tim Cushing doubled up on stories about the intrusive surveillance system India had set up and commented on how the NSA must have been drooling over having that kind of capability. Now, those stories probably seem sweetly ignorant, since we know much more about what the NSA is both capable of doing and how little restraint they suffer, but the point is that India is not made up of saints when it comes to respecting the privacy of their citizens.
But, having said that, India is an incredibly important friend and ally of the United States. They're an important trading partner and a nation with aligned goals when it comes to fighting terrorism. So it may be a sign of trouble that India distrusts the American government enough to force government officials to pull their email from American-based email providers.
The move is intended to increase the security of confidential government data and information after it was revealed earlier that NSA may be involved in widespread spying and surveillance activities across the globe.That's the problem with unfettered hubris from a global power like the United States: you're going to start losing friends. It's one thing to spy on unfriendly nations. That might still have its problems, but you're going to have an easy sell to your citizens on the question and it doesn't matter all that much if you're found out because, hey, the spied-upon already hate you. But when you begin turning your spy-sights on your allies, particularly allies as important as the Indian government, you just have to wonder whether more harm than good will come of all this. Yes, there's a cynical response that this also helps those in power in India better use their own surveillance capabilities to spy on everyone within the government, but that doesn't diminish the potential harm between US and India.
In a statement to reporters here J. Satyanarayana, secretary in the department of electronics and information technology, said that data of Indian citizens using US based email services like Gmail is residing on servers which are located outside India and for now the government is concerned about the large amount of official and critical data that may be resident on those servers.
In an increasingly connected globe, the postures of our allies are every bit as important as those of our enemies. The American government pissed off a friend in India, Hopefully that won't come back to bite us.
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Filed Under: allies, email, india, nsa surveillance, surveillance
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You Make the Bed You Sleep In US Gov !
In other News is everyone ready to lose some of your money over yet another Default ?
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No, the prior items seem hopelessly naive.
I pointed that up with title of my censored post: Ah, here's the "not as bad as" excuse. Because no matter what happens in India, doesn't affect me as much as NSA and Google. The billion Indians are just going to have to solve their own problems.
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Re: No, the prior items seem hopelessly naive.
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India sucks.
I have no love for either one.
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Yes, but...
A mythos has grown up over the past 10-15 years running an email system is hard. This is nonsense. It's only hard if, through poor design choices, one makes it hard. (Source: running email systems since before most of you knew there was a 'net to run them on.) Hosting a decent email system for (let's say) a 20,000-student college or the state department of transportation or the senate is a straightforward exercise if prudent choices are made.
And that's the trick, really: and it's one that most miss. They deploy Exchange and Outlook, they install Barracuda devices, they install anti-virus products -- every single one of those a catastrophic blunder that sabotages their chances of success. Then they complain that "Email Is Hard" and outsource to Microsoft or Google. The proper solution is fire the idiots that made such appallingly stupid decisions and hire people who have at least a baseline level of competence in the field.
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Privacy is a bigger deal in Europe than here (other than some selected countries and I think in the end that more of them will elect to seek other places to do their internet business and their communications other than ones tied directly to the US.
What did the NSA and our government think would happen when this came out? Did they some how believe it would never be exposed? Now that it is out, no one is doing anything that restores the confidence in them. Quite the opposite in that every pitch to support it has left the public and the world open mouthed at the audacity of some government supposed to be representing the land of the free being anything but free.
I have little belief nor faith in this country anymore. Not the people and the land itself but in the political leaders.
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NSA didn't catch the Banksters?
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Trust is hard-earned, easily lost.
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What good?
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Re: What good?
(though they are probably more likely to do so for their own gov, but at least it's their own gov that's spying on them)
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Re: What good?
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This from India??? The Queen of invasion?
Any company operating within India must turn over encryption keys to decrypt the traffic.
Companies with field offices have resorted to using services like rdesktop and citrix servers residing outside of India so that their network traffic won't be snooped on by India's government in addition to the NSA.
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It's been biting you back for a while now...
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I found this very difficult to decide
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