All computers now under govt. watch

Flash!

Vroooomm...
Disciple
The Ministry of Home Affairs on Thursday issued an order authorising 10 Central agencies to intercept, monitor, and decrypt “any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer.”

The agencies are the Intelligence Bureau, Narcotics Control Bureau, Enforcement Directorate, Central Board of Direct Taxes, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, Central Bureau of Investigation; National Investigation Agency, Cabinet Secretariat (R&AW), Directorate of Signal Intelligence (For service areas of Jammu & Kashmir, North-East and Assam only) and Commissioner of Police, Delhi.

According to the order, the subscriber or service provider or any person in charge of the computer resource will be bound to extend all facilities and technical assistance to the agencies and failing to do will invite seven-year imprisonment and fine.

The MHA gave the authorisation under 69 (1) of the Information Technology Act, 2000 which says that the Central government can direct any agency after it is satisfied that it is necessary or expedient to do so in the “interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence of India, security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above or for investigation of any offence.”

Source: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/all-computers-now-under-govt-watch/article25792523.ece
 
FTFY
All computers now also under Indian govt. watch

Everything you send/receive (and in all likelihood store) is already being monitored by a dozen agencies. Any assurance you get from any company about privacy is pretty much meaningless.

Also remember that DNS is now under ICANN (UN) control. You have no idea what kind of despicable people are now running the internet.
[DOUBLEPOST=1545379209][/DOUBLEPOST]I am willing to bet that that they have been doing it for a while. This order is mostly window dressing.

I used to work for a company which has operations in the US. As the config magager, I has to send a tar file of the codebase (and linked libraries) to NSA for every release.
 
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All Te members pcs here will be first confiscated and the amount of scannings they might have to go through will eventually pass their 5yrs validity until next govt.
Plz go on. And keep doing useless things for time pass as nothing good can be expected from you.
They will be put to shame by themselves on global maps once it then gets revealed that maximum piracy+pron happens in India.
So get your fame by means of shame.
 
Monitor means installing spyware on domestic computers ?
Sort of, without an intimation or without your knowledge they can infilitrate any users/companies computers (Physically present in India).

They should start with faceBook, google, whatsapp, etc. first
But alas there data/mainframes specially are not physically located in India ;)
 
Monitor means installing spyware on domestic computers ?
No, it means if they want your records for whatever reason then they can get them from companies concerned. ISP's keep a 6 month record anyway. This also applies to social media as well.

I don't know what the point of this directive is, maybe just a formality of what already exists anyway

I suppose they want people to be careful with what they say online. Those lynchings that took place due to whatsapp for example means that now they will be able to track how and who spreads these messages. Inciting riots is another. Everybody uses phones these days so things can go out of hand very quickly and keeping stability is harder.

in the US there's only three categories of people that are spied on
- terrorists
- nuclear proliferators
- foreign spies

They don't have bandwidth or storage for regular people's activities and most certainly neither do we.

The new thing these days is foreign interference in elections. If for example influence operations are afoot to prefer one party over another , you could throw elections or do lasting damage to an undesirable candidate.

My opinion on fake news is nobody does it better than the opposition :D
 
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The big difference here is earlier they could intercept your communications and data flow, now they can seize your equipment like laptops, PCs, external HDDs/flash drives, mobile phones, etc. with relative ease.
 
The big difference here is earlier they could intercept your communications and data flow, now they can seize your equipment like laptops, PCs, external HDDs/flash drives, mobile phones, etc. with relative ease.

IANAL, but I am quite sure the current laws on the book are good enough to seize all kinds of things from individuals. A few months ago, one of my friends started getting threats on SMS. The police managed to track down the individual, got all his mobile devices and forced him to unlock them.

This one might be targerted towards equiment vendors/bigger organizations/NGOs. Sounds like a first step towards something like LI/CALEA.

But then, I don't expect a leftist rag like the hindu to do any real research. Fear mongering sells better than real news.
 
LIM is already in complete force and effect as seen by myself when building India's biggest ISP's data centre. They made us build them a room with individual cabins with terminals. Also a rack for LIM.

Cops already can do pretty much anything to an individual before his lawyer gets involved, so no great shakes there, but with the new laws they can legally seize equipment very easily, in case it makes it to court.

And i dunno what left leaning and the Hindu has to do with this, it's open news; and the FM himself went on to blame the UPA govt for these laws! If anything it's right wing supporters that are so blinded by what they think is "patriotism" that they ignore/condone such blatant assaults on Liberty and democracy.
 
So this seems to be the technicality: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/aru...ing-agencies-to-snoop-on-any-computer-1966276

Earlier, only the home ministry could scan calls and emails of people. The new order gives that power to the Intelligence Bureau, Narcotics Control Bureau, Enforcement Directorate, Central Board of Direct Taxes, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence, CBI, National Investigation Agency, Cabinet Secretariat (Research and Analysis Wing), Directorate of Signal Intelligence (in Jammu and Kashmir, North-East and Assam only) and the Delhi Police Commissioner.

Additionally. to me it seems earlier it was "tapping" only; calls/sms/data. Now it's stored data too, like i mentioned earlier.
 
And i dunno what left leaning and the Hindu has to do with this
I'll concede; you are right on this one. I doubt any media has the skills to report on the intersection of tech and the legal/political world. In fact hindu is one of the better ones.

but with the new laws they can legally seize equipment very easily
Are you sure the current laws can't do this. I would be very surprised if that is the case. My reading is that this law directed at equipment/software vendors to force them to help in forensic work (e.g the Apple vs FBI where the iphone's owner was dead). But again, we will have to wait and see how it is used.

blatant assaults on Liberty and democracy.
This framing so atavistic. You have signed away your rights to bear arms. You don't have the right to property. You don't have the right to free speech. And you still find in yourself to talk about 'Liberty' and 'democracy'? If you don't have the teeth to fight back, you will only get dictatorship. It can come clothed in democracy, but it will still be dictatorship.
 
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My reading is that this law directed at equipment/software vendors to force them to help in forensic work (e.g the Apple vs FBI where the iphone's owner was dead). But again, we will have to wait and see how it is used.

You're probably right about this. I was wondering about the bit where they threaten non-cooperation with jail time. It's probably for vendors and service providers.[DOUBLEPOST=1545461327][/DOUBLEPOST]Liberty, democracy etc. are relative and multiple shades of grey like most things in life. Even developed Western countries have differing levels of it. For example, we're still pretty free to login to TE and curse the govt. They can't do any of that sort in China. I was talking about what semblance of it we have. That little bit is at risk too.
 
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Mostly fake news. Here is the current law on the book

Source: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1439440/

"Where the Central Government or a State Government or any of its officers specially authorised by the Central Government or the State Government, as the case may be, in this behalf may, if satisfied that it is necessary or expedient to do in the interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above or for investigation of any offence, it may, subject to the provisions of sub-section (2), for reasons to be recorded in writing, by order, direct any agency of the appropriate Government to intercept, monitor or decrypt or cause to be intercepted or monitored or decrypted any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource."

Here is the new order (Yes, its a new order compliant with an existing law, not a new law):

Source: https://www.thehindu.com/news/natio...e-Ministry-order-on-computer-surveillance.pdf

n exercise of the powers conferred by sub-section(1) of section 69 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (21 of 2000) read with rule 4 of the Information Technology ( Procedure and Safeguards for Interception, Monitoring and Dec ryption of Information) Rules, 2009, the Competent Authority hereby authorities the following Security and Intelligence Agencies for the purposes of interception, monitoring and decryption of any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource under the said Act, namely ...

Headlines like "All computers can now be monitored by govt. agencies" are crude sensationalism. And no, you are not going to be forced to install spyware. You will do it willingly (windows/android/alexa/google search/...) and pay your masters for installing the spyware :)
 
Nothing fake, just overhyped and exaggerated. The headlines may be sensational but the end result and effect on us by these laws is the same and very very real.[DOUBLEPOST=1545462479][/DOUBLEPOST]And like I've explained in post #11, they've specified the individual agencies and departments which can carry out the LIM.

I guess i was wrong about the stored data thing being new then, if it was already there in the present laws.
 
i wonder why.
It's a pre-emptive move

https://www.thequint.com/news/india/koregaon-bhima-cops-counter-provocative-social-media-messages

Timing is the clue. First anniversary of those riots is close.

Bhima Koregaon led to a riot caused by Rona Wilson using social media

This is just one instance where social media can be used to cause trouble. There can be any number of instance in the future. And it can be quite sophisticated to unravel.

How to guard against such activities ? everybody has phones using whatsapp. Flash mobs what not can show up out of now here and chaos ensues
 
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Mostly fake news. Here is the current law on the book

Source: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1439440/

Nothing fake about it. While the legislation was there in IT Act, it required special authorization which was meant to be be given only under special conditions involving national security and to specific people/cadres working for the govt. Only organizations like IB, RAW and NIA should technically qualify for this and in a restrictive manner. Even CBI and NCB have no reason to have it directly. The current govt simply abused the law to give blanket authorization to a bunch of organizations including the taxman and the police.

The bigger threat here is not the snooping itself, but that these organizations can plant false evidence to implicate you in a criminal case whenever they feel like it. Pretty much similar to how things are done in china. Few years back, Police in certain places like railway stations were given authorization to search through phones. Do you know what they did with it? They stopped people, took their phones and tried to extort money from them and if they refuse they will copy a few porn mms videos to the phone and will implicate the person in a false case of distributing such videos. I think the authorization was later removed after numerous incidents of this type happened.

In USA, unauthorized snooping is common, but their legal system won't allow any evidence real or not obtained though such means to be used against those people. There are drug lords who had their cases completely struck off because part of the initial evidence was collected though illegal snooping.
 
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