n00b said:
How long has the cell phone industry flourished in india? My timer, for every terror event starts at 2001. So if DoT, had come up with some pre-initiatives on how to keep the mobile networks secure, then yes, Kudos DoT for keeping me safe. But none were done so(actually they were bickering about the 3G spectrum,then started the registration for sim, and then now this IMEI crap).
Not sure why you mentioned 2001, wrt to this country ?
But the answer to what you said lies in commerce. Were cellphones not touted as the biggest enabler for ppl in this country, far more than the internet, even the poor could avail of it, right away.
Look at the figure mentioned in the opening post, 25 million phones could be affected. So i'm thinking the cell phone majors would have greased enough palms so that as many phones as possible could operate within their networks. How many subscribers have they added since ? the growth rate must have been astronomical in the 3 digits and sustained over many years and still growing even now.
Should they have said, at the time, look we realise there is a chance this might be used for bad things and therfore the cost to have a phone will consequently be much higher ?
No, everyone wanted a piece of the action. Having a phone was considered almost a luxury item in the past, long waiting lines and here you can have a mobile phone much quicker.
n00b said:
(2-5 years down the line? Voip, unregulated phone calls placed from devices which have open access to wifi networks, come up with recommendations to limit / barricade or whatever that)
Those can be used in the same way but the numbers involved are a tiny fraction of the cell phone population. Also they only work within a smaller radius to a landline, wi-Fi has a smaller range compared a cell phone. If the MO is to hide the needle in as big a haystack as possible, we tighten up the cellphone. Whether its worth it is dependent on how hard it is to spoof an IMEI number.
n00b said:
For arguments sake, how many terror attacks has india suffered? And how many did we prevent? What have we learnt so far?
We learnt that to pull off a 'mumbai style' operation, one would necessarily have to import the personnel as well as the
materiel !
Had this not been the case, your assertion would be 100% correct.
That since 2006, RDX is very hard to procure so the only way for the perps was to have more smaller blasts instead of one big one. So hard to find that someone trying to pinch it off the army got caught.
But you only remember the frequency, you ask how many and not how different. Why were they different ?
That the only way for them to make a credible impact was to up the stakes. Mumbai happened because the older methods no longer have the right effect. Small consolation, of course to the victims but tangible developments wrt to state response.
Its a bigger game now, lets see how we deal with it.
n00b said:
Emphasis being not to REACT but to RESPOND to terror.(React is just a byproduct of a auto-simulated reply, whereas respond is to carefully focus and keep measures in place, err not sure how to explain it)
React is short term , respond would be longer in perspective. Well this is one of the ways we respond, i'm sure we will be learning about the rest with time.
n00b said:
Mumbai blasts a clear example of an reaction(its a "Reaction" because, how many days did it take to secure the place???), plainly because no one expected it. Is that even a excuse now-a-days?
Mumbai, New, York, Madrid, Bali, London, Mumbaix2, ____________
We rarely hear about what was prevented, so ppl just point to the above list.
But it has to decrease if the gains diminish, if it gets incresingly harder to pull off the next. I feel the only measure of success here lies in how often we get them to change their tactics.
n00b said:
Secondly, lets take a look at how these guys even got into the country. How many holes are there? Any guy can just walk right into this country if he's around the bordering regions, have we seen any projects initiated to strengthen the borders? Any talks about that? All we talk about are securing glaciers, and having more nukes to pretend we are safe. Where are the other governmental departments responses?
I hear the BSF is on high alert.
n00b said:
Bro, if a government is unable to forsee the state of a country thru a 5 year term, then thats just a rag tag team of nobody's playing to fate's accord.
The difficult bit is how to balance security with conveninence. I take it you are not happy with this current development for your own reasons. Imagine if each time they suggested changes that protests broke out. Would anything ever get done ?
n00b said:
The anti terror squad or what ever they have (do they have a squad ? not sure), should have every blue print of every major destination within india in their head(hotels-sight seeing spots-whatever), or atleast have each squad for each state. Have a response time, and announce it, so your division is commited to it and if you dont deliver, lock em up.
I think they will proceed along these lines.
n00b said:
And yea, i think i just finished writing a draft of different processes that can be in place to counter most of what is and what will be used in the future. Funny what you can do as an individual with free thought.
Indeed, its a national thing now, for once the govt. is feeling the heat of the people. Helps that we have elections coming up soon.
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