The fallout from the Snowden revelations continue. While India has already been attempting to fight economic reality with import duties on gold in an desperate move to reduce buying, they are now also trying to take further control of their technology infrastructure. Although this may appear to be a good thing on the surface, perhaps it is merely a move to further consolidate their own domestic snooping powers, which we already know they are trying to do.
In the latest news, it is being reported that the government will soon ask its employees to stop using Google’s Gmail due to the presence of the company’s servers within the U.S. More from The Times of India:
BANGALORE/NEW DELHI: The government will soon ask all its employees to stop using Google’s Gmail for official communication, a move intended to increase security ofconfidential government information after revelations of widespread cyberspying by the US.
A senior official in the ministry of communications and information technology said the government plans to send a formal notification to nearly 5 lakh employees barring them from email service providers such as Gmail that have their servers in the US, and instead asking them to stick to the official email service provided by India’s National Informatics Centre.
“Gmail data of Indian users resides in other countries as the servers are located outside. Currently, we are looking to address this in the government domain, where there are large amounts of critical data,” said J Satyanarayana, secretary in the department of electronics and information technology.
Last week, IT Minister Kapil Sibal said the new policy would require all government officials living abroad to use NIC servers that are directly linked to a server in India while accessing government email services. Sibal said there has been no evidence of the US accessing Internet data from India.
Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bangalore-based research firm Centre for Internet and Society, said he agrees with the government’s decision to ban Gmail for official communication and that any official violating this needs to be punished.
Expect a lot more of this going forward.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
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A recent leaked report on OBL raid stated that senior Pakistani Military generals were using gmail accounts to communicate sensitive info. Its scary as hell to think that these folks have Nukes on their fingertips.
Government officials shouldn’t be using Gmail for official communication, anyway. Surely, you remember the big deal here in the US about Obama administration officials using non-government email accounts to conduct official business. I don’t see what the big deal here is, to be honest.