abdulhakeem
10-09-07, 02:15 PM
Every click you make
By Egan Orion
Montag 10 September 2007
POLICE IN MUMBAI, India, are reported to be requiring all 500 cyber cafés in the city to get licences and install keystroke loggers on all the PCs they rent to the public.
India journalist Amit Varma writes in his bog:
"This is done ostensibly to fight terrorism, and here are the implications for you and me. Whenever we surf from a Mumbai cyber café, everything we type will automatically be captured on record. Our email passwords, every message we type, the sites we visit, the pictures we download: everything will be stored in police records, rendering us, effectively, naked in their eyes. If we buy stuff online, our credit card details will also get saved. Will these end up getting sold in a black market somewhere? Not unlikely."
Not surprisingly, he sees some potential for offical abuse in this development:
"The Mumbai police, like all police in India, consists of underpaid people given excessive powers over others, with little accountability. So how do you expect them to behave? ... By insisting that cyber cafes in Mumbai need a license from the police, for example, they have opened up a new under-the-table revenue stream."
Another newspaper in Mumbai quoted an unnamed civil liberty official as excusing the initiative by saying it didn't invade privacy "[a]s long as personal computers are not being monitored. If monitoring is restricted to public computers, it is in the interest of security."
Well, that's okay then. Or not, really. Mr. Varma replies:
"By this reasoning, why should the cops not place TV cameras in hotel rooms or record every conversation in every taxi and train? After all, terrorists use hotels and public transport. Are you okay with that?"
He must not have been to Blighty lately, because all that's already been done here. But then all government is just a protection racket with a lust for power and control, innit?
L'INQ
India Uncut (http://indiauncut.com/iublog/article/indias-cops-get-orwellian/)
http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=42242
By Egan Orion
Montag 10 September 2007
POLICE IN MUMBAI, India, are reported to be requiring all 500 cyber cafés in the city to get licences and install keystroke loggers on all the PCs they rent to the public.
India journalist Amit Varma writes in his bog:
"This is done ostensibly to fight terrorism, and here are the implications for you and me. Whenever we surf from a Mumbai cyber café, everything we type will automatically be captured on record. Our email passwords, every message we type, the sites we visit, the pictures we download: everything will be stored in police records, rendering us, effectively, naked in their eyes. If we buy stuff online, our credit card details will also get saved. Will these end up getting sold in a black market somewhere? Not unlikely."
Not surprisingly, he sees some potential for offical abuse in this development:
"The Mumbai police, like all police in India, consists of underpaid people given excessive powers over others, with little accountability. So how do you expect them to behave? ... By insisting that cyber cafes in Mumbai need a license from the police, for example, they have opened up a new under-the-table revenue stream."
Another newspaper in Mumbai quoted an unnamed civil liberty official as excusing the initiative by saying it didn't invade privacy "[a]s long as personal computers are not being monitored. If monitoring is restricted to public computers, it is in the interest of security."
Well, that's okay then. Or not, really. Mr. Varma replies:
"By this reasoning, why should the cops not place TV cameras in hotel rooms or record every conversation in every taxi and train? After all, terrorists use hotels and public transport. Are you okay with that?"
He must not have been to Blighty lately, because all that's already been done here. But then all government is just a protection racket with a lust for power and control, innit?
L'INQ
India Uncut (http://indiauncut.com/iublog/article/indias-cops-get-orwellian/)
http://uk.theinquirer.net/?article=42242