Ludicrous bill passed by the Indian government (yet again? ;))

It's been quite a while since I blogged. "Same old" reason, I guess - got busy with things. Anyways, something in today's news caught my attention and I felt like blogging about it.

"Email providers will need to have servers in India" - so goes a headline in the Times of India. The article says - according to the recent amendments in IT act, internet behemoths like Google, Rediff and Microsoft, which provide free email services to users, need to set up Indian servers. In addition, they may need to provide Indian email accounts for Indian nationals. Supposedly, this change is going to make a huge difference to the investigating agencies dealing with cyber crime, including data theft.

What a shitload of baloney this is! I agree that the intelligence agencies might have had problems with getting account information from companies with servers overseas. But is this the solution to the problem? Or, putting it more blandly, is this even "a solution" to the problem?

Sitting at my desk in my office, in just a few seconds, I could come up with at least half a dozen ways to circumvent the "provisions" of this act. One could enter false personal information while registering. If IP Addresses are being used to trace the country of origin, email-id's could be created in a foreign country and could then be used locally - there is no practical way of preventing usage of email-id's created overseas, in a given country. The country would have to literally ban foreign tourists from using email facility, which is unviable. What if people go to an email provider through an anonymized website and then create an ID using a foreign domain? There are definitely simpler as well as more complex ways of preventing "being caught" by this act. Terrorists who can get a hand on the cutting-edge weapons, can as easily find state-of-the-art, sophisticated ways of dealing with this law.

This bill is asinine and puerile, causing inconvenience to the common man, as well as huge expenses to the companies, while not achieving anything that it seemed to aim at! One of the simplest ways to deal with the problem is to have better laws to facilitate the expedited recovery of required information from companies with "servers" overseas. Any kid in his second year of engineering, or in fact, any kid who has the technical know-how of how internet works, would know the loopholes in this law, and could easily come up with a simple solution to the problem.

I understand that the politicians in India are not as tech-savvy as their counterparts in most countries. But when such laws are passed by the Parliament, do they not go through officials who are more educated about the subject at hand? Or are government officials in India totally clueless about the leading edge technology? I am appalled by the lack of knowledge in the Indian political machinery which, in addition to continuing to uphold antiquated laws like article 377, has started passing new meaningless laws like this one!

One other facet of the issue is that the very notion of "internet" is it is a global interconnection of networks. I personally feel that the government should not have access to personal information of the citizens. On the other hand, like any other technology, "internet" could be used for destructive purposes and the government should be able to counter that. There is a fine line that needs to be walked between personal freedom of privacy and expression and governmental control.

In conclusion, I feel that the government should employ personnel with appropriate level of technical expertise, as well as those with a broader view of the moral/social issues involved, in positions that should be involved in taking such decisions.