In India, Prism-like Surveillance Slips Under the Radar

India has a very complicated relationship with censorship that's compounded by underlying communal and religious tension. It looks idiotic when you hear about people being arrested for tweets and likes, but what gets lost is the fundamentalist barbarianism that underlies it: the grim truth that people might die otherwise. That unemployed youth will take to the streets and violently protest at every imagined slight to their <insert religious ideal / figurehead / motto / policy here >. That leaders will tacitly encourage the violence and terrorism that their own minions commit.

We don't care too much about privacy rights yet because we haven't got that far on whatever pyramid diagram of priorities you'd judge by. A majority of the population lives in poverty, is hungry and thirsty, does not have access to non-toxic food and water. The urban population is still very concerned with making ends meet, putting their kids through college and hoping that their dreams will be fulfilled through the lives of their offspring.

Those with money, influence and clout don't care. They can either simply buy their way out of this kind of monitoring or laugh at it over dinner.

Besides, we really don't have the capability to pull this off well enough to be a danger to anyone.

A lot of people here saying that the India govt is too incompetent to do this.

This is naive thinking. The indian govt might be slow and corrupt but rest assured when it comes to implementation they are actually quite decent. See the amount of work that has gone into computerization of various things like personal tax, property tax, education etc. Other governments can move much more quickly because they only have 1% of India's population. India has so much paper records and most of them lost. For example, can you imagine what it takes to move the property tax system online? Most land records don't exist on paper with the goverment. This is not just a data entry and technology problem anymore.

No, what I am worried about is that if they pull if off, you cannot keep the politicians off this. And it's guaranteed to be misused. It's dangerous to build a monitoring system because a security hole in such things endangers everyone. If the richest companies in the planet like apple, google, sony cannot build secure governments, I highly doubt government can.

This is particularly bad for a country like India where the police already has too many powers: they don't need a warrant for many things. By "need", I mean it's not that the Constitution doesn't require them to, but it's not enforced. So much so, if you are a "no-one" (means you don't have any "political connections"), the police can come to your place, search it, and arrest you and put you in lockup. All without requiring a warrant. Good luck complaining. (Of course the police requires a warrant when dealing with politicians, since they can't touch them.)

Now given the police state India already is, this is more dangerous. Why? Because the police has too many powers, they don't need warrants and now the state has the capability to spy completely on its citizens. I can only see glaring human rights violation coming out of this.

This makes all the difference:

"Yet India’s Central Monitoring System, or CMS, was not shrouded in secrecy"

Doesn't make collecting all that data ok, but the fact that it's not all cloak and dagger means that people know what the government is doing in their name and they can vote for a change if they disagree.

Not exactly on this topic, but somewhat relevant when I see articles like these from Indian media.

Media in India is weird in how it feels the need to emulate American events etc and draw parallels to illustrate their case. It's like they need a reinforcement framework to validate what they are saying. And for this, they love to look up to everything American (it's a complement to USA I guess, but also shows the insecurity india has towards modernisation). For example.. media routinely labels controversies as 'something-gate' when Watergate had nothing to do with india, and indeed most people in India probably don't know anything about it. The mumbai terrorist attacks are referred to as 26/11. Now their government surveillance is 'PRISM-like'.

India is insecure like this and looks for validation by trying to find 'standard' versions of what they are talking about, in the form of an American parallel. It's regular enough that I thought it worth pointing out.

India used to be like this before too, with British parallels. I guess the colonial hangover in India has proven to be a very long one. Be more confident in your own ways India; to improve and to progress, you don't always need to emulate.

The real problem is, recently there are lot of instances in India where government is trying to enforce restrictions around social media more or less to protect its own interests. There are no clear guidelines regarding how you'll classify something as free speech or hatred speech. Most politicians are too ignorant about internet, social media and the emerging crowd power, and they are very anxious about the same. Giving such a system for a set of people who don't really understand what it is and how it can be used, is the real danger. They'll always use it to protect their interests.

India's media is the only one allowed to openly lie on television. True stories are never shown. And me, who laughed on conspiracy theories like "Illuminati" as childish imagination, I know how foreigners are ruling India even today. To keep control over the population you have to first monitor their activities! This is what they do

I am really not too worried about this because - I know that corruption and incompetence will ensure this system never comes into place effectively.

On the few occasions that the government has tried to ban certain URLs - its almost always been simple DNS filters that can be bypassed by using Google DNS.

can the indian govt can do anything? I haven't seen it can execute anything. so, don't worry about such programs, they will build something, which will be so useless, it will be only used to bill the govt.