Indian High Commission to use typewriters for sensitive information
theage.com.au
theage.com.au
India should totally adopt lavabit.
Incompetent and embarrassing bit: They use yahoo address for one of the consulates in Iran: http://www.indianembassy-tehran.ir/consulates_iran.php
If there only were some sort of non-electronic version of email.
Take a look at the email ids for officials, including cabinet ministers, in India's Ministry for Communications and IT: http://deity.gov.in/content/people-and-offices
Aside from being a massive security risk it's also hugely embarrassing to some of us Indians.
Perhaps the typewriters are noiseless, electronic ones, with a touch-based input system? Perhaps, they generate characters which can't be traced (with the help of randomized glitches for example). And perhaps they only use paper which is not traceable (if such a thing exists).
Moreover, it's a common strategy to step back a few levels of tech innovation to defeat an opponent. Bayonets. Cops on bike patrols. Hipster bike messengers. Insurgents originally used cell phones to detonate IEDs (Iraq or Afghanistan), but then they had their phones jammed by the USM--so they switched to string. Al-Qaeda uses hand written notes, hand-delivered.
FOIA laws and e-discovery also cause people to go low tech. To get around FOIA requests government officials have simply stopped using email (others used webmail under a false name). And in my last start up, serious issues raised on email elicited a response by phone in part to avoid potential e-discovery in a lawsuit. That kind of shady behavior caused me to leave.
For an example of the sophistication of such attacks, see the Project GUNMAN document on the NSA's history subsite:
http://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/center_crypt_h...
For seven years the Soviets had bugged IBM Selectric typewriters in the US embassy in Moscow. The bugging device was remarkable, keying-off the magnetic flux of the machine's operation and transmitting this data by burst radio transmission.
"The Apu travesty" - http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jul/16/theaput...
No need for name calling, Cletus. And it's sad to see this in someone with 12 yrs of professional experience as a "software and electrical" engineer.
In short, like the USA, which does all of these at far greater scale?
> A little hate is warranted.
And apparently, a little racism and bigotry.
Indian is not a race or even an ethnicity. It is a geopolitical affiliation, like Londoner. Nor am I a bigot. If I could read Hindi, I could point you to the Indian IT discussion forums where the thousands of competent security specialists are ripping into their government in ways that make my comment look like high praise. My fury is nothing compared to the people being sold out by the imbeciles at the Indian embassy.
Absolutely, but as another HN user already replied to you:
> Your comment is good. "Apu Fuck-knuckles" is not. You should change it while you can still edit. It completely occludes your otherwise decent comment.
And please stop with the pointless arguments that "India isn't a race or even an ethnicity" (it isn't, but that's irrelevant) to somehow prove your original comment wasn't racist. By that logic, no one can ever be racist to Indians, because, hey, Indians don't have a race!
That's like saying, "I saw my doctor smoking so it can't be that bad for you, right?" Maybe there's merit to the method, maybe not... but just because someone else is doing it too doesn't mean it's good to do.
The political system is already ineffective and the use of typewriters to "secure" communications only proves that the priorities of the leaders are so misaligned to what the country needs to make any progress with it's problems.
India has great potential to develop into something more than it is, but until there's significant political reform then it's progress will always be slow and its people will continue to suffer.
Pray tell me, what is the connection between "extreme poverty, a caste system, the safety of women walking the streets at night and massive stockpiles of food" with better Internet privacy measures?
Are the two a zero-sum game? Will implementing more secure email and Internet communications across all government departments somehow make Indian women more likely to get raped or molested? Or entrench the caste system even further?
> India has great potential to develop into something more than it is
Thank you for your vote of support. Do let us know when we'd become eligible for Internet privacy though.
The article isn't about internet privacy for their residents. if it were, are you saying that the rights of women and the starving population is fine as long as no sneaky NSA is reading your emails?
> In a country that's stricken with extreme poverty, a caste system that births you into such a fate until death, where women can't walk the street at night without the fear of getting brutally raped or molested, a country that starves while massive stockpiles of food reserves perish due to kafkaesque bureaucracy and corruption; I hardly think that privacy breaches are India's top concern.
Your infering that privacy should hardly be India's top concern is a non-sequitur.
Privacy doesn't need to be India's "top concern" for its government to fix it. And neither is there a link between fixing it and all the other (valid) ills you described prior to it.
Nations can rarely afford to have mutually exclusive streams of work. You don't see the U.S waiting till they solve their economic crisis to figure out what to do in Syria.
One of the major problems with the rank generalizations in both domestic and international media about India is that it reduces the problem to a simple combination of inept leadership, useless bureaucracy and abject poverty.
The fact, though, is that there also a lot of good people doing good work at levels (government, leadership etc.), but there is also a large number of people who are doing crappy jobs.
And as far as something like poverty goes, the causes, extent and solution for it differ from region to region. The concept of India is one of the greatest abstractions the world has ever seen. Take away the tricolour, cricket and the movie industry and you'll find people who rarely have much to identify with each other at a national level.
Consequently, any solution will take time and it will be chaotic; at least until a better genuinely progressive leader emerges, which looks unlikely for a long time to come. Waiting for all that to fall in place till measures are taken to ensure data security and privacy may well mean those won't happen in my lifetime.
p.s: The state of IT in the government is terrible in India. Any smart citizen have to live under the assumption that everything is compromised, by the state itself and by other states.
Your comment is mind-boggling. Using typewriters for better security is somehow a prioritization over solving fundamental issues? As in, if they spent some effort over security at their embassies, it affects their ability to solve other problems? You should get over yourself.