INCA O NATIUNE CARE IMPLEMENTEAZA AGENDA “PLANETA PUSCARIE” ! > India Sleepwalks To Total Surveillance

• January
• 4

2:29 pm Atentie !, BIG BROTHER DECIS!, Bataia de joc!, CRUNTA SFIDARE A AUTORITATILOR, Control si indoctrinare, George Orwell - 1984, Important, Info, Infowars + MIND KONTROL, NESIMTIRE FARA LIMITE, Planeta Puscarie, Realitatea adevarata, Reflectati !, Sfidare si ipocrizie, Suntem umiliti si jecmaniti, Ultima Lupta, Utile

Binu Karunakaran
Countercurrents
January 3, 2009

It wasn’t tough for a protagonist in a Kundera novel to figure out if he/she were living in a police state. Looking out of the apartment window they could see agents of the state keeping a watch over them from a car parked in the street round the corner. Sometimes shady characters broke in and rummaged through shelves looking for letters or diary notes. Their phones were wiretapped and there was absolutely no way of knowing if the friend they met for a drink last night was an informer or not.

It was our age of innocence and Kafka wasn’t thought to be a realist. Under repressive regimes people lived in constant fear, but the terror they felt and the machinery that enforced it was tangible.

Not any more. We live in a time when information about our personal lives and behaviour are being gathered, stored and shared by governments and multinational corporations on a scale that no one ever thought was humanly possible.

In the name of fighting terrorism governments across the world have been creating new regulations that infinitely augment the state power of surveillance with no meaningful public or parliamentary debate.

The Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2006 passed by the Indian Parliament recently allows the government to intercept messages from mobile phones, computers and other communication devices to investigate any offence. Not just cognizable offence, the kind you witnessed in Mumbai 26/11, but any offence.

Any email you send, any message you text are now open to the prying eyes of the government. So are the contents of your computer you surfed in the privacy of your home.

Around 45 amendments have been made to the original Act, which now treats both publishers of online pornography and its consumers on equal footing. A law so sweeping in its powers that it allows a police officer in the rank of a sub-inspector to walk in or break in to the privacy of your home and see if you were surfing porn or not. It’s the personal morality of the official that will decide whether the picture/content you were looking at was lascivious or appeals to prurient interest.

The amended Act also grants the state absolute power to block access to any website in the national interest. In short a total gag and surveillance act that doesn’t set any limits for law enforcers, or have inbuilt safeguards against misuse.

ARTICOL COMPLET