India allegedly plans to install Keyloggers in all Cybercafes (please digg). Indian Journalist Amit Varma reports that :
| “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.” (…) |
Installing Keyloggers means not only that every password will be stored, but that services like Tor will be rendered useless again. For a quick minute it seems like it’s just another step in the lengthy arms race between Terrorism and Governments the victims are always the innocent bystanders in the fight. Whilst the fight against terrorism allows the government to go to great lengths and Tap phones or intercept mails, saving all user passwords will require a greater prevention of privacy.
Installing Keyloggers (and requiring Cybercafes to obtain licenses) causes a state where anonymity does not exist at all, until the next step will be implemented, will it be using sticks and stones again?
As it is already obvious, Terrorists won’t actually fear these new regulations, The Government can’t actually interfere with the clandestine methods of terrorists; they can do anything they want as they can work with virtual keyboards, Flash-Disk boots that bypass the Government’s spyware (as far as i know, they might be using windows processes which actually could be stopped by pressing “Alt-Ctrl-Del and ending the task) or Keyloggers (physical or virtual); The problem is with the Average Joe in the Cybercafe that plans to order his first song from iTunes or his first book from Amazon. They’ll fear of using the net, the only democratizing killer-app.
As Blogs Might be blocked in India (as well as the Israeli model) it is no big surprise to find the same powers calling to inflict a harsher censorship – by shaming the readers.
Will someone already publish a report explaining how effective were these measures somewhere so we can start arguing in a more polite manner, or is it just Security through Obscurity?
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