By now I’m sure you’ve seen the news that terrorists have attacked various places in Bombay, India. If not, what rock have YOU been living under? 
Anyway, I also read from the Times Online that terrorists “seized mobile phones and BlackBerries from their hostages and used them to contact each other and monitor world reaction.” Which reminds me of some stories I read a number of months ago about RIM and the Indian government.
In March of this year, the Indian government threatened to shut down the entire Indian Blackberry network of almost 400,000 if RIM didn’t give the government access to the security keys required to decrypt all wireless data. RIM balked, but then gave in on May 22nd of this year. However, they backtracked on that promise a bit and promised to keep things secure on the 27th of May.
Now, considering the reports that the terrorists were using Blackberries to communicate with eachother and keep an eye on the outside world, I’m a bit worried. Why? Well, I’m sure that people in the Indian government (and RIM themselves) are wondering what they might have been able to do differently if they had been able to see what the terrorists were saying to eachother.
Just watch and see, it’ll be just another week or two and the Indian government will be calling for monitoring of RIM’s Blackberry network in India and they won’t be put off so easily this time. Next it will be the English government (they’re already implementing CCTV “crime prediction” cameras) and then the rest of the governments that we the people answer to. All in the name of security.
This isn’t to say that I know exactly what I think of this. I mean, on one side, it’ll truly help in the war on terror and allow our governments to more effectively protect us, their citizens. However, it will also give a LOT more power and with that comes abuses. The movie V for Vendetta comes to mind and that rather scares me. But that’s where we’re collectively heading, you can see the writing on the walls. So, what do you think?
Zack | 29-Nov-08 at 7:54 am | Permalink
Data doesn’t go away, and will enevitably be abused by the government for uses it wasn’t originally intended for. Or even not by the government – curious employees often get in trouble for looking up celebrities and politicians information in their company databases.
For example, there are now cameras where an officer can drive through a parking lot and read all the license plate numbers, running them through the DMV database, and seeing if any are expired, stolen, etc. It’s not to hard to imagine the same algorithm applied to normal traffic cameras to do the same thing with moving vehicles, or even to measure speed between stoplights. You could basically track the movement of any car all over town.
Right now, in the US there are plenty of technological measures available to protect communications – nearly every desktop email client has support for S/MIME or PGP encryption. The thing is that almost nobody uses it because it’s too hard to get started with. The only way for that to change would be for a software vendor (Say Mozilla with Thunderbird) to make security the default – issue a certificate as a part of email account creation, and dumb down it’s use to the point that it would actually get used.
When the nation was founded, they didn’t write in protection for personal privacy, as it just wasn’t needed – if you needed to conduct business in private, there were no invasive technological inroads. Now, any request for personal privacy tends to be interpreted as “what do you have to hide?”. People have legitimate reasons to hide things, be they business trade secrets, financial information, or simple things like sending the password to a wireless network to someone who needs it.