Shhhh… someone’s listening to us!
August 13, 2010
The world is abuzz with BlackBerry being threatened by governments. The Indian government, the Saudi’s… everyone seems to be behind them. While RIM has so far maintained they want to cooperate with the governments but advocate citizen’s privacy, I think they’d eventually concede to the government’s demands. After all, it’s millions of customers are at stake. They just can’t afford to lose vital markets such as India and the middle east. What’s unclear is, to what extent will RIM compromise with our privacy. The operational side is going to be interesting (and maybe it’ll buy RIM some more time).
That said, I see a pattern here. Google vs China, RIM vs India, RIM vs Saudi’s. And some are now mulling this being extended to Skype and other communication services. Now that is when it starts getting a bit illogical.
They want to watch over your (and mine) shoulders no matter how private we think our conversation is. Think about someone eavesdropping when you are discussing your personal finances with your wife? It could be even more private than just finances… you get the idea. To me, it seems illogical. The government of course says it is going to operate on specific intelligence and not watch over everyone. But hey, if that is true, why do you want RIM to handover all encryption information and master-keys? You could simply ask them for specific pieces of info when your intelligence prompts you.
This is like each country is now implementing it’s own version of patriot act. It’s is needless to say that the loopholes allow the governments to practically sniff all of our communications. Is that ethical? May be dictionaries around the world will be altered to have new definitions for ethics and privacy.
Is the government going to read this post? Hell, I don’t care. I live in India and I have the right to voice my opinions. And of-course, there is no stagenorgraphed message in here anyway. One could call this paranoia. Maybe it is. If I become overly paranoid, maybe I’ll start using stealth techniques when discussing private things over the web. Will that guarantee my privacy? No! NSA, RAW, IB have great code-breakers and they sure will sniff things out. But giving them hell of a time is quite amusing in itself. Isn’t it! C’mon guys, don’t snoop my comm… There are better things you can do to make us secure!

