Indian Government To Ban Use of US Email Services For Official Communications

hypnosec writes "The Government of India is planning to ban the use of U.S.-based email services like Gmail for official communications. It will soon send out a formal notification to it half-million officials across the country, asking them to use official email addresses and services provided by India's National Informatics Center. The move is intended to increase the security of confidential government data and protect it from overseas surveillance."

Re:Not seeing a problem with that.

[ZombieBraintrust]

American politicians use GMail because goverement accounts are archived and the contents are considered public property and not private communication.

Indian Central Monitoring System

[TheSync]

Of course India is setting up the Central Monitoring System (CMS) [medianama.com] essentially India's version of PRISM:

Starting from this month, all telecommunications and Internet communications in India will be analysed by the government and its agencies. This means that everything we say or text over the phone, write, post or browse over the Internet will be centrally monitored by Indian authorities. This totalitarian type of surveillance will be incorporated in none other than the Central Monitoring System (CMS)...

...the CMS was prepared by the Telecom Enforcement, Resource and Monitoring (TREM) and the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) and is being manned by the Intelligence Bureau.... ...The Information Technology Amendment Act 2008 enables e-surveillance. The government plans to create a platform that will include all the service providers in Delhi, Haryana and Karnataka creating central and regional databases to help central and state level law enforcement agencies in interception and monitoring. Without any manual intervention from telecom service providers, CMS will equip government agencies with Direct Electronic Provisioning, filter and provide Call Data Records (CDR) analysis and data mining to identify the personal information and provide alerts of the target numbers.

The estimated cost of CMS is Rs. 4 billion. It will be connected with the Telephone Call Interception System (TCIS) which will help monitor voice calls, SMS and MMS, fax communications on landlines, CDMA, video calls, GSM and 3G networks. Agencies which will have access to the CMS include the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the National Investigation Agency (NIA), the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), the Narcotics Control Bureau, and the Enforcement Directorate (ED). Last October, the NIA approached the Department of Telecom requesting for connection with the CMS to help it intercept phone calls and monitor social networking sites without the cooperation of telcos. NIA is currently monitoring eight out of 10,000 telephone lines and if connected with the CMS, NIA will also get access to e-mails and other social media platforms. Essentially, CMS will be converging all the interception lines at one location for Indian law enforcement agencies to access them.

Re:how many recipients are on gmail?

[Anonymous Coward]

What contracts? The government of India already provides email addresses to their employees. They're saying "Hey, stupid employee, use this email, don't go off making a Gmail account for official business!"

Re:Not seeing a problem with that.

[Immerman]

I think the point is that if the source and destination endpoints are not under US control, and the communication channel between them is secure, then the NSA can watch the encrypted traffic flow through US-controlled nodes all they want without getting much information beyond mail server A transferred X bytes of data to mail server B.

Re:Not seeing a problem with that.

[thej1nx]

NICNET (http://www.nic.in) has long been used in India for government mails and official data. You literally have dedicated VSAT connections etc. to it in offices, and it is a separate network in itself.

The Indian army too for obvious reasons, just like its counterparts everywhere, maintains its own nationwide network, and does not allows internet connections to it.

All they are asking is, that officials use these network, which are NOT public, instead of allowing the data to pass over any backbone that US has control over. And thus no classified data is expected to ever hit any backbone that is in US control.