"The Indian government has come up with a new set of rules and regulations to regulate social media platforms, messaging services, OTT platforms and news portals," reported the Business Insider. "A key provision specific to messaging services is the requirement to identify the originator in case of mischief." This is nothing new. The previous Congress-led government forced Blackberry, a business to business service, to hand over its source codes so that they could snoop on citizens. How else would politicians and civil servants maintain total power without any accountability? Ominously, "All significant social media intermediaries are required to appoint a chief compliance officer, a nodal contact person and a resident grievance officer. Each of the above are required to be Indian residents." Thus, Disha Ravi could be forcefully locked up by Delhi Police whose evidence was rubbished by a courageous judge as "more of ornamental in nature". Laughably, Delhi Police filed a first information report (FIR) against Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and UP Police booked CEO of Alphabet, which is parent company of Google, Sundar Pichai, who is of Indian origin, but dropped charges, perhaps realising that he is too big to be abducted from the US, like Ravi was. Indian citizens are fair game, like Nodeep Kaur, who has not been sexually assaulted or tortured said Haryana Police, reported the BBC. However, 5 doctors examined her co-accused Shiv Kumar and "listed seven injuries, of which two were termed 'grievous' caused by a 'blunt object'". Who should we believe? WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, has said that it will not end its end-to-end encryption but the government says that it should be possible to trace the original author of a message despite encryption. Of course, the police could do it by seizing the phone of anyone they arrest, which they do anyway, tracing the number from where it was forwarded all the way back to the source, but it will take too long. Instead, companies have been told to find the origin within 72 hours. At their own cost. End-to-end encryption is through Signal protocol (E2EE) which prevents traceability, wrote Anand Venkatanarayanan. So governments use a propaganda technique called Pedophrasty, "where children are invoked to prop up an argument and make opponents against the argument look like unprincipled savages and make everyone else suspend all rational and critical thinking, and agree to the argument". Backdoors are dangerous. "In 2010, Google published a blog post, detailing how Chinese state backed hackers, attacked Gmail to spy on Chinese human rights advocates via a backdoor, installed by Google at the behest of the US government to comply with search warrants on users." Will social media companies surrender to the Indian government. Why not? Why should they care if Indians get beaten up if they are making money? Google had a secret project to offer a censored search engine in China and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly visited China for permission to launch a censored version of Facebook. "The overwhelming tone and nature of the international media's coverage of contentious domestic political issues reinforce a narrative that India is turning back on its democratic, secular, pluralist roots and its open and free society is no longer as open and as free," wrote Chanakya. Xi Jinping may not care but Prime Minister Narendra Modi enjoys hobnobbing with foreign leaders. If India is seen as a fascist police state, invitations may not be as freely forthcoming. Just when 2 brand new super luxury aircraft have arrived. With encryption facilities.
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