Anything Else

In his futile attempt to fight terrorism, Mr Mukhi asks us a question:

“The question we need to ask ourselves is whether a breach of privacy is more important or the security of the nation. I do not think the above question needs an answer,” said Mukhi.

Not only Mr Mukhi is completely clueless about cyber security, he has no idea why the notion of privacy is so important. So what is wrong if our password are stored and is available to police. Why is someone potentially reading our mails such a big problem?

Privacy relates to access of private information about individuals. Human beings associate trust with this information. Imagine someone coming to you and accusing your wife of adultery, in one case he just proclaims, your wife sleeps with other people. This is meant as an insult and you will take it as such, and will just ignore it. But imagine if he has access to your wife's calendar, and says dude yesterday you thought your wife went to laundry in the evening, well she went some other place, and that movie thing she did with her friends last Friday, well, she dint go to the movie either :-), and few other such tidbits. Ignoring the allegation has become so much difficult now. Imagine if he has access to your wife's email account and told you that she still is in touch with her collage ex boyfriend, your wife will not be able to deny this, but she never saw him, and knew how you hated him. The marriage is in deep trouble don't you think? He might not approach you and might blackmail your wife and make some money out of it.

Everybody has stuff about them that if taken out of context can be a cause of great deal of embarrassment or in many cases much worse. Privacy is our weapon against people finding out things about us and misusing them.

Now imagine, 30-40 percent of Bombay accesses internet through cybercafes. If all passwords are being recorded, sure someday someone will discover where they are and steal them. May be the security would be tight, but may be not.

More about trust aspect of privacy. If I call a girl and ask her to come to some place, she will most likely not, but if I have access to her email password, I can find out about her trusted friends from it, and can pretend to be a friend of them calling her to tell her that the good friend of hers is in accident, and caller found her number from the cellphone in his pocket. The chances that the girl comes to the desired place become so high now, don't you think.

There was a case about a guy being lured to a place and kidnapped and I guess murdered using orkut. The guy made a mistake of trusting an unknown person, but imagine if passwords are stored for lackhs of people in some police computer and its gets stolen, how many potential blackmail and murder crimes might get facilitated.

The passwords would be stored in the cybercafe, one point of attack, anyone sitting on this computer can potentially get the passwords. Next passwords will be collected by cybercafe operator, he might steal them himself, or someone might steal them from him. The passwords would be stored in CDs and collected by someone, or electronically uploaded to some site. Sites get hacked all the time, millions of passwords will just give extra incentive to the hackers. Then there are numerous personnel involved in maintaining the remote database that stores all keypresses, any of them could make a copy for himself.

I know of kids of millionaires and billionaires on Orkut, and if I can kidnap them, I can demand hefty ransom. I might be willing to sell this idea to some underworld don to just kidnap kin of system administrators responsible for the database.

Do you really think Mr Mukhi that such risks are worth the near zero benefit that we are going to get out from the privacy invasive plan that you are rolling out? What have you done to protect such privacy invasion? And if you did do anything, you would be a misreable sob if you did not, then why did you decide to redicule privacy concern instead of convincing us that suitable measures are being taken to protect our privacy?

Any data that is collected can be retained and stolen. A lot of privacy information can be gleaned from those datum and trust system inherent with privacy can be exploited to harass people or engage in criminal activities against them. Privacy is thus important. Especially against such un-thought-out measures by government officials, who usually do it under the guise of fighting terrorism.