Indian government pondering blocking Skype
By Sean P. Aune
Indian intelligence agencies are recommending to the government of the country that popular VoIP service should be blocked in the country due to its reluctance to cooperate with them.
According to The Times of India, Indian intelligence agencies have requested encryption keys from Skype so that they can intercept and decrypt calls between terrorist suspects. While Skype has done this for countries such as the United States of America and China, for some reason the same is not being done for India.
It is due to this reluctance that the intelligence agencies are recommending that Skype be blocked through out the country as it is well-known that terrorists are turning more to VoIP for communications as land line and cellular calls are far too easy to intercept.
Under sections 4 and 5 of the Telegraph Act of India, the government has the right to issue licenses for any telephony service used inside of its borders, and they also have the right to intercept any communications made on those services. Although Skype has been the focus of the big push, the government is also pointing out that Google, Yahoo and MSN, all of which provide VoIP services via their instant messaging clients, are also not licensed inside of the country. Some proposals have called for all of them to be blocked.
Some Indian ISPs have begun offering their own VoIP solutions that they are now pushing out to their high speed access customers. These services are of course all licensed by the Indian government.
Jai Bihar is reporting that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has stated that 130 million minutes of Internet telephone calls were made in India this year. Middle- and upper-class families have been using the services to communicate with family members that are spread through out the country and the world.
No timeline has been given on when a decision may be made, or if the government will even accept the recommendation.
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October 3rd, 2009
Indian Government is not blocking websites that are offering nude-women videos, sex onlineetc. while the same is offence in Indian law.Why?Also,why is skype not cooperating with the Indian government as it has with those of the U.S. and China?
October 4th, 2009
Indian law does not ban watching porn however, the law is not very clear on banning “offensive” videos.
Recently, savitabhabhi was blocked as it was deemed hurting “Indian culture”. The law should be precise on this ideally. They should not ban anything on whim.
I think Skype should share co-operate if it does share encryption with other countries since, terrorism is a huge problem in India. Although, I wouldn’t want govt to snoop freely on everybody but these steps are needed in our country badly suffering from cross border terrorism threats esp. from Pakistan.
October 5th, 2009
Please don’t do that as I would need it for business purposes.
October 5th, 2009
Indian govt. should think of them whoa are away from homes and have only this source of contacting with their family.. If govt t=really want to stop something that should be curaption not these social networking sites. And where is media sleeping right now, media should publish postive aspect of social networking site