Vinay Mandalia discusses the quite rational response of the Indian government to the recent discovery that the US intelligence services have had full access to all email communications hosted on US email services:
The Government of India is planning to ban the use of US based email services like Gmail for official communications and is soon going to send out a formal notification to its half a million officials across the country asking them to use official email addresses and services provided by National Informatics Centre.
The move is intended to increase the security of confidential government data and information after it was revealed earlier that NSA may be involved in widespread spying and surveillance activities across the globe.
In a statement to reporters here J. Satyanarayana, secretary in the department of electronics and information technology, said that data of Indian citizens using US based email services like Gmail is residing on servers which are located outside India and for now the government is concerned about the large amount of official and critical data that may be resident on those servers.
Expect a lot of other US “allies” to suddenly discover that their internal communications have been an open book to their “friends” for the last 10-20 years and decide to take similar measures.
H/T to Techdirt for the link.
