Submitted by Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog [4],
What’s a clueless government trying to micromanage the affairs of over a billion people supposed to do when the wheels start coming off the wagon? If you’re India, you blame the country’s financial and societal woes on the buying of gold and attempt to prevent people from purchasing it [5]. When that doesn’t work, and your currency continues to collapse, then what?
Well, you decide to double down on a surveillance state. That’s precisely what the enlightened government bureaucrats at India’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) have decided to do. From The Hindu:
Amid a raging global debate on privacy versus surveillance, monitoring and use of intrusive technologies by governments, the Directorate of Forensic Sciences in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) is set to purchase a range of equipment and software that will allow it to conduct deep search, surveillance and monitoring of voice calls, SMS, email, video, Internet, chat, browsing and Skype sessions on an unprecedented scale.
The MHA document of July 12, 2013 also lists software-based tool kits for logical level analysis of GSM and CDMA mobile phones — which will comprehensively cover phones and SIMs used by India’s 860 million subscribers across 2G and 3G networks. This will be capable of extracting the phone’s basic information and SIM card data, including in your phonebook and contact list, call logs, caller group information, organizer, notes, live and deleted SMSs, web browser artifacts, multimedia and email messages with attachments, multimedia image audio and video files and details of installed applications, their data, traffic and sessions log. It will allow access to iPhone backup analysis, including those which are password protected. Blackberry, considered safe by unsuspecting users, will also be fair game, since it will support Blackberry IPD backup analysis, even when password protected.
The MHA is also set to acquire software for forensic previewing, for analysis of digital media and smartphones. This can acquire date from various types of storage media including in multi-sessions. It can support Windows, Unix, Linux, Sun, Solaris, Macintosh, Apple’s iOS, Android, Blackberry, HP’s palm OS, Nokia Symbian, Windows Mobile OS, etc. The software will be capable of decrypting volumes, folders and files of suspected media including that which is subject to various types of encryption — including 32 and 64-bit systems.
Software is also being ordered for previewing, image mounting, password cracking and forensic analysis of digital media. This would allow recovering folders, expanding compounded files, saved email data bases, extracting artifacts, time line analysis, and registry log analysis. It will allow the government to auto-detect passwords of protected files and their decryption across a range of encryptions.
Don’t worry, all you have to do is yell terrorism and no one will give a shit.
Full article here [6].