Government wants to read our private email: But the joke is on it

For a government headed by a fairly tech-savvy political party, it is odd that the BJP and Modi fail to see how challenged they are.

First they came up with the draft policy guidelines on net neutrality and now we have a department of telecommunications (DoT) proposal on the use of encryption within the country.

While we are yet to hear more about this draft policy - some on Twitter are already calling it "daft" policy - on encryption, make no mistake, our very privacy is at stake.

Consider this proposal.

"B/C groups (B2C, C2B Sectors) may use Encryption for storage and communication. Encryption algorithms and key sizes will be prescribed by the government through notification from time to time. On demand, the user shall reproduce the same plain text and encrypted text pairs using the software/hardware used to produce the encrypted text from the given plain text. All information shall be stored by the concerned B/C entity for 90 days."

Now, let's simplify this a bit. What the government is saying can be divided into two parts:

1. The government will prescribe the strength and standards of encryption you can use while archiving your family photos with an application like WinRAR.

2. When you use a service like WhatsApp or iMessage, which use end-to-end encryption technology, you will have to keep the messages stored for at least 90 days after receiving them. For instance, if you delete an "Lol" message that you got from your crush on WhatsApp, you will feel the full wrath of the mighty Indian government.

The draft policy, which is all of six pages, is full of such gems. For example, another one mandates that all IT companies such as Google and Microsoft must comply with government conditions on encryption and keep relevant encryption keys with them if they want to offer their services in India.

The guidelines are so "daft" that they possibly even go beyond what China asks for from its citizens and technology companies when it comes to encryption technologies.

Be afraid

The worst part is that the draft policy, which seems to have been prepared by highly qualified experts, opens the Indian government to ridicule because it shows that our so called "experts" don't understand technology. It seems as if the policy has been written for the early 1980s and that all the technological progress that has happened since has been ignored.

Once used by just a handful of people, encryption is now commonplace. Regular services like WhatsApp and Gmail use encryption. All Android and iPhones come with encryption technologies that can help users safeguard their data. All Windows computers and Mac computers make use of encryption technologies. Then there are technologies like PGP (pretty good privacy) which have been in existence for almost 20 years now and are widely used by individual users as well as businesses.

The draft policy on encryption overlooks all of this. It ignores how ridiculous its proposals are and the fact that the best way to bolster security in the digital era is to make encryption harder to break, and not to come up with master keys which would make the whole exercise futile.

In fact, ever since Edward Snowden revealed the illegal surveillance practices of the NSA, technology companies are working to bolster encryption. They are even claiming to make encryption truly end to end. Apple, for example, not only says that it can no longer encrypt iMessages because it does not have any master key, but is also fighting in court against the US government to prove its claim.

Unfortunately, our government is hell bent on putting Indians back in the era when encryption was a luxury just because it believes that Indian web users don't require privacy.

You can read the draft, or should we say daft, policy on encryption here. Also, the government wants your comments on the policy so do share your Mann Ki Baat with the Big Brother.