Is it just me, or the government of India is cracking down of all end to end encryption apps like signal and element.
Cause I guy who works for the police came to my house and asked whether I use signal and element
Ay yo wtf.
I thought India was a democracy?
🤔
The largest democracy in the world. Democracy is majority rule so unless the majority are firm about not wanting this no reason for the government to prevent it. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of Indians are in favor of such things.
Oh trust me, so many Indians blindly follow what the government says. Remember when ProtonMail was under the threat of being banned because some dumbfuck used PM to send bomb threats to schools in Chennai? Yeah I remember when that happened, I went through so many news articles covering this and so many comments on those articles were in favour of the ban with the most stupidest reasons possible and logic that exceeds human comprehension. It’s scary.
So I looked into India and found quite a lot of attacks, that the Indian Government deems to be “Terrorism”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in_India
I mean look at the long list.
Government is getting paranoid and have justification to starting to deem “encryption” as “suspicious activity”. It would be easy to use these “terrorist attacks” to convince the legislature and the population that this is necessary.
I just read an article on reddit that a foreigner having a Garmin InReach satellite messenger got arrested and interrogated for several hours for “not having a license”. https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-backpacking/india-garmin-inreach/
Not saying its right, it is what is is.
😆 Indian government is so weird.
Host your own XMPP node outside the country’s jurisdiction, turn on E2EE if it weirdly wasn’t on by default, & don’t trust the big centralized servers they could easily ban. Apparently everyone wants to dismiss XMPP since you can disable the E2EE (since it is a generic protocol for lots of stuff) despite encryption being on by default on every modern client—so there is your deniability 🙃 Unlike Matrix, the average user can afford to run it on a toaster too.
Dude what the fuck. That is scary. And here I am trying to somehow convince my friends to join signal.
By the way which state do you live in¿?
It’s true Indian government has banned Element and other Apps and forced Signal, WhatsApp and other such apps to have a local representative so that they can arrest someone and force their will. But there is one silver lining, it is that these politicians don’t fully understand how open source software works. So just banning Element app doesn’t do much I can switch to schildiChat or just download element source code and change the name and logo and boom I’m back in.
And also most of their app bans are just requests sent to Google play store and Apple App store, You can always download from FDroid or from other sources
and there is no real way they can enforce these stupid laws.
They started going through chats on traffic stops, but there are ways to avoid that also
If you are interested and want to support then you can donate to https://internetfreedom.in/ or if not possible just share the word.
Wait wait wait when did Element get banned? I did not know this. Also you’re right, these politicians are faaaar from understanding how Open-Source works or even how software works lol, this is just pathetic at this point. Also the traffic stops point, when did this start happening? and in which states? This is scary and extremely concerning.
Hyderabad also a fun fact Indian supreme Court has ruled that WA messages are not admissible in court.
Apps were banned only in Jammu and Kashmir
Really ironic but also sad cause it shows the dysfunction of the Indian legal system, laws are there but proper enforcement is not and the distrust people have in the police is for a good reason. Laws are subject to the ruling party’s will, it can be legal when it benefits them and illegal when it does not and the loopholes some of them have is another story unto itself lmao
Oh yeah I knew that, I thought another ban was enforced which made it nation-wide. My bad!
The majority of users on Lemmy are probably not from India, I would say our userbase skews US/Europe.
This is a very, very interesting and important story, if it’s true.
Do you have any other evidence of this happening? It’s okay if your sources are not in English, that’s just the nature of local media, it speaks the local language.
Would love to hear more about this from your perspective, @Ritsu4Life@lemmy.world because this is a big, important issue that needs discussion if it’s really happening. Please expand your thoughts and any evidence you may have in the comments section, please and thank you.
Finally, thank you for bringing this to our attention at all. Cheers.
Thanks for the comment. I haven’t found any local news for this. I may update this once I find any
And for my story: A guy came from the police station he had a list all the people who were using "signal, element and bip (not open source, full of ads but encrypted) and a buch more end to end encrypted apps. Shown my mobile number, address and my name.
Told me why I was using signal and element and also had to show my chats. Didn’t look at all the chats, was curious tho.
Said that these apps were used by terrorist and all and you should switch to WhatsApp.
WhatsApp runs India. It is a backbone all Indian users and it is also e2ee for all I know
