India to ask Gmail, Yahoo to share emails
India Blooms News Service
New Delhi, Feb 21 (IBNS): Email service providers such as Google and Yahoo are set to be ordered by the Indian government to route all emails accessed from India through the country to provide quicker access to security agencies, media reports said Tuesday.
According to reports, the move comes in the wake of instances where security agencies were unable to obtain real-time access to some emails accessed from India, as part of an anti-terror investigation, as they were registered outside the country.
At a meeting held in the office of Union Home Secretary R K Singh, the Department of Information Technology was asked to pursue the matter “at the earliest” with the the service providers, a report citing unnamed sources said.
During the meeting, a top official of the government-mandated information technology security organisation CERT-In (the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) reportedly presented the issues with the prevalent protocol of email access.
Email providers like Yahoo automatically locate all email accounts registered in India to its servers in India, however, accounts registered overseas and subsequently accessed from India are routed through servers outside the country, he apparently said.
The Indian government’s move, that comes in the wake of security agencies’ inability to access suspect emails during an investigation against the Indian Mujahideen terror group stored in European servers, follows a similar drive against Canadian smartphone maker RIM.
Facing intense pressure for the government in a tussle that has been raging for months, the BlackBerry maker, that provides an encrypted email service, finally set up servers in Mumbai to provide a mechanism for "lawful interception" of messages transmitted through their devices.
The move also comes in the middle of an ongoing government-backed litigation against search and social networking companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook that asks them to remove offensive user-generated content from their websites.
Internet services companies have faced an increasingly tightening set of regulations in India, seen by experts as a combination of escalating security threats and unease over anti-government sentiments.
Even though less than 10 percent of India's 1.2 billion people have Internet access, the connected population is rapidly growing through social media tools on mobile phones, increasing postings of content that the government deems “objectionable”.
However, despite rules to remove offensive content and opposition from civil rights groups against the laws, India's Internet access is still largely free when compared with the tight controls in neighbouring Asian economic powerhouse China.
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