14 DAY TRIAL // Back in August, a citizen from India was arrested and charged by the local authorities with posting insulting images of Shivaji (also known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Raje Bhosle) an important historic figure on Orkut.com.
That was the beginning of a very interesting yet very unfortunate chain of events that summed up to be an innocent man's nightmare. Phillip Lensen of blogoscoped.com details: "What the Indian authorities did to find the man's identity to arrest him was to first query Google for the Orkut user IP, that unique address assigned to us when we surf the web which can be so helpful to authorities all over the world. With that IP address in hand - Google handed it over in "compliance with Indian legal process", as they said - the authorities marched onwards to the Internet Service Provider, who in turn gave them a name assigned to that IP. Only that, as it turns out, the ISP made an error and provided the wrong data, which then led to a 3-week jailing of a completely innocent person (as opposed to a person "guilty" of the crime of free speech within Orkut, that is)."
That's a lack of respect towards the freedom of speech from the Indian authorities, because as Larry Flint well said, "Freedom of speech is not freedom for the thought you love, but rather for the thought you hate, you hate the most." Google, by allying itself to this action seems to take a step back from the openness that it claims to represent. Of course a statement was released from the Mountain View based company that simply stated that "authorities are required to follow legal process to get information", and with that they washed their hands of the whole deal.
The only annoying detail that both the Indian authorities and Google forgot to mention is that "a set of laws do not replace any person's responsibility to act morally by their own definition, not when it comes to crucial, core issues", as Lensen underlines, and that they do not have the right to play God with an individual's future. But you live and you learn and this is learning the hard way.