14 DAY TRIAL // Indian intelligence agencies are pressing the country's telecommunications department for wider data retention regulations that would force Internet service providers to store more information about communications.
According to the Times of India, the Department of Telecom (DoT) is also being asked to increase the retention period from six to twelve months.
As far as email communications are concerned, proposed regulations would require ISPs and mobile operators to retain the address of the sender, the address of the recipient, the subject of the message and the attachment name and type.
The addresses of any additional recipients must also be kept and the retained information must be grouped together with similar details from any replies to the original message.
Other types of online activities like Web searches, social networking, instant messaging, file sharing, peer-to-peer technologies and video sharing would also be covered under the new rules.
The country's intelligence bureau justifies these changes, which to some represent a serious invasion of privacy, with a need to tackle security challenges in the context of new Internet technologies.
But with many mainstream services making a push for default encrypted HTTPS connections, Indian ISPs and mobile operators will find it hard to implement the new policies without outright banning SSL for a large number of popular websites.
And if that were to happen, online security risks would probably far outweigh national security benefits. That's because terrorists and criminals can always use alternatives methods, such as encrypted VNPs in out of reach countries, to communicate.
They can also use collaborative platforms that don't require sending messages to each other, therefore bypassing data retention. Taking turns at writing into an online document or in a draft email would be a good example of that.
Unfortuantelly, India is not alone in this line of thought. The European Commission is also trying to push data retention legislation, but the Constitutional Courts of some member states like Romania and Germany have already ruled its requirements unconstitutional.