Hi all, This is quite a debatable topic with all the recent revelations about snooping by the governments. Now the major question being, is the govt securely storing information?
Everybody gives "National (IN) Security" as a reason when we request data through RTI, NDSAP hypothetically classifies data into restricted & open-access. We know that most of the open-access data is highly unstructured because we tried getting it open. Now, how secure is the restricted data? Is it being encrypted? Here is an extract from NDSAP *c) Restricted Access * *Access to the following categories of information, in case these are not already in * *public domain – are restricted: * *1. Exact coordinates of strategic locations; sensitive archaeological, cultural * *and historical locations; * *2. Information about persons in terms of protection of data privacy * *3. Protection of intellectual property rights * *The data users who are accessing / using this data for research should clearly * *acknowledge the ministry / department in all forms of publications.* Now, there is thread by thej about sensitive geographic data being publicly available over google. Go google loksabha, you can get exact coordinates of it. If an associate requests bus stops lat longs from a regional transport agency, the reply would be *"Sorry, this information is restricted, because of security". *To be frank they don`t have it, but they are too proud to acknowledge it and take help from us. Here is a railway site, in which any intermediate programmer can by-pass the so-called captcha http://www.indianrail.gov.in/pnr_Enq.html . Now what a hacker can do? he can probably get the entire site down These are just publicly available data, we all know how delhi metro cctv feeds got leaked (sorry distributed for money). NIC issued fake google certificates two weeks ago. Now think of UID data being leaked, this holds data about every individual in the country. Frankly electoral rolls released to public should have anonymised data (i don`t want everybody to know i have un-married daughters in my house). I don`t want my identity to be stolen. If anybody wishes to sue EC over this, i would be very happy. Is the NIC/India actually equiped to tackle a cyber-warfare scenario? We need a revamp of the data policy and security checks,measures. I don`t mind the govt snooping on me as long as it doesn`t release it to random advertising agencies. Regards, Srinivas -- Datameet is a community of Data Science enthusiasts in India. Know more about us by visiting http://datameet.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "datameet" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to datameet+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
