Google Provides User's Identity to Indian Governement

This is a real morass, or best case scenario, a slippery slope.  An individual citizen wrote (just words) what seems to be very inflammatory statements about an Indian gov official.  This qualifies, under the Indian sedition laws, as an imprisonable offense. The person who wrote the statements is responsible to know that his statements were illegal.  This would be the benefit of the doubt version of what happened. 

The next thing that happened was that Google gave up the identity of the writer to the Indian government and that person will potentially spend 5 yrs in jail and throw away a 22yr career in IT. 

Do we care?

clipped from www.webguild.org Google provided Indian police with information that led to the arrest of 22 year IT professional, Rahul Vaid, on Friday (May 16, 2008). Vaid posted derogatory content about Congress chief Sonia Gandhi on a orkut community named — “I hate Sonia Gandhi”. The messages were circulated through an email address – Rahulvaidindia@gmail.com, which is operated by Google's Gmail. Monday, May 19, 2008

Continuing with the benefit of the doubt scenario, some one broke the law in a country where Google is bound by the law in order to operate there.  If this were a case of child pornography or cyber-terrorism, the government's and Google's actions would be difficult to question.

However, it is an issue of free speech and democracy in the world's largest democracy.  To look at the details a bit, what if this was cut and dry political discourse.  (It seems the the statements were lude and ridiculous, which always seems to be the test case for this kind of thing.  But, if we assume that this was political discourse where the statements were vigorous, even aggressive, critique, would the scenario have played out the same.  And what if the posted weren't an  anonymous technologist but a "leading intellectual" or a blogger or a fully identified citizen of India?  How does the Indian Governement behave?  How does Google respond.

In Aug of '06 Google was presented with a subpoena for search history records. And Google fought the subpoena saying it was too broad.  Several other ISP's (Yahoo, AOL and MSN) evidently gave the DOJ what they wanted. 

I just did a search for Google search, Google AND NSA, and came up with a lot of scary hits, though potentially shady, paranoid conspiracy theory drivel.

Ultimately, Google is doing what we should all assume they would do.  They are operating with in the context of the governements of the countries in which they operate.  It is silly to equate most any corporation with the NSA because, the NSA does not have a profit motive, corporations do.  That puts them in radically different camps.  (Although, what would a privatized NSA look like?  Truely privatized, both the providing of services and the demand for information open to the global public.)

If we want infomation AND we want privacy, we may need to do something different.