> the app enables communication even during network restrictions and creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups and cyber criminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions.
This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for the country.
Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens. They can blame Dorsey, Telegram, WhatsApp and what not, but it is their failure. Things will not change until people notice the obvious and vote out incompetent persons in power.
Hilariously (darkly), during the pandemic, the very same reason is why the very same administrators were hell-bent on forcing Bluetooth-always-on contact tracing on the whole country's smartphone-carrying population.
(edit: viz. that forcible peer-to-peer bluetooth networking works. One man's unrestricted mass-surveillance is another person's "terrorist activity". Oh how the turntables turn and turn.)
Can we perhaps agree the that the response to COVID, worldwide, was essentially shit. When faced with a true crisis, the People in Charge fucking lost their minds. It’s laid bare for all to see:
Our governments have failed us worldwide.
I don’t know what we can do with that information. Feels both useless and that we’re helpless to fix it.
We go by province, mine was basically keep your distance and wear a mask (yeah, that pretty much was non-existent), whereas another one was; you can enter a coffee shop, but you can't use the washroom, you can buy construction shoes (not boots) in-store, but regular shoes you had to order and pickup outside.
It felt odd while there (I was visiting a friend with health issues).
There are gradations to failure. And "our governments" and "us" also overlap.
I'm probably more on your side than it sounds based on this comment, but I find it frustrating to encounter learned helplessness dressed in profundity.
Australia just used police to move "close contacts" into "internment camps". Any wrong move inside would get punished by a $5000 fine.
> Hayley Hodgson [...] was ordered to go to the facility after a friend of hers tested positive for the virus and she was identified as a “close contact” by the number plate on her scooter.
> spent 14 days at the Howard Springs mandatory Covid-19 quarantine facility
> "Police officers blocked my driveway. ’What’s going on, are you guys testing me for Covid? What’s happening?’ They said, ‘No, you’re getting taken away. And you have no choice. You’re going to Howard Springs. You either come with us now, and we’ll put you in the back of the divvy van. Or you can have a choice to get a Covid cab.’
> they were even threatening me that if I was to do this again, ‘We will extend your time in here.’”
> Ms Hodgson said she told police “I don’t consent to this”, and asked why she couldn’t “just self-isolate at home”. Police responded ‘We’ve just been told from higher up where to take you. And that’s all that there is,’”.
> She was told to pack her bags and that she would be released when she tested negative. During her two-week stay she was tested three times, and each time tested negative.
> The video includes footage filmed by Ms Hodgson during her stay as she argues with a police officer at the facility, who reprimands her for leaving her cabin without a mask and threatens her with a $5000 fine.
> “I’m gonna give you a warning, yeah?” he says to her as she sits on the balcony. “It’s an official warning that you have to stay on your balcony and obey the rules while you’re here.” When she argues with the officer that the rules don’t make sense, he replies that “it doesn’t have to make sense”. [...] “Highly infectious when all of us people are negative?” she asks. “So far. The risk is still very high,” he says.
> She said at one point when she was distressed and asking to be let out of her room to go for a walk or a run, facility staff instead offered her Valium to calm down.
> Ms Hodgson said as a result of her two-week stay she had lost her casual retail job. “They compensated me $1500 for the two weeks, and that was all,” she said. “Now I’m currently unemployed because of this situation”
A Victorian police officer who was filmed grabbing a woman around the neck after approaching her for not wearing a face mask earlier this year will face no disciplinary action.
None of your three examples provide any evidence of hazmat crews forcibly taking away infected people. In fact, your links have absolutely nothing to do with anything at all. It's reasonable to assume that police would arrest people breaching curfew orders.
Under no circumstances was anyone in Australia forcibly removed by people in hazmat suits.
Your argument seems to boil down to a No True Hazmat Suit fallacy.
Where if the uniform worn isn’t quite right, and the location isn’t quite the same, and the presence or absence of one arbitrary infectious agent doesn’t match the criteria, then Everything Is Okay™.
> The man had been staying at the Intercontinental, in the centre of Perth, until yesterday afternoon before three officers, dressed in Hazmat suits removed him from his room.
That's someone getting deported and has nothing to do with the claims that people were being forcibly removed into quarantine zones. This just didn't happen.
Agreed, and I'm happy to live in a country where this is likely true. The only thing more deadly than pandemics are governments that gained sufficient power to round up their citizens systematically in the name of the public good.
If you think that the 1:30 ratio of guns to people in the US is going to stop the government from doing whatever the fuck they want, you are suffering from a potentially terminal case of optimism. I am an ardent believer in “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”(even though the context was the Penn family bribing the governor to avoid taxation, I still align with both the original and modern meanings), but a “well-armed militia” isn’t doing jack against an FBI task force or god forbid the military, which has recently been deployed in ever more dubiously-justifiable ways domestically.
You say that, and yet insurgents with a tiny fraction of the population using mostly 60s era guns with zero access to the US economy and base logistical stores or sources managed to keep the US on their toes for two decades. A single redneck in Texas with a hunting rifle has 100x more damage potential to the US military and economy than 1000 middle eastern insurgents.
You underestimate how little resistance it takes to make a difference. It's not about every free man in the country single-handedly holding off the might of the US military on his doorstep.
As soon as a single shot is fired in defence, every thug now has to think twice before busting down a door. The game changes. Tyranny becomes a whole lot less efficient.
You send an FBI task force or god forbid the military to interfere with the life of a peaceful stranger and now you've given every man in the country a damn good reason to get himself organised for when they come for his family.
If they shoot a federal agent that causes an escalation of violence, and future federal agents will be more brutal in response to anything. That loss in efficiency is partially regained by being more violent. That is, in my view, something inevitable when a power structure encroaches too far on those it has power over. But that inevitability doesn't mean you ignore the danger that comes with it.
What it comes down to is can you scare those within the power structure sufficiently enough that they back off before they escalate violence to the point of mass murder? In the U.S. I don't think that you can. It seems that a lot of other people don't either, which is what is delaying people from using violence. There are still enough incentives to be handed out that those capable of committing the harm will escape being harmed by the power structure. When the rewards run out and those who wield arms in service of power become no different from those being harmed, then it will change. The issue is that so much of the world is connected now that those rewards are at no risk of running out, because they can always be pulled from somewhere else.
Please. You could defend yourself from first or second hazmat wearing person that comes to your house, it would be very much different story defending yourself from SWAT team, then remotely detonating drones, finally if it all fails, try to defend yourself against B52.
Medicine is literally the source of the concept of side effects, the idea that some helpful interventions have simultaneous harmful impacts.
For large-scale infectious disease --- epidemiology and public health --- quarantine and infection/contact tracing are very tried and true containment methods. Yes, these impose costs, particularly on individual liberties. What's key is having a well-governed, principled, high-integrity, trustworthy government which makes clearly-justified decisions as to when to impose such restrictions, and when to lift them. Sadly, this has become more difficult in recent years.
Agreed. The theory is there, and even then sounds like it would work like you said if the government was "well-governed, principled, high-integrity, trustworthy". Theory rarely works according to the plan in practice, so as we see today, even if those qualities had been a priority of the government (which I don't think they really are - I think the government in USA acts more like a rich-man's proxy tricking you a lot) we need the plan that accounts for some rough spots or edge cases.
> Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens.
Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but "providing safety for its citizens" is not, has never been, and never will be a "goal" of any government on this planet.
Your "productive outlook" in this case is mere wishful thinking and campaign rhetoric. It will never come to pass in a meaningful way. The legitimacy of the state is defined by its monopolistic right to use force without meaningful consequence to the institution. It's a difference of degree, but since a government would lose a great deal of its supposed raison d'etre if they actually accomplish the goal, there isn't even an incentive to act on it.
They act on keeping the institutions running, which implies partial citizen safety. With spare resources / generous budget and benevolent politicians, these services can be extended to cover more welfare, with shouldnt exist in the first place, according to you?
Governments DO HAVE to try to protect its citizens against internal and external threats. Otherwise people will "abandon" the government up to a certain point.
Case in point: When cartels dominated small towns in Mexico, people gathered in small armies (Auto defensas).
I wonder how long it's going to take until we have universal communication monitoring, including in real life. It's not an impossible technical challenge, it's just a question of time. Every spoken word recorded forever and scrutinized. After all forms of distant private communication fall, the spoken word will be the last one remaining. And all these arguments they're making apply to it, too.
That went live about a decade ago. Heck, a lot of the people who built it and maintain it are here on HN, each getting paid so well and contributing only so little that if they can even admit it to themselves, they would never do it publicly.
What went live a decade ago? I feel like the monitoring technology we have now (let alone what we had in 2016) is still just scratching the surface, it can (will) get so much worse.
My post was talking about things like discreet microphones in public spaces that can automatically separate and recognize multiple voices, smartphones recording and sending every word (or, even better - 24/7 camera footage) to the relevant authorities. But it's not just recording - we still lack the deep level of organization to automatically and fully correlate and organize ALL these types of data from countless sources for everyone. All of these are things that we already have to limited extents, but they're still not taking full advantage of, yet.
> I wonder how long it's going to take until we have universal communication monitoring, including in real life. It's not an impossible technical challenge, it's just a question of time. Every spoken word recorded forever and scrutinized. After all forms of distant private communication fall, the spoken word will be the last one remaining. And all these arguments they're making apply to it, too.
There's a lot that scary about AI, but this is one of the scariest. Even if new good jobs pop up to employ all the people who work on things LLMs can do, governments and other powerful organizations now have this ability to analyze surveillance at scale that was unimaginable even by the East German Stasi.
It's conceivable we'll soon have a machine that can listen in on every phone call, read every text message and email, understand them, and flag dissident concepts and content. The manpower limit on oppressive surveillance will be gone. It'll be like having a spy following you around all the time, taking notes. All the guys who's job it is to listen can be redeployed as thugs to beat out the wrong-think.
It so great these smart kids invented all this. Truly for the benefit of mankind. /s
A scenario explored in the prescient and excellent TV show Person of Interest (2011). We're comfortably able to build The Machine and/or Samaritan by now.
I think you should blame the existence of authoritarian governments and not the technology. Seems odd to give them a pass. It's like blaming the gun instead of the shooter, and nobody does that. Right?
> Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens.
Exactly. How about doing something for people instead of trying to control them, people aren't becoming radicals when their basic needs are met, they have a well paying jobs, housing, and health insurance.
You vote against them when they're up for re-election. If they're not up for re-election, you vote against anyone who allies themselves with said person.
It's easy to criticize others when your own government basically mandates backdoors into all comm devices, thereby obviating the need for hamfisted maneuvers like blocking apps, etc.; after all, who needs to block apps when there are backdoors farther down which allow the reading of all keystrokes and characters displayed?
>This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for the government.
Fixed that for you. It's a subtle but important difference.
There is only partial overlap between what's good for the government and the country. At some times in some countries the overlap may be substantial, or it may be scant if at all.
Those "protections" are in place for the protection of the government, not the citizens. That's also why the US tried to classify encryption as arms and why they passed the gun control act (people nowadays might think modern gun control was passed to help school kids, no lmao, it was passed in response to the killing of JFK).
I don't have the citations to back this up anymore than you did, but it was also passed because of the rise in Black Power movements walking around with guns.
I used to be an obnoxious gun control advocate until I learned that California's gun control legislation was brought about in response to the Black Panther's patrolling predominantly black neighborhoods while armed to protect the people of the neighborhood from state sponsored (police) violence.
>I don't have the citations to back this up anymore than you did, but it was also passed because of the rise in Black Power movements walking around with guns.
Were they what precipitated it or were they one of the many factors used to get the public on board?
Only two countries in the world have police who don't carry guns in regular service. Those are UK and NZ. In all other developed countries, the police may carry a gun, but there is a thorough investigation if it is ever fired.
Only two countries in the world have police who don't carry guns in regular service. Those are UK and NZ.
and china. police in china generally is not armed. (china may or may not be considered a developed country, but i think that distinction is irrelevant. i am pretty sure there are more than three countries in the word where police is not armed, or where armed police is a distinct unit used only for specific tasks where arms are needed). but that wasn't the point i was making, rather, in most countries police simply does not get violent, nor do they have to fear being shot at, because of gun controls.
I don’t think anyone thinks gun control was passed to help school kids. People have been begging the govt to pass stricter gun control laws to protect kids for decades with very little success.
Blocking communications is basically sweeping the issue under the rug in the hopes that it dissolves on its own. This is closer to avoiding of "taking action"
I mean one could say they are taking action when they lock up and kill random immigrants... or getting into unnecessary wars in the middle east. I would hardly call that a measure of competence. In fact, I would love a government that did absolutely nothing at all ahead of this one.
care to clarify yourself then? It's hard to see what other conclusion I should arrive at, because it seems like you're implying that privacy interferes with safety.
I've replied to other comments but to reiterate I am not saying that at all. I was simply trying to ask what the OP considers an appropriate form of safety a government might take.
You don't have to presuppose, you can choose any one of the common positions that work well. Like, it shouldn't matter if you have nothing to hide and are law abiding, or, it's safer for the children, or, it's for the greater good and you're being selfish, etc.
> Are you suggesting that taking down an application is making people safe?
No I'm not.
> You can't seriously argue trying to take down ONE app is acting in the interests of national security?
Again I'm not.
See my replies to all the other comments. I'm only interested in what the OP of the comment I was replying to think governments should be doing.
They implied that if this goes on (TFA) then the government is incompetent and all the people should be fired. Seems to me this sort of thing is the focus of most world governments (chat control, online identity checks, etc). These are all the same thing and as the op states indicates that all these governments are incompetent. So what does a competent government look like? What acceptable stuff should they be doing to solve the issues these measures are attempting to solve (however badly).
Maybe my wording lead to misunderstanding but there you go.
India is pretty serious about being able to monitor all communications after the terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008. The terrorists used satellite phones to coordinate the attack. As a result, they banned most satellite communication devices.
I learned about this earlier this year because I had a connecting flight through India on the way to go trekking in the Himalayas. I had planned to take a Garmin inReach with me, but luckily a day or two before my flight out I came across horror stories of people getting pulled out of security and taken to JAIL in India for having these things in their checked bags when TRANSITING India. Security there when transiting from Switzerland to Nepal was no joke - every single electronic item including anything with wires had to come out of bags including electric toothbrush.
In light of that, banning point to point communication seems on brand for India. Note that Apple gets a pass for its satellite capable phones by geofencing India and disabling the feature.
The terrorists were only able to do so because mass-media news was live broadcasting everything on the air, and the terrorists holed up with hostages in the hotel were able to follow the blow-by-blow live.
(edit: i.e. SatCom alone can't do much, if there is no verifiable on-ground intel. And in 2008, our mass-media supplied it in liberal quantities, through multiple camera angles and replays and blow-by-blow commentaries.)
> Maintaining communications with their handlers in Pakistan was critical for several reasons. First, the handlers were monitoring live Indian news broadcasts and social media feeds, so they could provide real-time instructions throughout the operation and thus afford the attackers the ability to react to developments outside their targets.
> The communication also provided the attackers psychological support.
> The handlers were able to encourage the young, inexperienced militants to maintain their resolve and continue killing civilians and security forces by reinforcing their religious and financial motivations.
> During the operation, the handlers actively coached some of the attackers to continue shooting civilians and to hold positions against Indian security force responders.
That's wild. TIL; thanks for sharing. That appears to be an epic failure of all kinds of intelligence on both sides of the war.
And, it's a miracle the gaffe was not explained away as a "strategic master stroke" psyop engineered by the British to fool the other side and lull them into complacency.
> Side 1: Henlo world, look our people are here, about to surprise-attack Side 2, at this surprise location, at this time.
> Side 2: Lol. Not falling for that.
> Narrator: This is all totally absurd, and totally real of course.
> Side 1: Goes ahead with globally broadcasted secret plan anyway.
> Side 2: FML.
> Side 1: After the dust settles. "Psych! Master-Stroke!".
Also, pray tell why is everything (supposedly) "done" by those in positions of power framed as "strategic master stroke"s these days? I suppose only hyperbole makes sense, in a zeitgeist where "leadership" behaviour is jerk, knee-jerk, reactionary-by-default... epileptic.
You would have also observed how every single politician wanting to become PM had showed up around the Taj while the act was in progress to leech off the media feeding frenzy.
To broadcast that they are there to "stand in person with the heroes", literally making it all about themselves. How they showed up. But unfortunately they could only come the day after, because the then home minister beseeched them to not come on site. But now they are there, surrounded by their Z-plus security, in an ongoing urban conflict zone.
What kind of a state leader shows up in another state, compounding the security nightmare with their own entourage at the site of an ongoing security debacle and literal national emergency,with people being murdered as they spoke?
Japan has no trash cans. (reaction to the japanese subway attacks)
Returning to the US from japan you notice. Japanese bathrooms don't have trash cans, so no paper towels. In the US, the bathrooms have trash cans overflowing with paper towel waste and it is quite a difference.
To add some context, the removal of trash cans accelerated prior to the hosting of the Tokyo Olympics. The municipal government was concerned about trash possibly overflowing from the can, thereby ruining the appearance of the streets.
Meanwhile, Japanese subway stations still have trash cans, which are only blocked when foreign dignitaries visit the country. It doesn't seem authorities are reacting to the subway attacks from 30 years ago.
I would never do this as a visitor to another country - but if this happened where I lived I would advocate mass littering until it was repealed. Just drop the trash where the canvases to be. If you could get even a single percent population doing this in a large city it would snowball and it would be over in 30 days tops.
I would happily do that ~anywhere. The social contract is that I carry my trash around with me on the basis that there will be a can somewhere nearby.
In a nearby municipality there is a particular spot that sees a lot of dog traffic yet has no can. Some civilly disobedient good samaritan keeps leaving an empty bucket and the city periodically gets around to removing it long after it fills up. Seems to work well enough despite being entirely illegal.
The social contract changes when you change location. It’s unreasonable to be accepted as a guest in country and not expect to have to modify your behavior to accommodate local norms.
I agree with you in principle but given this specific example I'm failing to come up with any counter examples. Community provided trash cans seem to go hand in hand with a cultural aversion to littering and both seem to be a direct consequence of population density rather than anything to do with a particular culture.
One thing I noticed is that I tended to accumulate a lot of trash in Japan. Connivence stores were plentiful and the food was tasty, but it was all wrapped in plastic.
Where does all the trash go? More often than not, I ended up carrying trash in a backpack to throw away at my hotel.
I would eat the food at the store and then throw the trash away in the store's trash cans.
For things I didn't eat at the store I carried a small plastic bag to store my trash and when I got to my lodging I would throw it away. Also once you go inside the gates of a subway/train station there often seemed to be trash cans available.
It's been a while since I visited Japan, but one thing I remember is that people tend to not "walk and eat" there. So you buy your konbini sandwich and sit on the benches in front of the konbini to eat it and throw the packaging out there, or bring it home with you.
They're still quite rare and only the type with a clear bag hanging on a metal ring in the main areas.
The busiest stations have wandering staff picking up rubbish off seats and the floor etc.
Many of us Brits in station coffee shops still do the performance of looking for a bin because we're too embarrassed and too well-mannered to leave it anywhere else. It's endearing and funny at the same time (though of course it's also often due to forgetting there are no bins!)
They are self-DoSing. Whatever you want to get banned, just make sure you some terrorists use it, and it will get banned. Want to ban, say, hijabs, or long pants? Have some terrorists wear them to cover their identities.
It’s funny because the Indian independence movement was a failure. Indians protested non-violently and sometimes violently for over a hundred years, and British control (first through the East India company and then directly by the crown) kept increasing with every passing year, eventually encompassing the entire subcontinent.
India eventually gained independence because colonialism in general was not politically and economically viable in a post WW2 world, and so Britain just got up and left (as they did from dozens of other colonies in the post war years).
Had the independence movement not existed and Gandhi himself not existed the end result would have been exactly the same.
I think the political non-viability was at least partly due to the combination of non-violence and the potential threat of violence, as I am of the opinion that the first never works without a threat of the second.
People greatly misunderstand the Indian independence movement. The early Indian activists merely wanted India to have a devolved legislature like present-day Scotland and Wales, or like Canada and Australia used to have. It was relatively late that anyone really wanted independence. I think many of them still wanted to be a constituent state of the UK.
People always forget that Gandhi's first actions as a 'nationalist' were attempting to raise an army to fight on behalf of Britain. The idea that the Indian nationalists wanted to be a new nation from the get go is a modern day invention.
Call it freedom or independence or autonomy or dominion or whatever else you want, it doesn’t change the underlying point. Indians wanted it, and Britain denied it. In fact they denied it quite emphatically and violently. Eventually the outcome was decided by geopolitical realities, not a bunch of people shouting slogans.
Britain did not deny it and was actively working towards allowing self-rule in India the entire time. You seem to be saying that Britain denied India independence while at the same time saying Britain allowed an independent India. The two views are fundamentally at odds.
It is simply not true to the same degree. The American colonies believed the King of England had violated their rights as Englishmen, Indian independence activists simply wanted Indians to have the same rights as other citizens of the UK and subjects of the British crown. The Indian independence movement started as a mirror of the Irish self-rule movement.
The 'Americans' felt that they were being treated as second class citizens with no meaningful political representation on their behalf. Hence rallying cries like 'no taxation without representation' which originated, at least in modern times, in Ireland.
The difference is that American colonials could return to England and have representation, while Indians could not, so no there is a distinct difference in what was being asked for.
hardly anything is ever true to the same degree, and so saying something is simply not true to the same degree seems oxymoronic, in that if it is not true to the same degree implies that it is somewhat true to a lesser degree.
There is a racial component to it that the American settlers did not have.
Gandhi and the original nationalists were English barristers who spoke English, believed in English institutions, were educated in England, and saw themselves as Englishmen and loyal subjects of the King.
That is how they've always seen themselves and how the average educated Indian saw themselves.
Gandhi's experiences in South Africa made him realize that no amount of education was going to make the English treat him the same simply because his skin made him not blend in. Gandhi is not the only person to see that. Lee yuan kew thought the same.
His first reaction was thinking he should prove Indian loyalty to the crown and this would win him points.
When that didn't work, he threw away all his tailored English suits and adopted (by show... It was all show) the habits of a Hindu holy man to lead his movements.
One can debate the efficacy or whatever but there was no great resistance to English rule. Many old Indians are neutral about it. That generation is dying though and the younger ones have a mythologized past.
So yes the degrees in this situation really mattered. The American settlers were seeking to forge a new nation with new institutions. The Indian nationalists just wanted to perpetuate English ones but were unable to do so under English rule.
What you describe, and the way you describe it, reads to me like a progressive application of the Saam, Daam, Dand, Bheda principle, attributed to the late great diplomat Chanakya.
Saam: First, they tried reason.
Daam: Then they demanded a price (Salt Satyagraha to initiate the Civil Disobedience Movement).
Danda: Then they moved to reject the regime entirely (Quit India). At a time when the colonial power was literally fighting on multiple fronts, in World War Two.
Bhed: Then they helped to throw them out, and attempt to build a whole new political identity.
Same thing that happens whenever your flight gets diverted to South Korea and you have condoms, or Indonesia and you have legal weed, or to Australia and you have a pineapple.
Which is that it depends on the mood of the person in charge. Either you get to keep it, or it's confiscated and destroyed, or you go to jail, or you go to a firing squad.
We can guess which is more likely in each country. Indonesia almost always executes people found with drugs. Australia would probably just destroy your pineapple. India, being authoritarian but not completely insane, my guess is they'd take it and fine you.
I was probably thinking of Romania a century ago. But you can imagine for every normal thing there is probably a country where it is banned. And South Korea is a country where some things are banned that you wouldn't expect.
Welcome to the world. If someone wants to shoot you, they can just do that. If that someone is a government, they won't suffer any consequences. There have been flights deliberately diverted by the country they were traveling over because they didn't like one of the people onboard, and that person was arrested by that country upon landing. I think the USA does this most frequently but it's also happened in CIS countries and Asian countries.
I'm aware of stories of people who've had their flights unexpectedly grounded in New York (, New York) so they just abandoned their checked pistol and refused to collect it. I'd imagine something similar. If you never take possession, it becomes harder to charge and convict someone for possession.
But wouldn't they know whose bag it was anyway? And there's cameras everywhere so it wouldn't help if you e.g. removed the bag tags or discarded the contents somewhere else in the airport.
When you're standing at the customs office entering a country, your lawyers are far far FAR away and the people talking to you won't care about them even a little bit.
Whatever will happen with you lawyering and fighting the border officers, will happen after you've been detained.
I disagree with the Modi and Hindutva project almost entirely, not only politically, but on a personal level coming from a minority community (Christian) in India. However, India is in what basically amounts to a perpetual state of war with Pakistan and has always been this way. India rarely agresses Pakistan and Pakistani terror groups do operate with seeming impunity in India (Pakistan doesn't even maintain a 'no-first-use' nuclear option, and is currently run by a military dictatorship... they're f'ing nuts). While all these actions are obviously crazy and in my opinion overbearing, people in the West don't understand how awful radical Islam is, especially of the South Asian variety. I'm not sure many Americans would react differently to the extremism of South Asian Islam to be honest.
To put it in perspective, many Indians (of all religions) died and fought in a bloody war to secure Bangladesh's (then East Pakistan's) freedom from what was a genocidal regime in West Pakistan. Decades later, the typical Bangladeshi muslim still hates Indians because any non-muslim Indian they consider 'Hindu', thus polytheist, and thus worthy of death. One thousand five hundred Indian soldiers died only for their neighbor to hate them in return for the 'crime' of not being born part of their religion. While Hindu nationalists are fucking insane, I honestly think many have been driven to it by the insanity of South Asian Islam.
Meanwhile, America has a relatively peaceful and cooperative neighbor (Mexico), which only has a crime problem on the border, and the average American seems ready to give up almost every civic right to deal with that. There are barely any terror attacks of note coming from these Mexican gangs, and congress has already ceded many constitutional rights (such as the right against unreasonable search and seizure) near the border zones. Anyway, imagine Mexicans hated everyone in America for the crime of being 'gringos' (even the non-whites) and that's basically what India has with all their neighbors.
If people in the west want India to liberalize, which we really should want to do, Western nations need to work on dismantling Pakistan and limiting Islamic extremism in the region.
Explaining the Hindutva moment as a genuine counter reaction to anti-Hindu sentiment rather than a politically motivated movement seems to be misguided, even if not actively propogating the propaganda.
> Largely uncited and generalised exposition of Bangladeshi's misses other factors which could be involved in their decision towards distrust of India.
It's reasonable to distrust a neighboring country with distinct interest, even if they went to war for you, sure. You don't owe them anything.
Similarly, it's actually also normal for India to have concerns about illegal migration, similar to Europe, America, Australia, and Canada.
But the propaganda coming out of Bangladesh is purely religious in form, and it's pretty clear that that is the main reason why they dislike India. Pakistan literally slaughtered them and they're all bhai-bhai with them now.
The article cites the CAA as a reason for Bangladeshi distrust, except the data show that India is acting as a humanitarian in this disaster. Non-muslims are physically persecuted in both Bangladesh and Pakistan. Pakistan particularly is an apartheid state where non-Muslims have fewer political rights. Bangladesh is slightly better but violence against non-Muslims is rampant. People like to paint India as having high rates of religious violence, which is true, compared to America, but not true compared to Pakistan or Bangladesh. Pakistan regularly executes Christians for blasphemy. India doesn't. Non-Muslim refugees should qualify for extra protection from secular nations given the on-the-ground realities of South Asia. Literally the cited reason for the creation of Pakistan is that South Asian muslims constitute a distinct nation from every other religion in the subcontinent. Neither the Jews nor the Parsis nor the Christians ever made such an argument.
Well regardless, countries cannot get angry over other countries making immigration policy (and yes, this also applies to Indian migrants to America, blah blah blah)
> Explaining the Hindutva moment as a genuine counter reaction to anti-Hindu sentiment rather than a politically motivated movement seems to be misguided, even if not actively propogating the propaganda.
If you read about the history of Savarkar, then I think this is exactly what you see. He was kind of meh about everything until he witnessed anti-Hindu extremism from Muslims, and then went off his rocker. Before that, he was a relatively benign nationalist and humanitarian. Well anyway, more to the point of it really being just the Muslims, Savarkar was defended by an Indian Christian barrister.
Are you an American or South Asian, out of curiosity? I feel like Americans don't really have the ability translate South Asian politics. Not that I'm some expert, but I can report personal on-the-ground experiences.
Are you a European, out of curiosity? I feel like South Asians don’t really have the ability to translate European history. Not that I’m some expert, but we can report good on-the-ground experiences about "relatively benign nationalism" and where it leads.
This has nothing to do with India. This is an argument the British and some European states made. India iirc recognizes both Palestine and Israel and most Indians are skeptical of Zionism, including the Christians. Once again American politics don't map cleanly here.
Since some people misunderstood what I am saying: when I saw 'the jews' I am referring to Indian Jews who were mostly indifferent to the whole Zionism movement. Of course many did exercise the right to return, but mostly for economic reasons during Indias license raj. For the most part, Jews lived happily in India without any issues.
You are collapsing different propositions into one:
There is anti-Hindu persecution in Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Therefore Bangladeshi distrust of India is mainly religious.
Therefore Hindutva is essentially a defensive reaction rather than a political movement.
I accept the first proposition. The others do not follow from it.
Bangladesh has entirely intelligible state-to-state grievances with India, unresolved Teesta water sharing, killings at the border, Indian political rhetoric portraying Bangladeshis as demographic threats, economic asymmetry and India’s perceived support for Sheikh Hasina and none of that makes Islamist propaganda imaginary. It means your claim that religion is the main explanation requires evidence rather than assertion. AP, among others, identifies both Teesta and lethal border enforcement as serious bilateral disputes [0].
India’s enormous contribution in 1971 also does not place Bangladesh under permanent political obligation. Bangladeshis fought the liberation war and India provided strategic assistance. Countries can remain grateful for historical aid while opposing a neighbour’s present policies. And Bangladesh has hardly forgotten Pakistan’s crimes: in 2025 it was still formally demanding an apology and financial settlement from Pakistan over 1971 [1]. That is rather different from your “bhai-bhai now” potrayal.
Similarly, describing the CAA as humanitarian does not answer the objection. A true persecution-based refugee law would ask whether an applicant was persecuted. The CAA instead adds to the broader co-relation over actual criteria they need to look for and preselects six religion [2], excluding groups such as persecuted Ahmadis and non-theists. Making religion the statutory filter is the part being criticised.
The portrayal of Savarkar as a benign humanitarian who simply snapped in response to Muslim extremism is not rationalising the fact after the incident. His 1923 Hindutva formulation made India’s status as both fatherland and holy land a criterion of national belonging, thereby excluding Muslims and Christians from the Hindu nation. That is an articulated political ideology, and not a reflex to witnessing extremism.
> "A HINDU means a person who regards this land of
BHARATVARSHA, from the Indus to the
Seas as his Father-Land as well
as his Holy-Land that is
the cradle land of his religion."
> Many a Mohammedan community in Kashmir and
other parts of India as well as the Christians in
South India observe our caste rules to such an extent
as to marry generally within the pale of their
castes alone; yet, it is clear that though their
original Hindu blood is thus almost unaffected by
an alien adulteration, yet they cannot be called
Hindus in the sense in which that term is actually
understood, because, we Hindus are bound together
not only by the tie of the love we bear to a common.
I'm not sure how Christians persecuted Sarvakar to cause him to not consider them worthy of belonging here. Although their rhetoric has indeed not been anti-Christian later given we are a minority.
> Not that I'm some expert, but I can report personal on-the-ground experiences.
Your claim that Jews “never made such an argument” makes the selectiveness more apparent. Zionism was organised as a Jewish political movement advocating a Jewish homeland and eventually a Jewish state in Palestine [3]. This does not make Zionism, Hindutva and the Muslim League identical movements, but it disproves the universal claim made. Were you to narrow it after the correction to “Jews specifically within India”, that would move the goalposts. Different minorities, occupying different demographic and political positions, unsurprisingly did not all develop identical political movements. Their differing outcomes do not prove that Muslim political mobilisation was uniquely theological while every other form of nationalism was historically intelligible. Hindu nationalism is granted an historical defence that it's adherents were provoked and driven towards it by Muslim extremism. Bangladeshi and Muslim politics, meanwhile, are stripped of political context and reduced to religion. If historical insecurity and persecution are relevant when explaining Hindutva, then border killings, water disputes, political interference and support for an authoritarian government are also relevant when explaining Bangladeshi distrust. You cannot treat context as explanatory when it excuses your side and as irrelevant when it complicates your account of the other.
Likewise, saying that Americans cannot understand Islamist extremism is rhetorical but not grounded. The United States was the target of the September 11 attacks, and the 9/11 Commission documented al-Qaeda’s development, declaration of war against the United States and execution of those attacks [4]. That does not make every American an expert on Islamism, but that is exactly the point: neither nationality nor proximity automatically establishes expertise. Asking where someone comes from rather than answering their evidence is a genetic fallacy, evaluating a claim through its origin instead of its reasoning. The special pleading lies in treating your own South Asian identity as evidence while treating somebody else’s identity as grounds for disqualification.
So asking whether someone is American, South Asian or Indian Christian does not resolve anything. A person outside India can misunderstand India, and a person within India can be misinformed about it. The relevant question is still whether the account is supported by evidence. Personal experience may provide useful evidence, but it cannot substitute for demonstrating causation. “I have been there” is not evidence that every Bangladeshi grievance is secretly religious.
Your appeal to on-the-ground experience is also less helpful than you suggest. The student protests in India provide a fairly direct example. Indian television did not report the same events from a same point, a review found that Republic, News18, ABP and DD News largely changed the protesters’ actual demands with narratives about conspiracies, Pakistan, Nepal and national security, while police violence against protesters nearly disappeared from their coverage [5] while AP seemed to have a much coverage of the police violence, and the HRW [6], [7].
The UN declaration is retarded because Indian law is not and has never been neutral to religion. If you believe it should be, then you are on the side of the BJP. This is why such things cannot be reduced so simply to American biased left right ideals.
South Asian Muslims often want it both ways. When India got rid of triple talaaq divorce, south Asian Muslims at my American college demanded a protest to criticize Indias supposed religious discrimination. Meanwhile, you act as if Bangladesh has not given India and Indians reasons to dislike it
This is the problem with discourse about India. The expectation is always that India needs to change and it's neighbor's behavior, regardless of how unhinged, is just seen as a simple matter of unchangeable fact.
> Your claim that Jews “never made such an argument” makes the selectiveness more apparen
You took no time to read or understand what I said and instead assumed I was talking about European Jews. I am not
I am talking about Indian Jews. In that sentence about neither Christians nor Jews nor parsis not sikhs nor jains claiming to be separate nations, I was referring to Indian christians, Indian Jews, Indian parsis, Indian sikhs and Indian jains.
None of these religious groups claimed they were not part of the cultural nation of India. No one made arguments like Jinnah who claimed that Indian Muslims and everyone else (who he called Hindus.. he called all non Muslims Hindus) constituted two distinct nations.
Not everything is about Europeans and European Jews. India has its own Jews. While some were sympathetic to Zionism, most were integrated into Indian society writ large and many participated in the independence movement for India.
> saying that Americans cannot understand Islamist extremism
These sorts of things (terror attacks) are of course awful, but in India it's a different story. Firstly there's just more, and more fooled plots. But more than that, it's the aggressive nature of the religion. It's the loud calls to prayer, the public street takeovers, the slaughter of animals in the streets full of blood, etc (much of which is banned in Muslim countries) that annoy the hell out of people.
Up until recently Muslims could claim any piece of private land and then privately judge whether such a claim had legal merit. Landowners were left without any possibility of appeal. Imagine such a thing in america, lol.
American communities that have seen large influxes of Muslims smaller than the population of Muslims in India by a lot have lodged similar complaints. I mean, when the government tries to stop the streets from being filled with lambs blood, Indian Muslims complain that it's discrimination. Americans would quickly become radicalized if that happened in an American city.
Europe is a great example. The Muslim population of Europe is miniscule but Europeans are even more vitriolic against them than Indians. And even European liberal parties have seen the issues. Of course it's only when India takes actions against this that claims of islamophobia arise. When macron bans the burqa, people default to it being for cultural preservation and safety.
> When Macron bans the burqa, people default to it being for cultural preservation and safety.
Macron did not introduce France’s public face-covering ban because the law was enacted in October 2010 [8]. Macron became president in 2017 [9]. It is formally a general prohibition on concealing the face in public, rather than a law that names only Muslim clothing, and the same legislation separately punishes forcing someone to conceal her face [8]. There can obviously be secular grounds for restricting face coverings in particular situations. Identity checks, examinations, courtrooms, secure buildings and circumstances in which someone is being coerced are all reasonable subjects for regulation. If a woman is being forced to wear a burqa or niqab, then punishing the coercer is entirely defensible.
But that does not make every general prohibition unquestionably secular or liberal. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the French law [10], while the UN Human Rights Committee later found that France violated the religious freedom of two women whom it fined for wearing the niqab [11]. The Netherlands has a partial prohibition applying to public transport and government, healthcare and educational premises rather than an unrestricted ban in every public place [12].
European states therefore do not have one obvious consensus under which all burqa restrictions are merely neutral safety measures. Different countries regulate them differently, and major human-rights institutions have disagreed about the limits. You can defend a restriction on secular grounds, especially where identification or coercion is involved, without pretending that every restriction proves Europe has correctly diagnosed the nature of Islam.
> Europe is a great example. The Muslim population of Europe is miniscule but Europeans are even more vitriolic against them than Indians.
The fact that Europeans complain about Muslims does not prove every complaint is true, much less that the cause must be the "aggressive nature" of Islam. That is circular, Muslims are supposedly aggressive because people dislike them, and people’s dislike is then justified because Muslims are supposedly aggressive. Hostility towards a group cannot itself be used as proof that the group deserves hostility. Europe also involves a very different political question. A large part of its debate concerns recent migration, asylum and integration. Indian Muslims are not recently arrived foreigners asking a host population to tolerate them. They are citizens from communities that have lived in the subcontinent for centuries. Millions remained in India after Partition and had to define their citizenship and belonging within the Indian republic [14].
Immigration policy concerns who may enter and settle in a country. Constitutional equality concerns how a country treats citizens who already belong to it. Conflating the two rhetorically turns Indian Muslims into permanent immigrants whose rights depend on whether the majority presently finds their behaviour agreeable.
> When the government tries to stop the streets from being filled with lambs blood, Indian Muslims complain that it’s discrimination.
Slaughtering animals in public streets can be restricted on grounds of sanitation, or obstruction of public space. India’s prevention of cruelty to animals rules state that, within municipal areas, animals generally may not be slaughtered except in recognised or licensed slaughterhouses and set requirements involving veterinary examination, drainage and the collection of blood [15]. Apply those rules. I have no objection to that. But apply them as rules governing slaughter, sanitation and public space, not as evidence that one religion has an inherently aggressive nature.
United States federal law expressly recognises slaughter performed according to Jewish or other religious ritual requirements as a legally humane method [16]. European Union law permits a religious rites exception from prior stunning requirements when the slaughter occurs in a slaughterhouse [17]. The British government publishes instructions for legally conducting halal and kosher slaughter without prior stunning [18].
And is animal sacrifice uniquely Muslim. Goats are sacrificed daily to Kali at Kalighat, and the Indian legal dispute there has included whether the practice should be prohibited, regulated or concealed from public view [19]. I am not arguing that Hinduism is therefore an aggressive religion, that inference would be as irrelevant as the one you are making about Islam. It shows that slaughter can exist within more than one religious tradition and can be regulated through neutral public health law, and maybe animal welfare. Practices change when institutions, and culture change and if public slaughter creates a health problem, regulate public slaughter. There is no need to transform a solvable civic problem into a theory about the unchangable nature of millions.
The same applies to loudspeakers and the occupation of roads. Impose neutral limits on noise, hours, sanitation and obstruction, and apply them to mosques, temples, churches, political rallies, wedding processions and every other group. Article 25 itself subjects religious practice to public order, morality and health and allows the regulation of secular activity associated with religion [1]. What is not neutral is treating a Muslim violation as evidence about Islam’s aggressive essence while treating similar majority practices as ordinary Indian culture. India has no shortage of temple loudspeakers, processions, road occupations, public animal sacrifice or politically protected religious gatherings.
This is the same special pleading that existed in your previous response. Hindutva is granted history, fear, political incentives, trauma and provocation. Muslim conduct is reduced to “the aggressive nature of the religion”. Indian Jews are treated as comparable to a population thousands of times larger when that helps your argument, while their mass migration to Israel is ignored. Your experiences at an American college become evidence about Indian Muslims, while sourced descriptions of Indian politics are dismissed as Western misunderstanding.
And after all of this, you still do not answer the original causal claim. None of the material about triple talaq, Waqf property, burqas, loudspeakers or animal slaughter establishes that Bangladeshi distrust of India is mainly religious. None of it converts Savarkar’s articulated political ideology into a merely defensive reflex. It is a collection of grievances about Muslims being used to avoid defending the propositions that were actually challenged.
Most of this does not answer what I wrote. You do not address Teesta, border killings, India’s support for Sheikh Hasina, the CAA’s religious filter, or the fact that Savarkar explicitly excluded both Muslims and Christians from his conception of the Hindu nation. Instead, you move to the UCC, some students at your American college, Waqf property, burqas, loudspeakers and animal slaughter.
> The UN declaration is retarded because Indian law is not and has never been neutral to religion. If you believe it should be, then you are on the side of the BJP.
The fact that Indian personal law has historically not been religion neutral is not an argument against making it more neutral. It also does not follow that anyone who supports religion neutral law must support the BJP. Equality before the law, prohibition of religious discrimination, freedom of religion and the aspiration towards a uniform civil code all exist together in Articles 14, 15, 25 and 44 of the Constitution [1]. The BJP does not own the concept of equal law merely because it invokes it selectively.
I have no issue saying that instantaneous triple talaq should not have legal effect. That is separate from supporting every provision of the BJP’s legislation. The 2019 act does not declare triple talaq void but also it makes pronouncing an already legally ineffective divorce a criminal offence punishable by up to three years in prison [2]. Someone can support getting rid of triple talaq while questioning why an ineffective utterance requires that particular criminal penalty. Presenting the only options as either supporting the BJP’s complete policy or supporting discrimination against Muslim women is a false dichotomy.
> South Asian Muslims often want it both ways. When India got rid of triple talaq divorce, South Asian Muslims at my American college demanded a protest.
You are at an American college reporting what some South Asian Muslim students supposedly said. I am at an Indian college and do not see Muslims behaving in the way you keep describing. Neither experience proves much. My experience cannot establish that no Indian Muslim behaves this way, and your experience cannot establish that South Asian Muslims generally behave this way. You are repeatedly moving from some people you met, to South Asian Muslims, to Indian Muslims, and then to the inherent character of Islam. One campus anecdote should not carry that much weight.
> You took no time to read or understand what I said and instead assumed I was talking about European Jews. I am not. I am talking about Indian Jews.
Your clarification narrows the claim, but also makes the comparison nearly meaningless. There were only 22,480 Jews in India in 1941 [3]. They were an extremely small and geographically scattered minority. They could not reasonably demand a Jewish territorial state carved out of India in the manner that a community numbering tens of millions and concentrated across entire provinces could. Their failure to demand an Indian partition does not prove that they possessed some fundamentally different religious or moral character. It largely proves that no such political project was demographically possible.
Indian Jews also did exactly the broader thing you were presenting Jews as having rejected. After Israel was established, most Bene Israel emigrated there. The Hebrew University estimates that there are now around 80,000 Bene Israel in Israel and only about 3,000 in India [4]. This was large-scale migration by Indian Jews to a Jewish nation-state.
That does not make Indian Jews disloyal, nor does it make their migration identical to Jinnah demanding that India be divided. It does, however, destroy the idea that Indian Jewish integration proves Jews had no interest in religiously framed national self determination. They could be integrated into India and still migrate to Israel when a Jewish state became available. Both things can be true.
So the comparison fails in both directions. They were far too small to demand a viable Jewish state inside India, but when a Jewish state existed elsewhere, most of the community migrated to it. You cannot use them as a control group proving that Muslims uniquely politicised religion.
You have also basically stopped defending what you initially said about Savarkar. Your original description was that he had been a relatively benign nationalist and humanitarian until Muslim extremism caused him to snap. I then quoted his own definition of Hindutva, under which India must be both a person’s fatherland and holy land, and the passage in which he explicitly explains why Christians and Muslims are not Hindus in the relevant national sense [5].
Muslim violence does not explain his exclusion of Christians. Christians did not collectively persecute Savarkar into declaring them outside his cultural nation. Your answer that later Hindu nationalist rhetoric was not especially anti-Christian because Christians are a small minority does not defend his ideology either. If anything, it concedes that the groups emphasised by the movement depend upon political usefulness and demographic threat rather than some neutral humanitarian reaction.
You initially gave a psychological account of Savarkar as a humanist driven into extremism by what he witnessed. When confronted with what he actually wrote, you did not explain it. You simply moved to other subjects. The quote still stands, this was a worked out political definition of national belonging that explicitly distinguished Hindus from Muslims and Christians.
> Up until recently Muslims could claim any piece of private land and then privately judge whether such a claim had legal merit. Landowners were left without any possibility of appeal. Imagine such a thing in America, lol.
This is not an accurate description of the old Waqf Act. An individual Muslim could not simply point to someone’s house, privately declare it Waqf and award it to himself. Former Section 40 allowed the statutory Waqf Board to collect information about property it had reason to believe was Waqf property and decide the question after an inquiry [6].
There was a valid criticism here, the board was an interested administrative body being allowed to make the initial determination. I do not need to pretend that was a good arrangement. But the act expressly stated that the Board’s decision was final only unless it was revoked or modified by the Waqf tribunal. The tribunal had the powers of a civil court. Although the act excluded an ordinary appeal from the tribunal, Section 83(9) allowed an aggrieved person to ask the High Court to examine the record and confirm, reverse or modify the tribunal’s determination [6].
"No ordinary appeal" and "no legal remedy whatsoever" are not the same statement. Your quote removes the regulatory bodies like the tribunal and High Court revision, and replaces all of them with "Muslims could claim anything and privately judge it themselves". That is far more rhetorically useful, but it is not what the statute said.
America also does have a proecudre in the same broad family, called adverse possession, where a person possessing somebody else’s land can eventually acquire legal title without the original owner’s consent if state-specific conditions are met which has to be hostile, open and continuous for the statutory period [7].
Adverse possession is not identical to the old Waqf process and requires physical possession over a long period and eventual legal proof, it is not a religious board making an initial property classification. But that is precisely why the careful comparison matters. "Imagine a legal mechanism by which somebody can obtain title to another person’s property in America, lol" is not a devastating point you think it is, because America has one, the procedures and justifications are different, which is what should actually be debated.
And that is relatively benign compared to the constant barrage of foiled or successful terror attacks that India faces. Also, no one really cared when America went forward with a giant war of aggression against those people America labeled possible perpetrators
I find it telling you blame India's lack of modernization on Pakistan. A reflection of the times.
Maybe dismantle the caste system first. You need a civil rights movement.
This is India's biggest hurdle but it seems too ingrained in the society.
All peoples should have the same opportunity, but the structure of power in India likes the way things are.
Hmm... I said nothing of modernization; I was talking about Indias police state tendencies. These are orthogonal issues. Indians lack of economic development is due to severely lacking general government funded education and over regulation.
As countries such as Norway and China show, you can have development with or without a police state. The issues have nothing to do with each other
I wonder what is it with this denial of the existence of India prior to 1947. If people were specific and said that they were referring to the Republic of India as the successor state to British-controlled India, then it would at least make some sense. Otherwise it sounds completely insane.
If India was invented 79 years ago, then you need to explain the various East India companies established in the 1600s, and all the references to India and the Indians by the Romans and the Greeks and the Persians and the Chinese before the Abrahamization of Europe. Europeans were literally looking for ways to India and ran into the West Indies and North America by accident.
There was no unified political entity prior to 1947---technically, 26 January 1950---because it took that long for Sardal Patel's program of political unification of sovereign princely states to conclude, so that the now-unified political entity would govern itself under common constitutional, and common law, with democratic universal franchise.
The East India Company, and then the British Raj, held power because they were able to broker deals with opposing (and warring) princely states and kingdoms. They used contractual leverage to make those sub-sub-regions keep each other in check.
The British Raj was a kingdom of kingdoms, in addition to being a protectorate. These are literal legal facts [0].
The word Hindu is literally an exonym. A name given to a people by foreigners. Our very collective identity was conferred upon us by outsiders.
In its Interpretation Act 1889, the British Parliament adopted the following definitions in Section 18:
(4.) The expression "British India" shall mean all territories and places within Her Majesty's dominions which are for the time being governed by Her Majesty through the Governor-General of India or through any governor or other officer subordinates to the Governor-General of India.
(5.) The expression "India" shall mean British India together with any territories of any native prince or chief under the suzerainty of Her Majesty exercised through the Governor-General of India, or through any governor or other officer subordinates to the Governor-General of India.[1]
Who agreed to the legal terms? The rulers of the sovereign princely states and kingdoms.
> There was no unified political entity prior to 1947
There have been many (empires, not modern, Westphalian nation-states), but the British managed to create the largest yet. Pakistan was carved out of British India on Muslim and non-Muslim lines.
> Who agreed to the legal terms? The rulers of the sovereign princely states and kingdoms.
Sovereign in name, but vassals nonetheless.
> Our very collective identity was conferred upon us by outsiders.
It is a name, not an identity. This is like saying the Indians conferred upon the Chinese their identity because the word cīna is of Sanskrit origin and the world calls the Chinese ... Chinese ... due to that.
It is a name. The identity comes from the rituals, beliefs, clothing, literature, temples, architecture, food and so many other cultural and civilizational markers.
Pakistanis who were looking for their fathers in Arabia, Persia and Turkey in the past based upon a deliberate avoidance of their Indic origin have recently started a political project to reclaim their identity based upon the IVC. They can try all they want but civilizational continuity is the only thing that matters. Names are dime a dozen. If you have a problem with Hindu/India and other exonyms, you could always call yourself Bhāratīya or some such. It is all the same.
Honestly not really. Hindu was the widely used demonym to refer to any Indian before Hindu nationalists decided to turn it into a religious designation. To be a follower of the Hindu religion meant that you followed some set of practices that originated in India. There was no requirement that they be the same standard set.
Modern day Hinduism is a post-hoc reconstruction. That's not to say Indian religious beliefs and doctrines don't exist -- they do. There are just a wide variety of them and they deserve their own mentions.
The idea of a Westphalian nation state is foreign to South Asia until 1947. Before that there was your local patil and whatever clan you belonged to. Even Indian princely states had no clean separation before the British insisted on clean borders.
You're applying modern standards to a time and place where they would have been incomprehensible
I upvoted that comment because it's obvious tin foil hat "oooh look at the boogeyman" speech. That fact along with its critique contributes to the discourse on HN.
I merely pointed out that India's banning of satellite communications is a mirror to the American response to 9/11 except that India faces more 9/11 like situations on a regular basis. This is hardly some boogeyman. Most countries predictably start clamping down on free speech when they feel threatened. Not sure what conspiracy you're trying to foist on me, but I assure you it's not there. I myself am pretty much a free speech absolutist.
And like clockwork, a single terror attack in Berlin and you'll find redditors from western countries calling for solutions much worse than anything india has ever proposed.
Indian Government is struggling to address this issue at face. PM Modi hasn't responded to this in public. To address this, Government is taking into all sort of measures like blocking public communication and social media. Like they have done for other measures like for terrorism , control and govt lead propaganda to control the narrative.
It is interesting that they tried to do this app with a _miniscule_ usage. Usage might be so small, that they could have bothered less about it.
But since they did it, Jack Dorsey is now using his clout to share about this app and bring some light on the situation. With what we have seen with Twitter/X and not-standing up to Elon, let's just remember that Dorsey isn't champion of free speech either.
> Jack Dorsey is now using his clout to share about this app and bring some light on the situation
Failed attempts at censorship are the best thing that could ever happen to Bitchat: free advertising for a vibcoded and questionably secure entry in a space with plenty of competitors. As others have commented it's basically impossible to shut down an open source app by blocking the source distributor, but press is priceless.
I played around with Briar [1] for a while: it worked well, and had an option to install peer-to-peer without going through any app store, was sad to see that the authors put it in maintenance mode. It also had a security audit.
This was a legit case for the students, who suffered the most here. Better systems need to exist, including parametric computer testing and same day results - thereby making re-examinations simpler for the affected students.
I am also aware of the attempts to bring down NEET here, which I feel isn't given the right amount of scrutiny, and showing the cracks in the system. Exam leaks have been happening in India for a long time, and it looks like better systems need to exist for preventing this.
As far as censorship goes, many people should start making SDR based chat systems for long distance relays as well ... they can make this easily today
In the late 90s I attended a Telephone industry conference while working for a telephony test equipment company. A rep. from the Indian government gave a talk on their telephone system regulations. During the question period I got up and asked how India was dealing with voice over internet protocol (VOIP). With a straight face the speaker replied "We will not allow it". :-)
And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.
This stuff happens in many places, including in India.
>And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.
I don't think there's any country that can keep a lid on the internet. The best they can do are leaky blocks (china's gfw is probably the best in the world, but still quite leaky), or complete shutdowns (eg. iran).
As I understand it, China's GFW is intentionally leaky, balancing as much control as they can get away with but not enough to forment open revolt. As with a lot of things, the best control is not total control.
Also not revealing their capabilities. During normal times, some VPNs work. Whenever there is a protest in Beijing, suddenly, none of them work any more.
They could even just shoot people for using the internet! It’s hopeless. Anyone who wants freedom should probably just give up now before it’s too late.
Fair enough, yes people should be ready to fight for their rights (physically if necessary). The tone of your post came across as an attempt to demoralize. Intentional or not, my comment was a pushback against that.
There are workarounds for all of those things up until the point of you suffering violence for just using any encryption. But if you are at that point, then your country is completely fucked.
It is trivial for a law to simply ban workarounds. The vast majority of countries can and do censor the internet in some ways, and they all use violence to compel compliance with it. The only thing that varies is the extent to which it is censored.
Then the question gets much more political: how to make the government prefer not to shoot me for using encryption? There are some strategies that are better discussed with e.g. communists than with tech nerds, as they have more experience and thinking on this as it becomes primarily a political thing not a tech thing.
One example - the government would lose infinite respect if it martyrs some normal guy who bought business supplies with foreign (TLS-encrypted) online banking. So it won't do that. So how far can that line be pushed? i.e. what is the least normal thing the government won't punish?
Or fly a plane or drone overhead and see [0] where the terminals are. After a few fines most people would decide it’s not worth the risk.
I remember how the Uber rollout worked in Berlin. Uber said they don’t need to comply with anything the city asked for and enjoyed their position in the safety of an ocean away so the local authorities instituted eye watering fines for drivers caught providing Uber rides. Uber decided to comply.
Depends on how many terminals there are and whether or not the neighborhoods they are in are sympathetic to the operators. It’s very easy to move them.
I wasn’t thinking of totalitarianism but rather a country objecting to Starlink operating on its territory. This is why I brought up Berlin and fines, not the secret police breaking in your house at night.
After living under one of those totalitarian regimes, all Incan say is that everything sounds easy in an HN comment typed from the safety of a democratic society.
National firewalls and other such things are tools of totalitarianism. Except possibly in wartime, or if they are causing harmful interference, or if Starlink refuses to pay taxes, I don’t really see a good argument against things like Starlink.
Or if the country already operates another system on the same frequencies, or just hasn’t validated and authorized Starlink on their territory, something countries really like to do.
Not everything is about “fighting the power”, there are plenty of good reasons to want to validate and approve these systems.
Musk was as usual likes to talk big and brave but same as with his fight in Brazil over X, or the Tesla factory in Germany, if he wants to operate there he needs to follow the rules. And there’s no moral argument (saving freedom) he can pull out of his wig in most parts of the world that can make him money.
I can see how that worked in Berlin. In USA or someplace with a healthier culture of resistance that would fail laughably. Americans will drive with no license, registration, in cars they've stolen back from the repo man because they refuse to pay anything to anyone. When my car was totalled by an illegal alien, the police didn't even show up, wisely because they were surely driving without license, identity documents, insurance, registration, or any sort of recoverable assets or any way to punish them but to throw them in an overflowing jail. You could try fining them but it would be like trying to draw blood from a stone. I suppose could try to jail them, but you'd find our jails are already full, and we already let violent criminals out on bail.
In much of the world including USA poor people will slang crack for $5 under threat of life in jail and fines higher than they could ever hope to pay. Suffice to say there's an endless line of people willing to uber for roughly crack slinging wages without the risk of life imprisonment even if the fines are as bad -- because their alternatives are worse.
Albania and Georgia have much healthier culture of resistance than the US.
The US has almost entirely lost this culture except for short moments in isolated places. Minneapolis is nearly a proof by exception in this. Very, very few people need to be detained or killed to get the mass of Americans to stay inside and self-censor. Much less is required to get businesses to put their head down and play nice with the government.
FR lol, people in the US love to talk a big game but most of us take the freedoms for granted and will fold at the drop of a hat when real consequences are on the line
I think you wanted the opportunity to beat that “healthy culture of resistance” drum. Every tweaker, every inbred, every starved person acting out of desperation is Rosa Parks now.
You name things and decide that‘s “resistance”. People break the law because there’s no real consequence or because they just have nothing to lose. They’re not “resisting”, they’re surviving. The US society decided that a large class of people will be forced to operate at that level their whole life and are incentivized to do worse by the insane punishment model applied only to them.
The only people doing the “resisting” in the US are those who can afford a good lawyer. Everyone else does what the cracks in the system allow, or what they need to do out of desperation.
No German Uber driver is desperate enough to risk their whole livelihood especially for that meager payoff. Most civilized countries make sure that people have something to lose which will keep people acting straight rather than always act on desperation. Depending on your goal, having people exercise self restraint works better than restraining them with tasers, chokeholds, and bullets to the back.
> because their alternatives are worse.
Ah, ok. So not “a healthy culture of resistance” but more “desperation because the country made sure that’s driving them”.
>Ah, ok. So not “a healthy culture of resistance” but more “desperation because the country made sure that’s driving them”.
This is logical fallacy, but you've tried hard to pull a gotcha out of it.
Resisting because you are desperate is perfectly valid and doesn't create a contradiction.
It's not something reserved to "those who can afford a good lawyer." Desperation is one of the hardest drivers of resistance, not something reserved to rich people with lawyers and something to lose. And even if we suppose there's not resistance in USA, I said in USA or someplace with a healthier culture of resistance, which means even if you don't consider USA a place of resistance it still meets the logical test of falling within my statement.
>[now deleted] If you hear this for the first time, hello white male with plenty of money for a lawyer.
Lol you couldn't resist adding that in. Your little racially charged bits about why we're not allowed to call it resistance when a poor black person does such acts. While ignoring your very example of Rosa Parks who was a black woman, child of a teacher and itinerant worker and before activism working largely in domestic work for white families. The contradiction is yours.
Resistance is a choice. “No other choice” is just surviving. The gotcha was already in the fact that you started by proudly waving a flag of “healthy culture of resistance” and immediately switched to desperate people having no other options. The healthy culture of resistance as you see it is made of the most desperate and dilapidated people doing desperate things.
My “very example” about which you are now quoting Wikipedia to me was resistance, not desperation. It wasn't a tweaker selling $5 crack because he literally has nothing better to look forward to. It wasn’t a mother driving without a license because she couldn’t afford the court taxes for a few traffic tickets. It was a woman who did it out of principle alone. That’s resistance, and it’s rare. Your speech fell on its face as soon as you had your big boy proud moment because you’re missing something important to back it up [0]. You were never taught enough pst that proud song and dance.
If you thought calling you privileged for your dissonant and ignorant line of argumentation is racist then let me add not educated enough[0] too. Read a book to understand these concepts, don’t expect you can just throw words around and people will bow to your wisdom. You make it impossible for me to take you seriously when you make junior level confusions like “resistance” and “desperation” all for a shitty national pride moment.
Your rebuttal rests upon a logical fallacy of false mutual exclusion that one cannot exercise resistance as a means of survival. You believe resistance comes from rich white people with lawyers; I believe it largely comes from the hungry and those with no other choice. The truth is it comes from a bit of both.
Putting aside the geopolitics of satellite destruction, we're likely moving to the realm of microwave based disablement instead of kinetic. It's the thing that can scale and provide some plausible deniability while the numbers are low.
Lots of countries ban voip in some way or another. Not allowed to connect to the PSTN. Disrupted by licensed ISPs based on traffic inspection. Large vendors yelled at. Etc.
isn't phone tech itself digital over the internet nowadays just like VOIP if it isn't using VOIP directly?
on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
Yes, but PSTN using voip is paying all the telecom fees and taxes and respecting the government surveillance mandates which is what the Indian Government is concerned about.
> on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
Not so much in countries where it's banned and the ban is enforced.
sure, but i as a user care about the tech, and what i am trying to say is that VOIP as tech for endusers is no longer interesting because we use video chat now.
Not on the PSTN you don't. The PSTN is a parallel internet whose main difference is that you need a verified identity to connect to it. It also simulates circuit switching and costs a lot.
i don't get your point. that does not matter. what i mean is that as a user i care about the tech that runs on my phone, not how the connection is made. i don't make phone calls anymore. nowadays everything is done with video chat. neither PSTN nor VOIP offer that, so their use will eventually decline unless they start offering video. phone numbers are also a privacy nightmare. they need to be replaced with something that allows me to pre-authorize who can call me. this is unlikely to happen any time soon, but the point is that VOIP in particular is hardly relevant except in a few specific use cases.
that depends on how you define VOIP. strictly going by the term any voice sent over the internet is VOIP. but since PSTN can be routed over the internet too, that would be included as well. but i am talking about the system that uses a standardized protocol over a federated network with a VOIP or SIP client with a public address that allows you to reach any other public address on the internet, just like email.
whatsapp is a private network, not federated and only works with a whatsapp owned client. to qualify i would have to be able to call someone on whatsapp with a generic VOIP client.
this is comparable to googles text messaging system that is built on xmpp. it used to be possible that i could use any xmpp client on any xmpp server to reach people on google. at that point google was xmpp. but when they removed public access it stopped being standard xmpp but became a custom fork of it.
VOIP is any voice sent over IP. It can be the internet or the PSTN. I assume India doesn't forbid telcos using IP internally, because they surely do that because TDM switches are obsolete technology, but they Shall Not Connect to a public IP network.
Title should specify that it is Indian government. I was worried for a second there that it was the American government. I should have read the url though.
I was fully expecting that was about Trump administration, and was a bit disappointed that my prediction turned out to be wrong. I do not support this; I expected the first federal court and then all the appeals to serve a verdict cementing the right of encrypted communication to exist in the US.
Be careful what you wish for. Bringing a test case to the current supreme court is playing with fire, and we are far more likely to end up with precedent rejecting a right to encrypted communications, given the current make up of the court. They have already shown a willingness to show deference to national security, and our fifth amendment protections are already eroding (State v. Andrews in NJ, government can compel the production of a password under the foregone conclusion exception). For now this is still state dependent, but its only a matter of time before a case reaches the supreme court.
We're much safer not opening that can of worms for now.
Something like this would be basically impossible in the US, and it wouldn't even matter what kind of administration tried it. The US government doesn't even order ISPs to block websites because they run afoul of all kinds of 1st amendment litigation. They just have the FBI seize a domain after a court order.
Honestly I would think something like this would come from the EU or UK. UK is trying to ban VPNs, EU is trying to ban private chat completely. EU countries routinely block whole swaths of IPs and websites, etc.
Oh boy , this is American exceptionalism at its finest. The US has by far the most authoritarian government of all mentioned entities.
Really you should protest against your government.
Yes, it is American exceptionalism (and quite foolish) to make the claim that "This could never happen in the US".
No, the American government is NOT more authoritative than the UK in the way they handle freedom of websites. The grandparent comment is correct: the US government does not (currently) order ISPs to block specific websites.
Yes, those in the US should protest the current government (many of us already are doing so).
I think maybe there is more than one way to quantify authoritative.
Just looking at the percentage of the population in prison, or murders by cop per inhabitant, that are also good indicators of "repression", and the US might rate first worldwide.
Sorry OPs first sentence mentions this is basically impossible in the US and then compared to EU or UK. There is a certain tone and I don't think this comment was a good faith criticism on EU or UK policy
How many people has the US sent to jail due to saying naughty things on Twitter vs the UK? If were going to speak of authoritarianism. Just due to ensuring free speech and right to bear arms the US is possibly the least authoritarian developed nation outside of maybe Switzerland.
This is 100% not true. On multiple measures of freedom the US scores around the 75th percentile if I remember correctly; I believe the category is something like “flawed democracy” on the economist’s democracy index, and that’s not even an publication that I particularly like. It’s not even in the top 30.
If Modi government wants to ban something, it is usually good stuff.
> “The application’s design, which enables communication even during network restrictions, creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups, and cybercriminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions,” the notice mentioned.
Literally any encrypted mesh net communication protocol would be subject to the same propaganda. The point of this stuff is providing checks and balances for the people against a rogue government, or emergency situation.
Yeah, did you know criminals can use roads to commit crimes, too? We should destroy all of the roads. Terrorists also use food to give them energy to commit more terrorism, so we should start regulating access to food behind mandatory ID checks.
Yes, exactly that. Tons of crime is committed using only in-person communication. Should we all have microphones in our homes? Do detective work, flip sources, follow the money.
I believe that most of terrorism does happen because the people behind it have some goals, not for funsies; so trying to fight the causes would be one thing to do. Obviously, that's difficult for many reasons, and making life more shit for everyone else is cheap and easy, and hence preferred.
But if the cause is "death to the West" or "from the river to the sea" or "India should not be secular" then it's a bit of a problem. How do you fight the cause?
I don't think it's everyone's job to do that, though. If an ideology is innately, for the last 1300 years, expansive, by military might or by population demographic change, you can't blame past grievances for that. It's just innate.
What poor taste, to attempt to equate terrorism to Palestinian liberation from colonial oppression, apartheid and genocide. You should be ashamed for making such a comment.
They need to adapt then. Plenty of encryption users have been busted. Whether by grabbing their device while it's unlocked or by turning a prison sentence into house arrest if they snitch on their peers.
If you were sane, you would realise that restricting the right of billions of people to communicate privately, a right they have enjoyed for all the thousands of years of human history, is handing terrorists a complete and total victory far beyond any act of violence they could commit. The purpose of a government is not to prevent 100% of all crime and terrorism by locking every citizen in a straitjacket.
This also isn't even motivated by terrorists, but rather people daring to oppose the government.
> Honestly no idea what I’d do if I were in government.
It's not ordinary citizens' job to figure out solutions to these problems. Government has teams of intelligence agencies to answer these questions. Encrypted chat is fundamental infra that shouldn't be blocked.
Most governments today are corrupt and the actions or inactions of the government cannot be used to draw general conclusions about the necessity of and right to private communication as a check and balance against tyrannical governments.
My read[0] suggests it's a combination of religious, political, ethnic and economic issues, which are all inherently social things. From the causes of the splintering into 2 countries to what's happening today. And social issues crop up when the needs of some group in a society aren't being met, because they aren't being properly heard. I've seen things in the news about Modi; he doesn't sound like the type to listen to/heed anyone not in his circle.
You clearly do not stand by your own argument, given your use of a throwaway. You realize that you're arguing a straw man. There is no reason to seriously engage with your reply.
Bluetooth based messaging apps are naturally able to circumvent internet restrictions that inhibit protests, citizen journalism and other kinds of unapproved activities but there are several ways Bluetooth could be updated as a protocol to introduce compatibility with some kind of antibody-esque suppression of communication standard.
It's just a matter of interested parties setting up a body to create the standard, which might genuinely be a huge bottleneck under the current geopolitical landscape.
I was thinking the same thing. We do need more. I set up a Meshtastic node at the house and joined https://chicagolandmesh.org/ which has been a fantastic community for beginners in mesh based comms.
you use it to access the internet, but the point is if the internet access is disabled you still have a local network for p2p communication across the city. also multiple people/hubs in the network can provide provide internet access over different ISPs providing resilience if some ISPs go down, but not all of them.
freifunk in germany and funkfeuer in austria do the same thing.
But here it shows another problem: who controls the distribution channel, they also control which program can be found and installed (by the mass) and which not.
Without a critical mass of adoption, mesh applications are largely useless.
No, not doing nothing. They are probably funding it, like Tor, as this kind of technology is useful in intelligence and the promotion and sustainment of foreign resistance movements.
(For once my tax dollars are producing something I appreciate, even if I don’t love the reason behind it.)
Indian government also blocked Telegram a while back to prevent exam leaks and stopped Whatsapp's rollout of usernames (which has some legitimate concerns) but more or less it wants complete China-like control of it's citizens' communications. Except no one uses any homegrown chat app (for good reasons)
Some relevant wisdom from the founding fathers of the United States:
When asked about when kind of government the founding fathers had created, Ben Franklin replied "A Republic, if you can keep it."
On democracy, John Adams wrote: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
Thomas Jefferson further wrote that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
tl;dr democracies need to be fought for, or else they won't stay democracies forever.
John Adams wrote that as a reason why the United States is not a democracy. It's a Constitutional Republic. It's a consistent theme throughout the Federalist Papers.
Individual States and localities have elements of democracy, but the US—built upon knowledge of Rome—is not.
The United States of America is the second iteration of American government, after the one that failed in 1787. The arguments leading up to the 1789 Constitution are quite explicit around why democracies don't work. America is a nation of nations, which is why "these United States" as a plural term was used frequently until after the Civil War, when having it be a singular concept once-and-for-all was of paramount importance.
That said, this is ban is clearly a restriction on freedom of expression, and highly un-American.
Which is a kind of democracy. Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people. This is a weird framing that I see brought up by Americans only, and I don't understand it, because direct democracies (what these Americans are actually referring to when they say 'democracy') are basically extinct in the modern world. They keep trying to distance themselves from the term. Most democratic nations today are presidential or parliamentary republics, just like you, or something that can be approximated to one of them. I'm doubtful that the US founders didn't recognize they were founding a democratic nation, just a specific subcategory - but ultimately still a state that should hopefully answer to the people.
Neither does federalism relate to the form of government - you could have a federal or distributed direct democracy if you wanted to. They're just different categories of things, the way you choose how to best represent the will of a group of people is a different question from how you subdivide these groups into self-governing blocks.
But Adams was specifically arguing not against democracy in the broad term, but specifically, unconstrained direct democracy, so this is not relevant to this discussion.
Is it interesting that all these "democracies" around the world have persistent speech bans? When someone says something they don't like?
I seem to have a recollection of flipping through HN for a decade or so and people talking about all the meanie-pants who want people to be able to speak freely, even if it hurts people's feelings and might not be endorsed by the elected government.
> Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people
No. It's not. I encourage you to read the quite enlightening treatment of democracies in the Federalist Papers. And Greece's government was nothing like Rome. If there is a conflation there, it is one largely created by America.
Which in its own right is interesting. What is interesting about the longest-running continuous constitutional government in history (America)?
I presume you're referring to the various systems of democracy introduced in different ancient Greek city-states, as opposed to the Roman Republic. Of course, they're different. But it doesn't run counter to what I said - being descendant from the ideas of democracy doesn't promise you that any aspect of the government will be in any way similar, only that the power will ultimately originate from the people in some way. You don't even have to go ancient for this - there are dozens of different takes on democracy in the modern world.
To emphasize - I'm not arguing against the distinctions or the new ideas that were made during the founding of the US, or that some of these ideas weren't novel. I'm arguing against the school of thought that seemingly arose long after that happened, which tried to categorize the US into a bespoke category of government that included it and excluded other nations, modern and historical - despite them all definitionally being ruled by the people and often even having similar ways of organizing their governments. Let's review the terms.
An autocracy is a state where power descends from a single person, the autocrat. An absolute monarchy is a subset of autocracy, where that person is a monarch, usually with religion tying into their perceived legitimacy. An aristocracy is a state where power descends from an upper elite class. In anarchy, the power descends from no one in particular. Democracy is the class that is opposed to these other forms, it's a system of rule by many where power descends from lots of people. It includes many flavors and forms that result in different types of government - direct, indirect/representative (you are here), as well as many sub-variants that define the exact way of how power moves from the ruled to the rulers or other characteristics.
Therefore, republics are a strict subset of the broad term of democracy. There are lots of republics in the modern world, all of which are democratic states, just as there are constitutional democracies. If you want to distance the US from these other states, you would need to prove why it was not envisioned as a power-from-the-people state and what exactly would place it in a different category that no one else occupies. The US may have been the first, but it's not that unique in the modern landscape of governments.
Great point about what Adams is actually arguing! Of course, I know the country was founded as/is a Constitutional Republic, but it's always interesting to see how much our modern (American) understanding of democracy differs from how the founders understood it – and also how they shaped the fact that most of us now equate Constitutional Republic with the best form of democracy.
If us means humans living in democracies, I would say that parliamentary democracy has more supporters and constitutional republics.
And even if us == the US, I would argue that most US citizens actually have only a very hazy idea about how their own system of government works, much less how others work. Most of these people think that chanting "USA, USA" in unison is democracy.
> And even if us == the US, I would argue that most US citizens actually have only a very hazy idea about how their own system of government works, much less how others work. Most of these people think that chanting "USA, USA" in unison is democracy.
That's a very dim view of your fellow Americans. I don't have such a dim view myself; there are certainly people who don't care and didn't pay attention in their high school civics classes, but I've found that most people do care and do pay attention. I wonder if your opinion is colored by recent events, and whether you'd have thought the same in 2008?
If your country's security depends on someone on the internet taking their product off for the whole world something must be wrong with the people in power. This is censorship and suppression at its peak.
Fun fact: They have deployed facial recognition vans, AI smart glasses and illegally tracking the protesters (most of which are students) without their consent to threaten and deter them.
What Jack Dorsey could do for decentralized local chat, better than creating yet another copy of what already exists, is taking 0.1% of his wealth and using it to solve the problems that Briar project has: money.
In 2014, the Hong Kong protesters used an app called FireChat.
I had the pleasure of meeting the founder, Micha, a few times. The company was called OpenGarden.
The app was popular - distributed in the App Store. Same idea: Bluetooth and wi-fi networks.
User numbers growing like a hockey stick. 100k+ downloads a day.
Micha was in Hong Kong during the 2014 protests (originally for a layover en route to meetings in China) and gave many interviews to international/Western media outlets while there, including the New York Times, TIME, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, BBC, and Reuters. Mica expressed support for free speech.
Authorities limited or blocked downloads and information about the app.
> “The application enables anonymous communication without mandatory user registration, phone number verification, or centralised logging of communications.“
Those are features, not bugs ;)
Seriously tho, the I4C is describing face-to-face communication. Is that illegal too?
Perhaps the problem here is not the protesters, but an overreaching government.
Agree, sounds like it is working for its intended purposes.
The thing about it is they specifically are targeting the repo which is interesting because the only thing that can really stop the proliferation of these apps is not allowing user to install from other sources which would have to come from Google preventing this.
Hopefully google won't prevent people from installing from outside sources /s
This change is largely drivin by claims that installing apps from other sources is insecure... I'd argue this is why it's insecure... Not insecure for individuals.
Insecure for oppressive governments.
Remember that Google is working to introduce developer verification to Android soon, making it trivial for governments to force Google to revoke a certain developer's apps within that country. The whole developer verification thing is about security... for Google's grip on Android and goverments' grip on communication
Lets imagine that github does give in and it does take down bitchat, will it result in the death (or at least a huge loss) for github? I mean of course a lot of open-source projects on github won't feel safe when they know that github can easily give in to the government pressure. Plus the general state of github right now is already causing projects to migrate to some better alternatives.
GitHub is currently a dead zombie, but it won't get any deader from this than it did when it deleted a bunch of stuff to please the Russian government or the American government.
I sincerely hope that Microsoft responds with "If the Indian government wants to block content hosted on U.S. servers, they are more than welcome to set up their own Great Firewall."
This may not be much, but if you’re outside India, please write to your local representatives and also to the Indian government that you are going to avoid products made in India as much as possible, will avoid visiting the country for tourism or work, and will not invest in the Indian markets or in foreign currency bank deposits. Clearly state the reasons why, and ask how the “largest democracy in the world” could be so short sighted and dictatorial.
Note that India is heavily dependent on money from elsewhere (hence a lot of recent policy changes to bring in more foreign money). It is a net importer and isn’t strong enough on exports.
There are some recent policy changes to attract more foreign currency deposits with lots of expectations.
If there is a hint that these subversive actions are also going to hurt the economy, there is a tiny, tiny sliver of a chance that the powers that be will be a bit more afraid of losing the next round of elections in the state governments and in a few years at the union level. That could possibly limit the ignorant knee jerk reactions and bans.
I understand the source is thehindu.com - but I'm assuming there's no way we can get that title updated? "Government orders..." sort've misleadingly implies something that "Indian government orders..." does not.
Ban Post-It notes and any other piece of paper than can be passed around with messages written on them by bad people. No whispering into people ears either unless your lips are plainly readable.
Unfortunately Bitchat feels like an unfinished proof of concept.
At a festival I got notifications there are "other users nearby", which made me question if and how the app is broadcasting it's presence, possibly at all times. I also couldn't figure out a way to turn off these notifications (there's barely any settings) and I ended up uninstalling the app.
For context, there are currently mass protests against the Indian government which the government is violently suppressing. It also just cut off the internet in a major city to stop the protesters communicating, so this ban is probably to try and suppress other means of communication.
To imagine that US MNCs readily obey these orders. There was a time when Gmail exited China due to Aurora attacks, and Chinese GFW is universally hated, so why is India allowed to create a GFW like censorship on US platforms? Indian courts have even blocked Reuters articles GLOBALLY before. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/19/india-judg...
#2 post on HN currently is: India’s first privately developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch. In the same page, there is this news about banning an OSS app, built on open tech. Just saying.
We evaluated Bitchat and determined it would be a really useful tool for Gaza - Israel controls all internet access to Palestine and would frequently cut off internet access to Gazans. We tried building our own but when Bitchat came out we focused on that instead.
Well, this also shows why we all should remove our dependency on Microsoft-GitHub in the long run. The US government just fiddle-influences too much here. Tomorrow it could be your project too.
Bitchat, berty, briar, all do use Bluetooth for communication. It would be funny if popular apps also add p2p Bluetooth options or just over any network, and seeing them trying to ban the internet.
Aside of if it's right or not (i actually think it is), the bag is out in the open, anyone any countries, any bad person or security persons are going to look at it now
Uggh in any given project I tend to gauge the hype to working tech ratio. The higher it is, the more annoying the project. BitChat is about as annoying as you get. The reason is simple: bluetooth connectivity only works at scale if everyone has the app, and even then it only works under extremely high node density -- packed stadiums, maybe an apartment building if you're super lucky. The combination of extremely wide distribution and extreme density never happens.
To make it even more annoying, good projects like Briar have been doing this for over 10 years. Why would BitChat suddenly succeed or get any attention at all?
Because it’s Jack Dorsey and that’s it. I agree it’s not novel or interesting. It’s frustrating for me particularly because I want some kind of widely decentralized network but something that actually has a chance to work, which Dorsey has the capability (financially, connections, etc) to make happen. Instead he decides to waste time on something that’s DOA.
> the app enables communication even during network restrictions and creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups and cyber criminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions.
This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for the country.
Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens. They can blame Dorsey, Telegram, WhatsApp and what not, but it is their failure. Things will not change until people notice the obvious and vote out incompetent persons in power.
Hilariously (darkly), during the pandemic, the very same reason is why the very same administrators were hell-bent on forcing Bluetooth-always-on contact tracing on the whole country's smartphone-carrying population.
(edit: viz. that forcible peer-to-peer bluetooth networking works. One man's unrestricted mass-surveillance is another person's "terrorist activity". Oh how the turntables turn and turn.)
But that did save lives; I was able to know my family had Covid before the symptoms showed up. Happened with a lot of other people too.
Indeed, and it would have saved far more lives if leveraged the app to have hazmat crews come in a forcibly carry the infected to quarantine zones.
Didn't actually this happen in China?
Maybe the videos were fake, but I saw at least a couple of this happening.
That was Australia. In China, they welded the doors to their housing units shut.
Can we perhaps agree the that the response to COVID, worldwide, was essentially shit. When faced with a true crisis, the People in Charge fucking lost their minds. It’s laid bare for all to see:
Our governments have failed us worldwide.
I don’t know what we can do with that information. Feels both useless and that we’re helpless to fix it.
Depends on the government.
We go by province, mine was basically keep your distance and wear a mask (yeah, that pretty much was non-existent), whereas another one was; you can enter a coffee shop, but you can't use the washroom, you can buy construction shoes (not boots) in-store, but regular shoes you had to order and pickup outside.
It felt odd while there (I was visiting a friend with health issues).
I'm happy we didn't go too nutso.
There are gradations to failure. And "our governments" and "us" also overlap.
I'm probably more on your side than it sounds based on this comment, but I find it frustrating to encounter learned helplessness dressed in profundity.
Australia just used police to move "close contacts" into "internment camps". Any wrong move inside would get punished by a $5000 fine.
> Hayley Hodgson [...] was ordered to go to the facility after a friend of hers tested positive for the virus and she was identified as a “close contact” by the number plate on her scooter.
> spent 14 days at the Howard Springs mandatory Covid-19 quarantine facility
> "Police officers blocked my driveway. ’What’s going on, are you guys testing me for Covid? What’s happening?’ They said, ‘No, you’re getting taken away. And you have no choice. You’re going to Howard Springs. You either come with us now, and we’ll put you in the back of the divvy van. Or you can have a choice to get a Covid cab.’
> they were even threatening me that if I was to do this again, ‘We will extend your time in here.’”
> Ms Hodgson said she told police “I don’t consent to this”, and asked why she couldn’t “just self-isolate at home”. Police responded ‘We’ve just been told from higher up where to take you. And that’s all that there is,’”.
> She was told to pack her bags and that she would be released when she tested negative. During her two-week stay she was tested three times, and each time tested negative.
> The video includes footage filmed by Ms Hodgson during her stay as she argues with a police officer at the facility, who reprimands her for leaving her cabin without a mask and threatens her with a $5000 fine.
> “I’m gonna give you a warning, yeah?” he says to her as she sits on the balcony. “It’s an official warning that you have to stay on your balcony and obey the rules while you’re here.” When she argues with the officer that the rules don’t make sense, he replies that “it doesn’t have to make sense”. [...] “Highly infectious when all of us people are negative?” she asks. “So far. The risk is still very high,” he says.
> She said at one point when she was distressed and asking to be let out of her room to go for a walk or a run, facility staff instead offered her Valium to calm down.
> Ms Hodgson said as a result of her two-week stay she had lost her casual retail job. “They compensated me $1500 for the two weeks, and that was all,” she said. “Now I’m currently unemployed because of this situation”
Full interview with recordings from inside the Australian "internment camp" https://unherd.com/newsroom/inside-australias-covid-internme...
Mirror: https://archive.ph/GQDkN
Your source is a site called "Unherd" and the story doesn't exist on any other platform.
Really? I suppose you'll be able to provide proof that people were forcibly taken?
Dramatic arrest footage shows police surrounding elderly women sitting on park bench
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/dra...
The arrest of a woman in Australia for promoting an anti-lockdown protest online has drawn criticism, after video of the incident went viral.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54007824
A Victorian police officer who was filmed grabbing a woman around the neck after approaching her for not wearing a face mask earlier this year will face no disciplinary action.
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/victoria...
None of your three examples provide any evidence of hazmat crews forcibly taking away infected people. In fact, your links have absolutely nothing to do with anything at all. It's reasonable to assume that police would arrest people breaching curfew orders.
Under no circumstances was anyone in Australia forcibly removed by people in hazmat suits.
Your argument seems to boil down to a No True Hazmat Suit fallacy.
Where if the uniform worn isn’t quite right, and the location isn’t quite the same, and the presence or absence of one arbitrary infectious agent doesn’t match the criteria, then Everything Is Okay™.
Circumstances:
> The man had been staying at the Intercontinental, in the centre of Perth, until yesterday afternoon before three officers, dressed in Hazmat suits removed him from his room.
https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/illegal-...
Mirror: http://archive.today/ekWBs
That's someone getting deported and has nothing to do with the claims that people were being forcibly removed into quarantine zones. This just didn't happen.
I doubt it, unless their hazmat suits are bullet-proof.
Agreed, and I'm happy to live in a country where this is likely true. The only thing more deadly than pandemics are governments that gained sufficient power to round up their citizens systematically in the name of the public good.
If you think that the 1:30 ratio of guns to people in the US is going to stop the government from doing whatever the fuck they want, you are suffering from a potentially terminal case of optimism. I am an ardent believer in “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”(even though the context was the Penn family bribing the governor to avoid taxation, I still align with both the original and modern meanings), but a “well-armed militia” isn’t doing jack against an FBI task force or god forbid the military, which has recently been deployed in ever more dubiously-justifiable ways domestically.
You say that, and yet insurgents with a tiny fraction of the population using mostly 60s era guns with zero access to the US economy and base logistical stores or sources managed to keep the US on their toes for two decades. A single redneck in Texas with a hunting rifle has 100x more damage potential to the US military and economy than 1000 middle eastern insurgents.
You underestimate how little resistance it takes to make a difference. It's not about every free man in the country single-handedly holding off the might of the US military on his doorstep.
As soon as a single shot is fired in defence, every thug now has to think twice before busting down a door. The game changes. Tyranny becomes a whole lot less efficient.
You send an FBI task force or god forbid the military to interfere with the life of a peaceful stranger and now you've given every man in the country a damn good reason to get himself organised for when they come for his family.
It's clearly not about a flu, at that point.
If they shoot a federal agent that causes an escalation of violence, and future federal agents will be more brutal in response to anything. That loss in efficiency is partially regained by being more violent. That is, in my view, something inevitable when a power structure encroaches too far on those it has power over. But that inevitability doesn't mean you ignore the danger that comes with it.
What it comes down to is can you scare those within the power structure sufficiently enough that they back off before they escalate violence to the point of mass murder? In the U.S. I don't think that you can. It seems that a lot of other people don't either, which is what is delaying people from using violence. There are still enough incentives to be handed out that those capable of committing the harm will escape being harmed by the power structure. When the rewards run out and those who wield arms in service of power become no different from those being harmed, then it will change. The issue is that so much of the world is connected now that those rewards are at no risk of running out, because they can always be pulled from somewhere else.
Please. You could defend yourself from first or second hazmat wearing person that comes to your house, it would be very much different story defending yourself from SWAT team, then remotely detonating drones, finally if it all fails, try to defend yourself against B52.
Sadly that wasn't possible in the US political climate and maybe a million people lost their lives as a result.
I think they're being facetious, this is basically a distopian movie plot point.
Was your short term safety at the expense of long term safety? (assuming rights erosion and government failures ultimately harms safety long-term).
Medicine is literally the source of the concept of side effects, the idea that some helpful interventions have simultaneous harmful impacts.
For large-scale infectious disease --- epidemiology and public health --- quarantine and infection/contact tracing are very tried and true containment methods. Yes, these impose costs, particularly on individual liberties. What's key is having a well-governed, principled, high-integrity, trustworthy government which makes clearly-justified decisions as to when to impose such restrictions, and when to lift them. Sadly, this has become more difficult in recent years.
Agreed. The theory is there, and even then sounds like it would work like you said if the government was "well-governed, principled, high-integrity, trustworthy". Theory rarely works according to the plan in practice, so as we see today, even if those qualities had been a priority of the government (which I don't think they really are - I think the government in USA acts more like a rich-man's proxy tricking you a lot) we need the plan that accounts for some rough spots or edge cases.
If they had administered properly people wouldn't have been to the streets and spread the virus in the first place!
The most consequential public health failure during COVID was the denial that COVID was airborne, based on no scientific evidence.
The infection spread based on being in the same enclosed space as an infected person, and was not based on being only a few feet apart.
Was that 30 second bluetooth beacon ever switched off again?
> Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens.
Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but "providing safety for its citizens" is not, has never been, and never will be a "goal" of any government on this planet.
> is not, has never been, and never will be a "goal" of any government on this planet.
this is not a productive outlook to have
Your "productive outlook" in this case is mere wishful thinking and campaign rhetoric. It will never come to pass in a meaningful way. The legitimacy of the state is defined by its monopolistic right to use force without meaningful consequence to the institution. It's a difference of degree, but since a government would lose a great deal of its supposed raison d'etre if they actually accomplish the goal, there isn't even an incentive to act on it.
They act on keeping the institutions running, which implies partial citizen safety. With spare resources / generous budget and benevolent politicians, these services can be extended to cover more welfare, with shouldnt exist in the first place, according to you?
You are just very pessimistic and cinic person.
Governments DO HAVE to try to protect its citizens against internal and external threats. Otherwise people will "abandon" the government up to a certain point.
Case in point: When cartels dominated small towns in Mexico, people gathered in small armies (Auto defensas).
Same thing with Zapatistas.
The only purpose of any government, anywhere, is to protect the ruling class (whether they are internal or external to said government).
The US supreme court has explicitly ruled, on several occasions, that the government has no duty to protect its citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeShaney_v._Winnebago_County
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale...
> any government
Proceeds to give example of one of the most oligarchical countries that ignore financial transparency laws on an industrial scale.
Hobbes's Leviathan wants to have a call with you.
Sorry, I’m already on the line with Society. She’s telling me how her signature has been forged on some scam contract.
This is an absurd claim.
Voting has never worked to bring competence into the government. Exhibit A: All governments of the world, right now.
Random allocation of citizens to seats might actually make for a better government.
We could try that one, since the MBAs-and-lawyers clique with money/influence have been doing a poor job lately.
> Random allocation of citizens to seats might actually make for a better government.
Not only that, but that would be actually democratic concept. Greeks long ago found that elective systems are in the end oligarchies.
I wonder how long it's going to take until we have universal communication monitoring, including in real life. It's not an impossible technical challenge, it's just a question of time. Every spoken word recorded forever and scrutinized. After all forms of distant private communication fall, the spoken word will be the last one remaining. And all these arguments they're making apply to it, too.
That went live about a decade ago. Heck, a lot of the people who built it and maintain it are here on HN, each getting paid so well and contributing only so little that if they can even admit it to themselves, they would never do it publicly.
What went live a decade ago? I feel like the monitoring technology we have now (let alone what we had in 2016) is still just scratching the surface, it can (will) get so much worse.
My post was talking about things like discreet microphones in public spaces that can automatically separate and recognize multiple voices, smartphones recording and sending every word (or, even better - 24/7 camera footage) to the relevant authorities. But it's not just recording - we still lack the deep level of organization to automatically and fully correlate and organize ALL these types of data from countless sources for everyone. All of these are things that we already have to limited extents, but they're still not taking full advantage of, yet.
I’ve heard mixed things about the efficacy of Palantir’s software but it’s certainly something that they’re working very hard on doing.
Doesn't the NSA technology already do all of this?
We already have that, except for half of real life.
They used to call it gawd and s4nta
> I wonder how long it's going to take until we have universal communication monitoring, including in real life. It's not an impossible technical challenge, it's just a question of time. Every spoken word recorded forever and scrutinized. After all forms of distant private communication fall, the spoken word will be the last one remaining. And all these arguments they're making apply to it, too.
There's a lot that scary about AI, but this is one of the scariest. Even if new good jobs pop up to employ all the people who work on things LLMs can do, governments and other powerful organizations now have this ability to analyze surveillance at scale that was unimaginable even by the East German Stasi.
It's conceivable we'll soon have a machine that can listen in on every phone call, read every text message and email, understand them, and flag dissident concepts and content. The manpower limit on oppressive surveillance will be gone. It'll be like having a spy following you around all the time, taking notes. All the guys who's job it is to listen can be redeployed as thugs to beat out the wrong-think.
It so great these smart kids invented all this. Truly for the benefit of mankind. /s
A scenario explored in the prescient and excellent TV show Person of Interest (2011). We're comfortably able to build The Machine and/or Samaritan by now.
I think you should blame the existence of authoritarian governments and not the technology. Seems odd to give them a pass. It's like blaming the gun instead of the shooter, and nobody does that. Right?
It's fine for the smart kids, because they are on the side of the well off and cushy, luxurious lifestyles with high rewards from this work.
The majority of people though may not be as well off.
If you're so well off, what criticism do you have to share and to worry about?
> Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but if your country's safety depends on ability to block all forms of private person to person messages, your government has failed in one of its primary goals: providing safety for its citizens.
Exactly. How about doing something for people instead of trying to control them, people aren't becoming radicals when their basic needs are met, they have a well paying jobs, housing, and health insurance.
“incompetent persons in power”.
The fact that they can get away with shit like this makes them pretty competent in my book.
To me it’s the opposition that’s incompetent, not being able to put an end to the circus.
and vote out incompetent persons in power.
How you can vote someone out?
Recall elections. California loves them.
So when are we recalling Trump?
You vote against them when they're up for re-election. If they're not up for re-election, you vote against anyone who allies themselves with said person.
So main driver is frustration? Why not remove immunity to electorate and keep them responsible for their decisions?
Or, even better, don't give our responsibility to uknown electorate at all.
Instant, wide-range (mesh) private comms are rather different than a couple of people out in a field at night talking.
It's easy to criticize others when your own government basically mandates backdoors into all comm devices, thereby obviating the need for hamfisted maneuvers like blocking apps, etc.; after all, who needs to block apps when there are backdoors farther down which allow the reading of all keystrokes and characters displayed?
tapping the sign https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48922409
you are being too charitable in your evaluation.
>This mouthful boils down to exactly this: a form of communication not controlled by the government creates a risk for the government.
Fixed that for you. It's a subtle but important difference.
There is only partial overlap between what's good for the government and the country. At some times in some countries the overlap may be substantial, or it may be scant if at all.
Those "protections" are in place for the protection of the government, not the citizens. That's also why the US tried to classify encryption as arms and why they passed the gun control act (people nowadays might think modern gun control was passed to help school kids, no lmao, it was passed in response to the killing of JFK).
I don't have the citations to back this up anymore than you did, but it was also passed because of the rise in Black Power movements walking around with guns.
I used to be an obnoxious gun control advocate until I learned that California's gun control legislation was brought about in response to the Black Panther's patrolling predominantly black neighborhoods while armed to protect the people of the neighborhood from state sponsored (police) violence.
Reference to start from: https://www.kcra.com/article/liberty-limits-black-panther-pa...
This topic is full of subtlty so recommend reading the sources from that article and so on.
>I don't have the citations to back this up anymore than you did, but it was also passed because of the rise in Black Power movements walking around with guns.
Were they what precipitated it or were they one of the many factors used to get the public on board?
9/11 didn't write the patriot act.
Most nations with gun control apply gun control to the street police also.
most nations with gun control do not need people to protect themselves against police violence. that's the real problem here.
Only two countries in the world have police who don't carry guns in regular service. Those are UK and NZ. In all other developed countries, the police may carry a gun, but there is a thorough investigation if it is ever fired.
Only two countries in the world have police who don't carry guns in regular service. Those are UK and NZ.
and china. police in china generally is not armed. (china may or may not be considered a developed country, but i think that distinction is irrelevant. i am pretty sure there are more than three countries in the word where police is not armed, or where armed police is a distinct unit used only for specific tasks where arms are needed). but that wasn't the point i was making, rather, in most countries police simply does not get violent, nor do they have to fear being shot at, because of gun controls.
that doesnt apply to the U.S.
I don’t think anyone thinks gun control was passed to help school kids. People have been begging the govt to pass stricter gun control laws to protect kids for decades with very little success.
Playing Devils Advocate... isn't this the government taking action?
Yes, misinformed and counterproductive action.
Blocking communications is basically sweeping the issue under the rug in the hopes that it dissolves on its own. This is closer to avoiding of "taking action"
I mean one could say they are taking action when they lock up and kill random immigrants... or getting into unnecessary wars in the middle east. I would hardly call that a measure of competence. In fact, I would love a government that did absolutely nothing at all ahead of this one.
The article is about India, not the US.
I'm not condoning this but what would you suggest they should be doing to keep people safe?
I'm fairly sure whatever they do you'd likely be complaining about it. Glad to be wrong though.
"Do you consider your position so weak that it cannot withstand debate?" -- Data, STNG
They're afraid of people communicating. That's not a safety thing.
I'm not at all saying private messaging makes people unsafe. I was interested in what the OP thinks governments should be doing to keep people safe.
Clearly I have not worded my reply carefully enough, so for clarity: I am all for private messaging and against mass surveillance.
How is private messaging causing people to become unsafe? If you're saying privacy = unsafe environment, then your right to privacy is meaningless.
That's not what I'm saying at all. If you've taken that from my comment you've misread it.
care to clarify yourself then? It's hard to see what other conclusion I should arrive at, because it seems like you're implying that privacy interferes with safety.
No. I have done so already in other comments.
and in this argument we pre-suppose that loss of privacy equates to an increase in safety, right?
I've replied to other comments but to reiterate I am not saying that at all. I was simply trying to ask what the OP considers an appropriate form of safety a government might take.
You don't have to presuppose, you can choose any one of the common positions that work well. Like, it shouldn't matter if you have nothing to hide and are law abiding, or, it's safer for the children, or, it's for the greater good and you're being selfish, etc.
Are you suggesting that taking down an application is making people safe?
People are making independent communication networks using reticulum, LORA devices and hold tight - unregistered radio transmitters.
You can't seriously argue trying to take down ONE app is acting in the interests of national security?
> Are you suggesting that taking down an application is making people safe?
No I'm not.
> You can't seriously argue trying to take down ONE app is acting in the interests of national security?
Again I'm not.
See my replies to all the other comments. I'm only interested in what the OP of the comment I was replying to think governments should be doing.
They implied that if this goes on (TFA) then the government is incompetent and all the people should be fired. Seems to me this sort of thing is the focus of most world governments (chat control, online identity checks, etc). These are all the same thing and as the op states indicates that all these governments are incompetent. So what does a competent government look like? What acceptable stuff should they be doing to solve the issues these measures are attempting to solve (however badly).
Maybe my wording lead to misunderstanding but there you go.
Ah, okay.
> I'm not condoning this but what would you suggest they should be doing to keep people safe?
That led me to believe you consider request to ban the app as an action in the interest of the general public, making them safe.
I appreciate your response, thanks!
Very similar argument to those who want to ban encryption.
Why do you need to encrypt your network traffic with ssl, is you have nothing to hide....
India is pretty serious about being able to monitor all communications after the terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008. The terrorists used satellite phones to coordinate the attack. As a result, they banned most satellite communication devices.
I learned about this earlier this year because I had a connecting flight through India on the way to go trekking in the Himalayas. I had planned to take a Garmin inReach with me, but luckily a day or two before my flight out I came across horror stories of people getting pulled out of security and taken to JAIL in India for having these things in their checked bags when TRANSITING India. Security there when transiting from Switzerland to Nepal was no joke - every single electronic item including anything with wires had to come out of bags including electric toothbrush.
In light of that, banning point to point communication seems on brand for India. Note that Apple gets a pass for its satellite capable phones by geofencing India and disabling the feature.
The terrorists were only able to do so because mass-media news was live broadcasting everything on the air, and the terrorists holed up with hostages in the hotel were able to follow the blow-by-blow live.
(edit: i.e. SatCom alone can't do much, if there is no verifiable on-ground intel. And in 2008, our mass-media supplied it in liberal quantities, through multiple camera angles and replays and blow-by-blow commentaries.)
cf. Westpoint's Urban Warfare Project Case Study #16: Mumbai Terrorist Attacks: https://mwi.westpoint.edu/urban-warfare-project-case-study-1...
> Maintaining communications with their handlers in Pakistan was critical for several reasons. First, the handlers were monitoring live Indian news broadcasts and social media feeds, so they could provide real-time instructions throughout the operation and thus afford the attackers the ability to react to developments outside their targets.
> The communication also provided the attackers psychological support.
> The handlers were able to encourage the young, inexperienced militants to maintain their resolve and continue killing civilians and security forces by reinforcing their religious and financial motivations.
> During the operation, the handlers actively coached some of the attackers to continue shooting civilians and to hold positions against Indian security force responders.
A similar thing happened in the Falkland's War: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/history/bbcs-treason-battle...
That's wild. TIL; thanks for sharing. That appears to be an epic failure of all kinds of intelligence on both sides of the war.
And, it's a miracle the gaffe was not explained away as a "strategic master stroke" psyop engineered by the British to fool the other side and lull them into complacency.
> Side 1: Henlo world, look our people are here, about to surprise-attack Side 2, at this surprise location, at this time.
> Side 2: Lol. Not falling for that.
> Narrator: This is all totally absurd, and totally real of course.
> Side 1: Goes ahead with globally broadcasted secret plan anyway.
> Side 2: FML.
> Side 1: After the dust settles. "Psych! Master-Stroke!".
Also, pray tell why is everything (supposedly) "done" by those in positions of power framed as "strategic master stroke"s these days? I suppose only hyperbole makes sense, in a zeitgeist where "leadership" behaviour is jerk, knee-jerk, reactionary-by-default... epileptic.
I was in school back then, lived in a town near Mumbai and watched it on TV
The media was so stupid that it literally showed commando positions. Literal position second by second.
The govt then later banned this information, staggering it to one hour after the fact
You would have also observed how every single politician wanting to become PM had showed up around the Taj while the act was in progress to leech off the media feeding frenzy.
To broadcast that they are there to "stand in person with the heroes", literally making it all about themselves. How they showed up. But unfortunately they could only come the day after, because the then home minister beseeched them to not come on site. But now they are there, surrounded by their Z-plus security, in an ongoing urban conflict zone.
What kind of a state leader shows up in another state, compounding the security nightmare with their own entourage at the site of an ongoing security debacle and literal national emergency,with people being murdered as they spoke?
Japan has no trash cans. (reaction to the japanese subway attacks)
Returning to the US from japan you notice. Japanese bathrooms don't have trash cans, so no paper towels. In the US, the bathrooms have trash cans overflowing with paper towel waste and it is quite a difference.
To add some context, the removal of trash cans accelerated prior to the hosting of the Tokyo Olympics. The municipal government was concerned about trash possibly overflowing from the can, thereby ruining the appearance of the streets.
Meanwhile, Japanese subway stations still have trash cans, which are only blocked when foreign dignitaries visit the country. It doesn't seem authorities are reacting to the subway attacks from 30 years ago.
I would never do this as a visitor to another country - but if this happened where I lived I would advocate mass littering until it was repealed. Just drop the trash where the canvases to be. If you could get even a single percent population doing this in a large city it would snowball and it would be over in 30 days tops.
I would happily do that ~anywhere. The social contract is that I carry my trash around with me on the basis that there will be a can somewhere nearby.
In a nearby municipality there is a particular spot that sees a lot of dog traffic yet has no can. Some civilly disobedient good samaritan keeps leaving an empty bucket and the city periodically gets around to removing it long after it fills up. Seems to work well enough despite being entirely illegal.
The social contract changes when you change location. It’s unreasonable to be accepted as a guest in country and not expect to have to modify your behavior to accommodate local norms.
I agree with you in principle but given this specific example I'm failing to come up with any counter examples. Community provided trash cans seem to go hand in hand with a cultural aversion to littering and both seem to be a direct consequence of population density rather than anything to do with a particular culture.
Meanwhile Boston spent millions on "bomb proof" trashcans that turned out to just be regular trashcans with an absurd mark-up.
Security Theater keeps on keepin' on.
One thing I noticed is that I tended to accumulate a lot of trash in Japan. Connivence stores were plentiful and the food was tasty, but it was all wrapped in plastic.
Where does all the trash go? More often than not, I ended up carrying trash in a backpack to throw away at my hotel.
I would eat the food at the store and then throw the trash away in the store's trash cans.
For things I didn't eat at the store I carried a small plastic bag to store my trash and when I got to my lodging I would throw it away. Also once you go inside the gates of a subway/train station there often seemed to be trash cans available.
It's been a while since I visited Japan, but one thing I remember is that people tend to not "walk and eat" there. So you buy your konbini sandwich and sit on the benches in front of the konbini to eat it and throw the packaging out there, or bring it home with you.
I did that at first, and ended up carrying around coffee cups and other nonsense.
Gradually I learned to deposit things where I bought them, sometimes politely asking the people behind the counter who would take it from me.
Working as intended
Britain had no rubbish bins on train stations for a long time due to similar issues (IRA attacks).
They're still quite rare and only the type with a clear bag hanging on a metal ring in the main areas.
The busiest stations have wandering staff picking up rubbish off seats and the floor etc.
Many of us Brits in station coffee shops still do the performance of looking for a bin because we're too embarrassed and too well-mannered to leave it anywhere else. It's endearing and funny at the same time (though of course it's also often due to forgetting there are no bins!)
Hmm, Osaka has plenty of trash cans... Did you mean Tokyo?
hmm.. I didn't compare. but yes for certain tokyo.
That just means that terrorism works.
What's next? A bomb under a bench? No more benches!
You will just have to buy your bench from a coffee shop after you get through airport security.
They are self-DoSing. Whatever you want to get banned, just make sure you some terrorists use it, and it will get banned. Want to ban, say, hijabs, or long pants? Have some terrorists wear them to cover their identities.
The Indian government is pretty serious about cracking down violently on peaceful protesters: https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/07/23/india-excessive-force-us...
One of the formative narratives of Indian independence is that peaceful protest works in getting rid of bad governments.
on edit: changed myths to narratives to avoid confusion
It’s funny because the Indian independence movement was a failure. Indians protested non-violently and sometimes violently for over a hundred years, and British control (first through the East India company and then directly by the crown) kept increasing with every passing year, eventually encompassing the entire subcontinent.
India eventually gained independence because colonialism in general was not politically and economically viable in a post WW2 world, and so Britain just got up and left (as they did from dozens of other colonies in the post war years).
Had the independence movement not existed and Gandhi himself not existed the end result would have been exactly the same.
I think the political non-viability was at least partly due to the combination of non-violence and the potential threat of violence, as I am of the opinion that the first never works without a threat of the second.
People greatly misunderstand the Indian independence movement. The early Indian activists merely wanted India to have a devolved legislature like present-day Scotland and Wales, or like Canada and Australia used to have. It was relatively late that anyone really wanted independence. I think many of them still wanted to be a constituent state of the UK.
People always forget that Gandhi's first actions as a 'nationalist' were attempting to raise an army to fight on behalf of Britain. The idea that the Indian nationalists wanted to be a new nation from the get go is a modern day invention.
Call it freedom or independence or autonomy or dominion or whatever else you want, it doesn’t change the underlying point. Indians wanted it, and Britain denied it. In fact they denied it quite emphatically and violently. Eventually the outcome was decided by geopolitical realities, not a bunch of people shouting slogans.
Britain did not deny it and was actively working towards allowing self-rule in India the entire time. You seem to be saying that Britain denied India independence while at the same time saying Britain allowed an independent India. The two views are fundamentally at odds.
arguably the American colonies wanted the same thing. What is it with these colonizers that they don't want that!?
It is simply not true to the same degree. The American colonies believed the King of England had violated their rights as Englishmen, Indian independence activists simply wanted Indians to have the same rights as other citizens of the UK and subjects of the British crown. The Indian independence movement started as a mirror of the Irish self-rule movement.
The 'Americans' felt that they were being treated as second class citizens with no meaningful political representation on their behalf. Hence rallying cries like 'no taxation without representation' which originated, at least in modern times, in Ireland.
The difference is that American colonials could return to England and have representation, while Indians could not, so no there is a distinct difference in what was being asked for.
hardly anything is ever true to the same degree, and so saying something is simply not true to the same degree seems oxymoronic, in that if it is not true to the same degree implies that it is somewhat true to a lesser degree.
Let me be more clear.
There is a racial component to it that the American settlers did not have.
Gandhi and the original nationalists were English barristers who spoke English, believed in English institutions, were educated in England, and saw themselves as Englishmen and loyal subjects of the King.
That is how they've always seen themselves and how the average educated Indian saw themselves.
Gandhi's experiences in South Africa made him realize that no amount of education was going to make the English treat him the same simply because his skin made him not blend in. Gandhi is not the only person to see that. Lee yuan kew thought the same.
His first reaction was thinking he should prove Indian loyalty to the crown and this would win him points.
When that didn't work, he threw away all his tailored English suits and adopted (by show... It was all show) the habits of a Hindu holy man to lead his movements.
One can debate the efficacy or whatever but there was no great resistance to English rule. Many old Indians are neutral about it. That generation is dying though and the younger ones have a mythologized past.
So yes the degrees in this situation really mattered. The American settlers were seeking to forge a new nation with new institutions. The Indian nationalists just wanted to perpetuate English ones but were unable to do so under English rule.
What you describe, and the way you describe it, reads to me like a progressive application of the Saam, Daam, Dand, Bheda principle, attributed to the late great diplomat Chanakya.
Saam: First, they tried reason.
Daam: Then they demanded a price (Salt Satyagraha to initiate the Civil Disobedience Movement).
Danda: Then they moved to reject the regime entirely (Quit India). At a time when the colonial power was literally fighting on multiple fronts, in World War Two.
Bhed: Then they helped to throw them out, and attempt to build a whole new political identity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saam_Daam_Dand_Bheda
So far the Modi clique is still in power though.
https://indianexpress.com/article/india/anantnag-terror-atta...
BBC says 3000 but yeah.
https://www.outlookindia.com/national/2-terrorists-family-ho...
So the houses of 2 accused were razed because.....
> I had a connecting flight through India
I make additional effort to never experience that again. Connecting flight through Mumbai. An absolutely awful experience.
So what happens if you have a flight that gets diverted to India and they search your bags and find a satellite phone?
Believe it or not, straight to jail.
Do you have a reputable link?
There you go : https://youtu.be/eiyfwZVAzGw
Same thing that happens whenever your flight gets diverted to South Korea and you have condoms, or Indonesia and you have legal weed, or to Australia and you have a pineapple.
Which is that it depends on the mood of the person in charge. Either you get to keep it, or it's confiscated and destroyed, or you go to jail, or you go to a firing squad.
We can guess which is more likely in each country. Indonesia almost always executes people found with drugs. Australia would probably just destroy your pineapple. India, being authoritarian but not completely insane, my guess is they'd take it and fine you.
>your flight gets diverted to South Korea and you have condoms
..what? Condoms are not outlawed there, are they?
AFAICT South Korea does not outlaw condoms. Grandparent may be thinking of North Korea. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
I was probably thinking of Romania a century ago. But you can imagine for every normal thing there is probably a country where it is banned. And South Korea is a country where some things are banned that you wouldn't expect.
Such as?
fake weapons, various medicines, e-cigarettes/vapes, wallets made from animal skins, anything deemed pornographic.
These are not as odd as satellite phones, I'd say.
No, it seems that they are banned in North Korea.
That sounds absolutely terrifying and makes me not want to travel anywhere ever again.
Welcome to the world. If someone wants to shoot you, they can just do that. If that someone is a government, they won't suffer any consequences. There have been flights deliberately diverted by the country they were traveling over because they didn't like one of the people onboard, and that person was arrested by that country upon landing. I think the USA does this most frequently but it's also happened in CIS countries and Asian countries.
I'm aware of stories of people who've had their flights unexpectedly grounded in New York (, New York) so they just abandoned their checked pistol and refused to collect it. I'd imagine something similar. If you never take possession, it becomes harder to charge and convict someone for possession.
But wouldn't they know whose bag it was anyway? And there's cameras everywhere so it wouldn't help if you e.g. removed the bag tags or discarded the contents somewhere else in the airport.
The poster you're answering to just described what happens.
Not for diversions necessarily. Diversion versus expected connection should at least help one’s lawyers… hopefully.
Lawyers can get you out of jail, but you need to be pretty rich for your lawyers to prevent going to jail in the first place.
Beat rap not ride right!
When you're standing at the customs office entering a country, your lawyers are far far FAR away and the people talking to you won't care about them even a little bit.
Whatever will happen with you lawyering and fighting the border officers, will happen after you've been detained.
If you’re flying private customs is a joke. And/or your fixer just calls the local governor/embassy/etc.
I disagree with the Modi and Hindutva project almost entirely, not only politically, but on a personal level coming from a minority community (Christian) in India. However, India is in what basically amounts to a perpetual state of war with Pakistan and has always been this way. India rarely agresses Pakistan and Pakistani terror groups do operate with seeming impunity in India (Pakistan doesn't even maintain a 'no-first-use' nuclear option, and is currently run by a military dictatorship... they're f'ing nuts). While all these actions are obviously crazy and in my opinion overbearing, people in the West don't understand how awful radical Islam is, especially of the South Asian variety. I'm not sure many Americans would react differently to the extremism of South Asian Islam to be honest.
To put it in perspective, many Indians (of all religions) died and fought in a bloody war to secure Bangladesh's (then East Pakistan's) freedom from what was a genocidal regime in West Pakistan. Decades later, the typical Bangladeshi muslim still hates Indians because any non-muslim Indian they consider 'Hindu', thus polytheist, and thus worthy of death. One thousand five hundred Indian soldiers died only for their neighbor to hate them in return for the 'crime' of not being born part of their religion. While Hindu nationalists are fucking insane, I honestly think many have been driven to it by the insanity of South Asian Islam.
Meanwhile, America has a relatively peaceful and cooperative neighbor (Mexico), which only has a crime problem on the border, and the average American seems ready to give up almost every civic right to deal with that. There are barely any terror attacks of note coming from these Mexican gangs, and congress has already ceded many constitutional rights (such as the right against unreasonable search and seizure) near the border zones. Anyway, imagine Mexicans hated everyone in America for the crime of being 'gringos' (even the non-whites) and that's basically what India has with all their neighbors.
If people in the west want India to liberalize, which we really should want to do, Western nations need to work on dismantling Pakistan and limiting Islamic extremism in the region.
Largely uncited and generalised exposition of Bangladeshi's misses other factors which could be involved in their decision towards distrust of India.
India's initial decisions need not be merely humanitarian but also political.
https://scroll.in/article/1081784/why-are-bangladeshis-turni.... This article explains that it's due to an increasingly unequal interactions as sowing distrust.
Explaining the Hindutva moment as a genuine counter reaction to anti-Hindu sentiment rather than a politically motivated movement seems to be misguided, even if not actively propogating the propaganda.
> Largely uncited and generalised exposition of Bangladeshi's misses other factors which could be involved in their decision towards distrust of India.
It's reasonable to distrust a neighboring country with distinct interest, even if they went to war for you, sure. You don't owe them anything.
Similarly, it's actually also normal for India to have concerns about illegal migration, similar to Europe, America, Australia, and Canada.
But the propaganda coming out of Bangladesh is purely religious in form, and it's pretty clear that that is the main reason why they dislike India. Pakistan literally slaughtered them and they're all bhai-bhai with them now.
The article cites the CAA as a reason for Bangladeshi distrust, except the data show that India is acting as a humanitarian in this disaster. Non-muslims are physically persecuted in both Bangladesh and Pakistan. Pakistan particularly is an apartheid state where non-Muslims have fewer political rights. Bangladesh is slightly better but violence against non-Muslims is rampant. People like to paint India as having high rates of religious violence, which is true, compared to America, but not true compared to Pakistan or Bangladesh. Pakistan regularly executes Christians for blasphemy. India doesn't. Non-Muslim refugees should qualify for extra protection from secular nations given the on-the-ground realities of South Asia. Literally the cited reason for the creation of Pakistan is that South Asian muslims constitute a distinct nation from every other religion in the subcontinent. Neither the Jews nor the Parsis nor the Christians ever made such an argument.
Well regardless, countries cannot get angry over other countries making immigration policy (and yes, this also applies to Indian migrants to America, blah blah blah)
> Explaining the Hindutva moment as a genuine counter reaction to anti-Hindu sentiment rather than a politically motivated movement seems to be misguided, even if not actively propogating the propaganda.
If you read about the history of Savarkar, then I think this is exactly what you see. He was kind of meh about everything until he witnessed anti-Hindu extremism from Muslims, and then went off his rocker. Before that, he was a relatively benign nationalist and humanitarian. Well anyway, more to the point of it really being just the Muslims, Savarkar was defended by an Indian Christian barrister.
Are you an American or South Asian, out of curiosity? I feel like Americans don't really have the ability translate South Asian politics. Not that I'm some expert, but I can report personal on-the-ground experiences.
> a relatively benign nationalist
Are you a European, out of curiosity? I feel like South Asians don’t really have the ability to translate European history. Not that I’m some expert, but we can report good on-the-ground experiences about "relatively benign nationalism" and where it leads.
Indian christian. European history and South Asian history are really quite different and don't map at all
> Neither the Jews nor the Parsis nor the Christians ever made such an argument.
The argument that Jews need their own state specifically in the area between Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria is integral to Israel’s politics and history.
This has nothing to do with India. This is an argument the British and some European states made. India iirc recognizes both Palestine and Israel and most Indians are skeptical of Zionism, including the Christians. Once again American politics don't map cleanly here.
Since some people misunderstood what I am saying: when I saw 'the jews' I am referring to Indian Jews who were mostly indifferent to the whole Zionism movement. Of course many did exercise the right to return, but mostly for economic reasons during Indias license raj. For the most part, Jews lived happily in India without any issues.
You are collapsing different propositions into one:
There is anti-Hindu persecution in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Therefore Bangladeshi distrust of India is mainly religious. Therefore Hindutva is essentially a defensive reaction rather than a political movement.
I accept the first proposition. The others do not follow from it.
Bangladesh has entirely intelligible state-to-state grievances with India, unresolved Teesta water sharing, killings at the border, Indian political rhetoric portraying Bangladeshis as demographic threats, economic asymmetry and India’s perceived support for Sheikh Hasina and none of that makes Islamist propaganda imaginary. It means your claim that religion is the main explanation requires evidence rather than assertion. AP, among others, identifies both Teesta and lethal border enforcement as serious bilateral disputes [0].
India’s enormous contribution in 1971 also does not place Bangladesh under permanent political obligation. Bangladeshis fought the liberation war and India provided strategic assistance. Countries can remain grateful for historical aid while opposing a neighbour’s present policies. And Bangladesh has hardly forgotten Pakistan’s crimes: in 2025 it was still formally demanding an apology and financial settlement from Pakistan over 1971 [1]. That is rather different from your “bhai-bhai now” potrayal.
Similarly, describing the CAA as humanitarian does not answer the objection. A true persecution-based refugee law would ask whether an applicant was persecuted. The CAA instead adds to the broader co-relation over actual criteria they need to look for and preselects six religion [2], excluding groups such as persecuted Ahmadis and non-theists. Making religion the statutory filter is the part being criticised.
The portrayal of Savarkar as a benign humanitarian who simply snapped in response to Muslim extremism is not rationalising the fact after the incident. His 1923 Hindutva formulation made India’s status as both fatherland and holy land a criterion of national belonging, thereby excluding Muslims and Christians from the Hindu nation. That is an articulated political ideology, and not a reflex to witnessing extremism.
> "A HINDU means a person who regards this land of BHARATVARSHA, from the Indus to the Seas as his Father-Land as well as his Holy-Land that is the cradle land of his religion."
> Many a Mohammedan community in Kashmir and other parts of India as well as the Christians in South India observe our caste rules to such an extent as to marry generally within the pale of their castes alone; yet, it is clear that though their original Hindu blood is thus almost unaffected by an alien adulteration, yet they cannot be called Hindus in the sense in which that term is actually understood, because, we Hindus are bound together not only by the tie of the love we bear to a common.
From: https://archive.org/stream/essentials-of-hindutva-veer-savar...
I'm not sure how Christians persecuted Sarvakar to cause him to not consider them worthy of belonging here. Although their rhetoric has indeed not been anti-Christian later given we are a minority.
> Not that I'm some expert, but I can report personal on-the-ground experiences.
Your claim that Jews “never made such an argument” makes the selectiveness more apparent. Zionism was organised as a Jewish political movement advocating a Jewish homeland and eventually a Jewish state in Palestine [3]. This does not make Zionism, Hindutva and the Muslim League identical movements, but it disproves the universal claim made. Were you to narrow it after the correction to “Jews specifically within India”, that would move the goalposts. Different minorities, occupying different demographic and political positions, unsurprisingly did not all develop identical political movements. Their differing outcomes do not prove that Muslim political mobilisation was uniquely theological while every other form of nationalism was historically intelligible. Hindu nationalism is granted an historical defence that it's adherents were provoked and driven towards it by Muslim extremism. Bangladeshi and Muslim politics, meanwhile, are stripped of political context and reduced to religion. If historical insecurity and persecution are relevant when explaining Hindutva, then border killings, water disputes, political interference and support for an authoritarian government are also relevant when explaining Bangladeshi distrust. You cannot treat context as explanatory when it excuses your side and as irrelevant when it complicates your account of the other.
Likewise, saying that Americans cannot understand Islamist extremism is rhetorical but not grounded. The United States was the target of the September 11 attacks, and the 9/11 Commission documented al-Qaeda’s development, declaration of war against the United States and execution of those attacks [4]. That does not make every American an expert on Islamism, but that is exactly the point: neither nationality nor proximity automatically establishes expertise. Asking where someone comes from rather than answering their evidence is a genetic fallacy, evaluating a claim through its origin instead of its reasoning. The special pleading lies in treating your own South Asian identity as evidence while treating somebody else’s identity as grounds for disqualification.
So asking whether someone is American, South Asian or Indian Christian does not resolve anything. A person outside India can misunderstand India, and a person within India can be misinformed about it. The relevant question is still whether the account is supported by evidence. Personal experience may provide useful evidence, but it cannot substitute for demonstrating causation. “I have been there” is not evidence that every Bangladeshi grievance is secretly religious.
Your appeal to on-the-ground experience is also less helpful than you suggest. The student protests in India provide a fairly direct example. Indian television did not report the same events from a same point, a review found that Republic, News18, ABP and DD News largely changed the protesters’ actual demands with narratives about conspiracies, Pakistan, Nepal and national security, while police violence against protesters nearly disappeared from their coverage [5] while AP seemed to have a much coverage of the police violence, and the HRW [6], [7].
[0]: https://apnews.com/article/india-bangladesh-energy-developme... [1]: https://apnews.com/article/bangladesh-pakistan-relations-has... [2]: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2019/12/press-... [3]: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/postwar-re... [4]: https://www.9-11commission.gov/report/ [5]: https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/07/21/nepal-reference-pak-l... [6]: https://apnews.com/article/india-cockroach-protests-memes-sa... [7]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/07/23/india-excessive-force-us...
The UN declaration is retarded because Indian law is not and has never been neutral to religion. If you believe it should be, then you are on the side of the BJP. This is why such things cannot be reduced so simply to American biased left right ideals.
South Asian Muslims often want it both ways. When India got rid of triple talaaq divorce, south Asian Muslims at my American college demanded a protest to criticize Indias supposed religious discrimination. Meanwhile, you act as if Bangladesh has not given India and Indians reasons to dislike it
This is the problem with discourse about India. The expectation is always that India needs to change and it's neighbor's behavior, regardless of how unhinged, is just seen as a simple matter of unchangeable fact.
> Your claim that Jews “never made such an argument” makes the selectiveness more apparen
You took no time to read or understand what I said and instead assumed I was talking about European Jews. I am not
I am talking about Indian Jews. In that sentence about neither Christians nor Jews nor parsis not sikhs nor jains claiming to be separate nations, I was referring to Indian christians, Indian Jews, Indian parsis, Indian sikhs and Indian jains.
None of these religious groups claimed they were not part of the cultural nation of India. No one made arguments like Jinnah who claimed that Indian Muslims and everyone else (who he called Hindus.. he called all non Muslims Hindus) constituted two distinct nations.
Not everything is about Europeans and European Jews. India has its own Jews. While some were sympathetic to Zionism, most were integrated into Indian society writ large and many participated in the independence movement for India.
> saying that Americans cannot understand Islamist extremism
These sorts of things (terror attacks) are of course awful, but in India it's a different story. Firstly there's just more, and more fooled plots. But more than that, it's the aggressive nature of the religion. It's the loud calls to prayer, the public street takeovers, the slaughter of animals in the streets full of blood, etc (much of which is banned in Muslim countries) that annoy the hell out of people.
Up until recently Muslims could claim any piece of private land and then privately judge whether such a claim had legal merit. Landowners were left without any possibility of appeal. Imagine such a thing in america, lol.
American communities that have seen large influxes of Muslims smaller than the population of Muslims in India by a lot have lodged similar complaints. I mean, when the government tries to stop the streets from being filled with lambs blood, Indian Muslims complain that it's discrimination. Americans would quickly become radicalized if that happened in an American city.
Europe is a great example. The Muslim population of Europe is miniscule but Europeans are even more vitriolic against them than Indians. And even European liberal parties have seen the issues. Of course it's only when India takes actions against this that claims of islamophobia arise. When macron bans the burqa, people default to it being for cultural preservation and safety.
PART 2:
> When Macron bans the burqa, people default to it being for cultural preservation and safety.
Macron did not introduce France’s public face-covering ban because the law was enacted in October 2010 [8]. Macron became president in 2017 [9]. It is formally a general prohibition on concealing the face in public, rather than a law that names only Muslim clothing, and the same legislation separately punishes forcing someone to conceal her face [8]. There can obviously be secular grounds for restricting face coverings in particular situations. Identity checks, examinations, courtrooms, secure buildings and circumstances in which someone is being coerced are all reasonable subjects for regulation. If a woman is being forced to wear a burqa or niqab, then punishing the coercer is entirely defensible.
But that does not make every general prohibition unquestionably secular or liberal. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the French law [10], while the UN Human Rights Committee later found that France violated the religious freedom of two women whom it fined for wearing the niqab [11]. The Netherlands has a partial prohibition applying to public transport and government, healthcare and educational premises rather than an unrestricted ban in every public place [12].
European states therefore do not have one obvious consensus under which all burqa restrictions are merely neutral safety measures. Different countries regulate them differently, and major human-rights institutions have disagreed about the limits. You can defend a restriction on secular grounds, especially where identification or coercion is involved, without pretending that every restriction proves Europe has correctly diagnosed the nature of Islam.
> Europe is a great example. The Muslim population of Europe is miniscule but Europeans are even more vitriolic against them than Indians.
The fact that Europeans complain about Muslims does not prove every complaint is true, much less that the cause must be the "aggressive nature" of Islam. That is circular, Muslims are supposedly aggressive because people dislike them, and people’s dislike is then justified because Muslims are supposedly aggressive. Hostility towards a group cannot itself be used as proof that the group deserves hostility. Europe also involves a very different political question. A large part of its debate concerns recent migration, asylum and integration. Indian Muslims are not recently arrived foreigners asking a host population to tolerate them. They are citizens from communities that have lived in the subcontinent for centuries. Millions remained in India after Partition and had to define their citizenship and belonging within the Indian republic [14].
Immigration policy concerns who may enter and settle in a country. Constitutional equality concerns how a country treats citizens who already belong to it. Conflating the two rhetorically turns Indian Muslims into permanent immigrants whose rights depend on whether the majority presently finds their behaviour agreeable.
> When the government tries to stop the streets from being filled with lambs blood, Indian Muslims complain that it’s discrimination.
Slaughtering animals in public streets can be restricted on grounds of sanitation, or obstruction of public space. India’s prevention of cruelty to animals rules state that, within municipal areas, animals generally may not be slaughtered except in recognised or licensed slaughterhouses and set requirements involving veterinary examination, drainage and the collection of blood [15]. Apply those rules. I have no objection to that. But apply them as rules governing slaughter, sanitation and public space, not as evidence that one religion has an inherently aggressive nature.
United States federal law expressly recognises slaughter performed according to Jewish or other religious ritual requirements as a legally humane method [16]. European Union law permits a religious rites exception from prior stunning requirements when the slaughter occurs in a slaughterhouse [17]. The British government publishes instructions for legally conducting halal and kosher slaughter without prior stunning [18].
And is animal sacrifice uniquely Muslim. Goats are sacrificed daily to Kali at Kalighat, and the Indian legal dispute there has included whether the practice should be prohibited, regulated or concealed from public view [19]. I am not arguing that Hinduism is therefore an aggressive religion, that inference would be as irrelevant as the one you are making about Islam. It shows that slaughter can exist within more than one religious tradition and can be regulated through neutral public health law, and maybe animal welfare. Practices change when institutions, and culture change and if public slaughter creates a health problem, regulate public slaughter. There is no need to transform a solvable civic problem into a theory about the unchangable nature of millions.
The same applies to loudspeakers and the occupation of roads. Impose neutral limits on noise, hours, sanitation and obstruction, and apply them to mosques, temples, churches, political rallies, wedding processions and every other group. Article 25 itself subjects religious practice to public order, morality and health and allows the regulation of secular activity associated with religion [1]. What is not neutral is treating a Muslim violation as evidence about Islam’s aggressive essence while treating similar majority practices as ordinary Indian culture. India has no shortage of temple loudspeakers, processions, road occupations, public animal sacrifice or politically protected religious gatherings.
This is the same special pleading that existed in your previous response. Hindutva is granted history, fear, political incentives, trauma and provocation. Muslim conduct is reduced to “the aggressive nature of the religion”. Indian Jews are treated as comparable to a population thousands of times larger when that helps your argument, while their mass migration to Israel is ignored. Your experiences at an American college become evidence about Indian Muslims, while sourced descriptions of Indian politics are dismissed as Western misunderstanding.
And after all of this, you still do not answer the original causal claim. None of the material about triple talaq, Waqf property, burqas, loudspeakers or animal slaughter establishes that Bangladeshi distrust of India is mainly religious. None of it converts Savarkar’s articulated political ideology into a merely defensive reflex. It is a collection of grievances about Muslims being used to avoid defending the propositions that were actually challenged.
[8]: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000022911670 [9]: https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron [10]: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=002-9952 [11]: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2018/10/france-banni... [12]: https://www.government.nl/faq/ban-on-face-coverings/what-doe... [13]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow... [14]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/muslim-belonging-in-sec... [15]: https://www.dahd.gov.in/sites/default/files/2026-05/SLAUGHTE... [16]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/7/1902 [17]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2009/1099/oj/eng [18]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/halal-and-kosher-slaughter [19]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-and-r...
PART 1:
Most of this does not answer what I wrote. You do not address Teesta, border killings, India’s support for Sheikh Hasina, the CAA’s religious filter, or the fact that Savarkar explicitly excluded both Muslims and Christians from his conception of the Hindu nation. Instead, you move to the UCC, some students at your American college, Waqf property, burqas, loudspeakers and animal slaughter.
> The UN declaration is retarded because Indian law is not and has never been neutral to religion. If you believe it should be, then you are on the side of the BJP.
The fact that Indian personal law has historically not been religion neutral is not an argument against making it more neutral. It also does not follow that anyone who supports religion neutral law must support the BJP. Equality before the law, prohibition of religious discrimination, freedom of religion and the aspiration towards a uniform civil code all exist together in Articles 14, 15, 25 and 44 of the Constitution [1]. The BJP does not own the concept of equal law merely because it invokes it selectively.
I have no issue saying that instantaneous triple talaq should not have legal effect. That is separate from supporting every provision of the BJP’s legislation. The 2019 act does not declare triple talaq void but also it makes pronouncing an already legally ineffective divorce a criminal offence punishable by up to three years in prison [2]. Someone can support getting rid of triple talaq while questioning why an ineffective utterance requires that particular criminal penalty. Presenting the only options as either supporting the BJP’s complete policy or supporting discrimination against Muslim women is a false dichotomy.
> South Asian Muslims often want it both ways. When India got rid of triple talaq divorce, South Asian Muslims at my American college demanded a protest.
You are at an American college reporting what some South Asian Muslim students supposedly said. I am at an Indian college and do not see Muslims behaving in the way you keep describing. Neither experience proves much. My experience cannot establish that no Indian Muslim behaves this way, and your experience cannot establish that South Asian Muslims generally behave this way. You are repeatedly moving from some people you met, to South Asian Muslims, to Indian Muslims, and then to the inherent character of Islam. One campus anecdote should not carry that much weight.
> You took no time to read or understand what I said and instead assumed I was talking about European Jews. I am not. I am talking about Indian Jews.
Your clarification narrows the claim, but also makes the comparison nearly meaningless. There were only 22,480 Jews in India in 1941 [3]. They were an extremely small and geographically scattered minority. They could not reasonably demand a Jewish territorial state carved out of India in the manner that a community numbering tens of millions and concentrated across entire provinces could. Their failure to demand an Indian partition does not prove that they possessed some fundamentally different religious or moral character. It largely proves that no such political project was demographically possible.
Indian Jews also did exactly the broader thing you were presenting Jews as having rejected. After Israel was established, most Bene Israel emigrated there. The Hebrew University estimates that there are now around 80,000 Bene Israel in Israel and only about 3,000 in India [4]. This was large-scale migration by Indian Jews to a Jewish nation-state.
That does not make Indian Jews disloyal, nor does it make their migration identical to Jinnah demanding that India be divided. It does, however, destroy the idea that Indian Jewish integration proves Jews had no interest in religiously framed national self determination. They could be integrated into India and still migrate to Israel when a Jewish state became available. Both things can be true.
So the comparison fails in both directions. They were far too small to demand a viable Jewish state inside India, but when a Jewish state existed elsewhere, most of the community migrated to it. You cannot use them as a control group proving that Muslims uniquely politicised religion.
You have also basically stopped defending what you initially said about Savarkar. Your original description was that he had been a relatively benign nationalist and humanitarian until Muslim extremism caused him to snap. I then quoted his own definition of Hindutva, under which India must be both a person’s fatherland and holy land, and the passage in which he explicitly explains why Christians and Muslims are not Hindus in the relevant national sense [5].
Muslim violence does not explain his exclusion of Christians. Christians did not collectively persecute Savarkar into declaring them outside his cultural nation. Your answer that later Hindu nationalist rhetoric was not especially anti-Christian because Christians are a small minority does not defend his ideology either. If anything, it concedes that the groups emphasised by the movement depend upon political usefulness and demographic threat rather than some neutral humanitarian reaction.
You initially gave a psychological account of Savarkar as a humanist driven into extremism by what he witnessed. When confronted with what he actually wrote, you did not explain it. You simply moved to other subjects. The quote still stands, this was a worked out political definition of national belonging that explicitly distinguished Hindus from Muslims and Christians.
> Up until recently Muslims could claim any piece of private land and then privately judge whether such a claim had legal merit. Landowners were left without any possibility of appeal. Imagine such a thing in America, lol.
This is not an accurate description of the old Waqf Act. An individual Muslim could not simply point to someone’s house, privately declare it Waqf and award it to himself. Former Section 40 allowed the statutory Waqf Board to collect information about property it had reason to believe was Waqf property and decide the question after an inquiry [6].
There was a valid criticism here, the board was an interested administrative body being allowed to make the initial determination. I do not need to pretend that was a good arrangement. But the act expressly stated that the Board’s decision was final only unless it was revoked or modified by the Waqf tribunal. The tribunal had the powers of a civil court. Although the act excluded an ordinary appeal from the tribunal, Section 83(9) allowed an aggrieved person to ask the High Court to examine the record and confirm, reverse or modify the tribunal’s determination [6].
"No ordinary appeal" and "no legal remedy whatsoever" are not the same statement. Your quote removes the regulatory bodies like the tribunal and High Court revision, and replaces all of them with "Muslims could claim anything and privately judge it themselves". That is far more rhetorically useful, but it is not what the statute said.
America also does have a proecudre in the same broad family, called adverse possession, where a person possessing somebody else’s land can eventually acquire legal title without the original owner’s consent if state-specific conditions are met which has to be hostile, open and continuous for the statutory period [7].
Adverse possession is not identical to the old Waqf process and requires physical possession over a long period and eventual legal proof, it is not a religious board making an initial property classification. But that is precisely why the careful comparison matters. "Imagine a legal mechanism by which somebody can obtain title to another person’s property in America, lol" is not a devastating point you think it is, because America has one, the procedures and justifications are different, which is what should actually be debated.
[1]: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/19150/1/con... [2]: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/11564/1/a20... [3]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4464913 [4]: https://cris.huji.ac.il/en/publications/the-bene-israel/ [5]: https://archive.org/stream/essentials-of-hindutva-veer-savar... [6]: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/15941/1/the... [7]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adverse_possession
>people in the West don't understand how awful radical Islam is
Do you remember that time two dozen or so years ago when a couple buildings collapsed in NYC? After some planes rammed into them?
And that is relatively benign compared to the constant barrage of foiled or successful terror attacks that India faces. Also, no one really cared when America went forward with a giant war of aggression against those people America labeled possible perpetrators
I find it telling you blame India's lack of modernization on Pakistan. A reflection of the times.
Maybe dismantle the caste system first. You need a civil rights movement.
This is India's biggest hurdle but it seems too ingrained in the society. All peoples should have the same opportunity, but the structure of power in India likes the way things are.
Next work on how you treat women.
Hmm... I said nothing of modernization; I was talking about Indias police state tendencies. These are orthogonal issues. Indians lack of economic development is due to severely lacking general government funded education and over regulation.
As countries such as Norway and China show, you can have development with or without a police state. The issues have nothing to do with each other
> India is in what basically amounts to a perpetual state of war with Pakistan and has always been this way.
You mean, since India and Pakistan were invented 79 years ago?
I wonder what is it with this denial of the existence of India prior to 1947. If people were specific and said that they were referring to the Republic of India as the successor state to British-controlled India, then it would at least make some sense. Otherwise it sounds completely insane.
If India was invented 79 years ago, then you need to explain the various East India companies established in the 1600s, and all the references to India and the Indians by the Romans and the Greeks and the Persians and the Chinese before the Abrahamization of Europe. Europeans were literally looking for ways to India and ran into the West Indies and North America by accident.
There was no unified political entity prior to 1947---technically, 26 January 1950---because it took that long for Sardal Patel's program of political unification of sovereign princely states to conclude, so that the now-unified political entity would govern itself under common constitutional, and common law, with democratic universal franchise.
The East India Company, and then the British Raj, held power because they were able to broker deals with opposing (and warring) princely states and kingdoms. They used contractual leverage to make those sub-sub-regions keep each other in check.
The British Raj was a kingdom of kingdoms, in addition to being a protectorate. These are literal legal facts [0].
The word Hindu is literally an exonym. A name given to a people by foreigners. Our very collective identity was conferred upon us by outsiders.
[0] Obligatory Wikipedia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#British_India_and_...
In its Interpretation Act 1889, the British Parliament adopted the following definitions in Section 18:
Who agreed to the legal terms? The rulers of the sovereign princely states and kingdoms.> There was no unified political entity prior to 1947
There have been many (empires, not modern, Westphalian nation-states), but the British managed to create the largest yet. Pakistan was carved out of British India on Muslim and non-Muslim lines.
> Who agreed to the legal terms? The rulers of the sovereign princely states and kingdoms.
Sovereign in name, but vassals nonetheless.
> Our very collective identity was conferred upon us by outsiders.
It is a name, not an identity. This is like saying the Indians conferred upon the Chinese their identity because the word cīna is of Sanskrit origin and the world calls the Chinese ... Chinese ... due to that.
I'm sorry what, Hindu is not an identity?
It is a name. The identity comes from the rituals, beliefs, clothing, literature, temples, architecture, food and so many other cultural and civilizational markers.
Pakistanis who were looking for their fathers in Arabia, Persia and Turkey in the past based upon a deliberate avoidance of their Indic origin have recently started a political project to reclaim their identity based upon the IVC. They can try all they want but civilizational continuity is the only thing that matters. Names are dime a dozen. If you have a problem with Hindu/India and other exonyms, you could always call yourself Bhāratīya or some such. It is all the same.
Honestly not really. Hindu was the widely used demonym to refer to any Indian before Hindu nationalists decided to turn it into a religious designation. To be a follower of the Hindu religion meant that you followed some set of practices that originated in India. There was no requirement that they be the same standard set.
Modern day Hinduism is a post-hoc reconstruction. That's not to say Indian religious beliefs and doctrines don't exist -- they do. There are just a wide variety of them and they deserve their own mentions.
The idea of a Westphalian nation state is foreign to South Asia until 1947. Before that there was your local patil and whatever clan you belonged to. Even Indian princely states had no clean separation before the British insisted on clean borders.
You're applying modern standards to a time and place where they would have been incomprehensible
Yes. Since these two nations came into being they have been in what is basically a state of war. That is what perpetual means.
its amazing you are actually getting downvoted for speaking facts
I upvoted that comment because it's obvious tin foil hat "oooh look at the boogeyman" speech. That fact along with its critique contributes to the discourse on HN.
I merely pointed out that India's banning of satellite communications is a mirror to the American response to 9/11 except that India faces more 9/11 like situations on a regular basis. This is hardly some boogeyman. Most countries predictably start clamping down on free speech when they feel threatened. Not sure what conspiracy you're trying to foist on me, but I assure you it's not there. I myself am pretty much a free speech absolutist.
we have more attacks in 1 year than they have in 10
And like clockwork, a single terror attack in Berlin and you'll find redditors from western countries calling for solutions much worse than anything india has ever proposed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1v6k8vq/several_injur...
I don't trust the Modi clique one second.
An important context is, there is a large scale non-violent protest and a Gandhian fast lead by Sonam Wangchuk. https://x.com/Wangchuk66/status/2080471599237702014
Indian Government is struggling to address this issue at face. PM Modi hasn't responded to this in public. To address this, Government is taking into all sort of measures like blocking public communication and social media. Like they have done for other measures like for terrorism , control and govt lead propaganda to control the narrative.
It is interesting that they tried to do this app with a _miniscule_ usage. Usage might be so small, that they could have bothered less about it.
But since they did it, Jack Dorsey is now using his clout to share about this app and bring some light on the situation. With what we have seen with Twitter/X and not-standing up to Elon, let's just remember that Dorsey isn't champion of free speech either.
> Jack Dorsey is now using his clout to share about this app and bring some light on the situation
Failed attempts at censorship are the best thing that could ever happen to Bitchat: free advertising for a vibcoded and questionably secure entry in a space with plenty of competitors. As others have commented it's basically impossible to shut down an open source app by blocking the source distributor, but press is priceless.
I played around with Briar [1] for a while: it worked well, and had an option to install peer-to-peer without going through any app store, was sad to see that the authors put it in maintenance mode. It also had a security audit.
[1]: https://briarproject.org/
To avoid a potential misunderstanding, the maintenance mode is intended to continue indefinitely. Briar project is not shutting down.
* https://briarproject.org/news/2026-maintenance-mode/
This was a legit case for the students, who suffered the most here. Better systems need to exist, including parametric computer testing and same day results - thereby making re-examinations simpler for the affected students.
I am also aware of the attempts to bring down NEET here, which I feel isn't given the right amount of scrutiny, and showing the cracks in the system. Exam leaks have been happening in India for a long time, and it looks like better systems need to exist for preventing this.
As far as censorship goes, many people should start making SDR based chat systems for long distance relays as well ... they can make this easily today
India is kind of cute.
In the late 90s I attended a Telephone industry conference while working for a telephony test equipment company. A rep. from the Indian government gave a talk on their telephone system regulations. During the question period I got up and asked how India was dealing with voice over internet protocol (VOIP). With a straight face the speaker replied "We will not allow it". :-)
And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.
This stuff happens in many places, including in India.
>And it's also cute when people imply the internet is unregulateable. There are plenty of tools that countries use to regulate internet traffic. They can require ISPs to DPI the traffic and block it. They can MITM traffic. They can shut off the internet entirely. They can throw people in jail. etc.
I don't think there's any country that can keep a lid on the internet. The best they can do are leaky blocks (china's gfw is probably the best in the world, but still quite leaky), or complete shutdowns (eg. iran).
As I understand it, China's GFW is intentionally leaky, balancing as much control as they can get away with but not enough to forment open revolt. As with a lot of things, the best control is not total control.
Also not revealing their capabilities. During normal times, some VPNs work. Whenever there is a protest in Beijing, suddenly, none of them work any more.
except this implies total control, and a willingness to use that control to gaslight your citizens into believing they have some control
Neither of those is a problem for any government on the planet, I promise.
They could even just shoot people for using the internet! It’s hopeless. Anyone who wants freedom should probably just give up now before it’s too late.
I'm not suggesting people should give up, I'm suggesting that some countries can resort to doing very uncute things when faced with noncompliance.
When someone with the monopoly on the use of force says they will not allow something, that isn't something cute to ignore, it is serious.
Fair enough, yes people should be ready to fight for their rights (physically if necessary). The tone of your post came across as an attempt to demoralize. Intentional or not, my comment was a pushback against that.
Reminds me of FSF versus some Uyghur. Summary:
FSF: if you use PGP your communications will be unreadable by outsiders.
Some Uyghur: bruh, the government assigned a Han Chinese person to live in my house and watch me whenever I use technology.
There are workarounds for all of those things up until the point of you suffering violence for just using any encryption. But if you are at that point, then your country is completely fucked.
It is trivial for a law to simply ban workarounds. The vast majority of countries can and do censor the internet in some ways, and they all use violence to compel compliance with it. The only thing that varies is the extent to which it is censored.
Then the question gets much more political: how to make the government prefer not to shoot me for using encryption? There are some strategies that are better discussed with e.g. communists than with tech nerds, as they have more experience and thinking on this as it becomes primarily a political thing not a tech thing.
One example - the government would lose infinite respect if it martyrs some normal guy who bought business supplies with foreign (TLS-encrypted) online banking. So it won't do that. So how far can that line be pushed? i.e. what is the least normal thing the government won't punish?
That's funny considering the scale of WhatsApp now in the country.
As I understand it's primarily an anti spam thing. They will allow apps to spam you but the telephone network is sacred.
Reminds me of Elon's answer to the question of what various countries can do about StarLink: "They can shake their fists at the sky."
India's solution is that they put anyone who has a starlink ground station in jail.
Starlink can be jammed.
Jamming can be defeated quite funnily, by digging a pit and putting the antenna at the bottom of it.
Thanks for sharing, very interesting: https://www.technology.org/2023/08/01/did-russia-learn-to-ja...
Why do you think China is putting lots of satellites into space.... All those tons into orbit isn't for the lolz.
That stops working when the jamming is coming from a hostile satellite that's also in the sky.
Or fly a plane or drone overhead and see [0] where the terminals are. After a few fines most people would decide it’s not worth the risk.
I remember how the Uber rollout worked in Berlin. Uber said they don’t need to comply with anything the city asked for and enjoyed their position in the safety of an ocean away so the local authorities instituted eye watering fines for drivers caught providing Uber rides. Uber decided to comply.
[0] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/quadrf-can-spot-drone...
Depends on how many terminals there are and whether or not the neighborhoods they are in are sympathetic to the operators. It’s very easy to move them.
Resistance against totalitarianism is a duty.
I wasn’t thinking of totalitarianism but rather a country objecting to Starlink operating on its territory. This is why I brought up Berlin and fines, not the secret police breaking in your house at night.
After living under one of those totalitarian regimes, all Incan say is that everything sounds easy in an HN comment typed from the safety of a democratic society.
National firewalls and other such things are tools of totalitarianism. Except possibly in wartime, or if they are causing harmful interference, or if Starlink refuses to pay taxes, I don’t really see a good argument against things like Starlink.
Or if the country already operates another system on the same frequencies, or just hasn’t validated and authorized Starlink on their territory, something countries really like to do.
Not everything is about “fighting the power”, there are plenty of good reasons to want to validate and approve these systems.
Musk was as usual likes to talk big and brave but same as with his fight in Brazil over X, or the Tesla factory in Germany, if he wants to operate there he needs to follow the rules. And there’s no moral argument (saving freedom) he can pull out of his wig in most parts of the world that can make him money.
I can see how that worked in Berlin. In USA or someplace with a healthier culture of resistance that would fail laughably. Americans will drive with no license, registration, in cars they've stolen back from the repo man because they refuse to pay anything to anyone. When my car was totalled by an illegal alien, the police didn't even show up, wisely because they were surely driving without license, identity documents, insurance, registration, or any sort of recoverable assets or any way to punish them but to throw them in an overflowing jail. You could try fining them but it would be like trying to draw blood from a stone. I suppose could try to jail them, but you'd find our jails are already full, and we already let violent criminals out on bail.
In much of the world including USA poor people will slang crack for $5 under threat of life in jail and fines higher than they could ever hope to pay. Suffice to say there's an endless line of people willing to uber for roughly crack slinging wages without the risk of life imprisonment even if the fines are as bad -- because their alternatives are worse.
Albania and Georgia have much healthier culture of resistance than the US.
The US has almost entirely lost this culture except for short moments in isolated places. Minneapolis is nearly a proof by exception in this. Very, very few people need to be detained or killed to get the mass of Americans to stay inside and self-censor. Much less is required to get businesses to put their head down and play nice with the government.
FR lol, people in the US love to talk a big game but most of us take the freedoms for granted and will fold at the drop of a hat when real consequences are on the line
Let American police crush any car violating traffic rules into a cube, and then see how quickly people obey traffic laws.
I think you wanted the opportunity to beat that “healthy culture of resistance” drum. Every tweaker, every inbred, every starved person acting out of desperation is Rosa Parks now.
You name things and decide that‘s “resistance”. People break the law because there’s no real consequence or because they just have nothing to lose. They’re not “resisting”, they’re surviving. The US society decided that a large class of people will be forced to operate at that level their whole life and are incentivized to do worse by the insane punishment model applied only to them.
The only people doing the “resisting” in the US are those who can afford a good lawyer. Everyone else does what the cracks in the system allow, or what they need to do out of desperation.
No German Uber driver is desperate enough to risk their whole livelihood especially for that meager payoff. Most civilized countries make sure that people have something to lose which will keep people acting straight rather than always act on desperation. Depending on your goal, having people exercise self restraint works better than restraining them with tasers, chokeholds, and bullets to the back.
> because their alternatives are worse.
Ah, ok. So not “a healthy culture of resistance” but more “desperation because the country made sure that’s driving them”.
>Ah, ok. So not “a healthy culture of resistance” but more “desperation because the country made sure that’s driving them”.
This is logical fallacy, but you've tried hard to pull a gotcha out of it.
Resisting because you are desperate is perfectly valid and doesn't create a contradiction.
It's not something reserved to "those who can afford a good lawyer." Desperation is one of the hardest drivers of resistance, not something reserved to rich people with lawyers and something to lose. And even if we suppose there's not resistance in USA, I said in USA or someplace with a healthier culture of resistance, which means even if you don't consider USA a place of resistance it still meets the logical test of falling within my statement.
>[now deleted] If you hear this for the first time, hello white male with plenty of money for a lawyer.
Lol you couldn't resist adding that in. Your little racially charged bits about why we're not allowed to call it resistance when a poor black person does such acts. While ignoring your very example of Rosa Parks who was a black woman, child of a teacher and itinerant worker and before activism working largely in domestic work for white families. The contradiction is yours.
Resistance is a choice. “No other choice” is just surviving. The gotcha was already in the fact that you started by proudly waving a flag of “healthy culture of resistance” and immediately switched to desperate people having no other options. The healthy culture of resistance as you see it is made of the most desperate and dilapidated people doing desperate things.
My “very example” about which you are now quoting Wikipedia to me was resistance, not desperation. It wasn't a tweaker selling $5 crack because he literally has nothing better to look forward to. It wasn’t a mother driving without a license because she couldn’t afford the court taxes for a few traffic tickets. It was a woman who did it out of principle alone. That’s resistance, and it’s rare. Your speech fell on its face as soon as you had your big boy proud moment because you’re missing something important to back it up [0]. You were never taught enough pst that proud song and dance.
If you thought calling you privileged for your dissonant and ignorant line of argumentation is racist then let me add not educated enough[0] too. Read a book to understand these concepts, don’t expect you can just throw words around and people will bow to your wisdom. You make it impossible for me to take you seriously when you make junior level confusions like “resistance” and “desperation” all for a shitty national pride moment.
Your rebuttal rests upon a logical fallacy of false mutual exclusion that one cannot exercise resistance as a means of survival. You believe resistance comes from rich white people with lawyers; I believe it largely comes from the hungry and those with no other choice. The truth is it comes from a bit of both.
It would be easier to shoot it out of the sky than try and jam a whole country from starlink
Might be easier to jam the uplink. Just modify some starlink units to transmit nonsense and place them around the country.
Putting aside the geopolitics of satellite destruction, we're likely moving to the realm of microwave based disablement instead of kinetic. It's the thing that can scale and provide some plausible deniability while the numbers are low.
That is still the case. I looked up this law. It is strictly forbidden to ever connect the POTS network to an IP network. End of story.
Lots of countries ban voip in some way or another. Not allowed to connect to the PSTN. Disrupted by licensed ISPs based on traffic inspection. Large vendors yelled at. Etc.
isn't phone tech itself digital over the internet nowadays just like VOIP if it isn't using VOIP directly?
on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
Yes, but PSTN using voip is paying all the telecom fees and taxes and respecting the government surveillance mandates which is what the Indian Government is concerned about.
> on the other phone calls are getting replaced by video chat with the various messengers, making VOIP a dying technology, at least the part that end users access directly.
Not so much in countries where it's banned and the ban is enforced.
It's not the tech they care about, it's the network structure.
sure, but i as a user care about the tech, and what i am trying to say is that VOIP as tech for endusers is no longer interesting because we use video chat now.
Not on the PSTN you don't. The PSTN is a parallel internet whose main difference is that you need a verified identity to connect to it. It also simulates circuit switching and costs a lot.
i don't get your point. that does not matter. what i mean is that as a user i care about the tech that runs on my phone, not how the connection is made. i don't make phone calls anymore. nowadays everything is done with video chat. neither PSTN nor VOIP offer that, so their use will eventually decline unless they start offering video. phone numbers are also a privacy nightmare. they need to be replaced with something that allows me to pre-authorize who can call me. this is unlikely to happen any time soon, but the point is that VOIP in particular is hardly relevant except in a few specific use cases.
What do you use - WhatsApp? That's VOIP.
that depends on how you define VOIP. strictly going by the term any voice sent over the internet is VOIP. but since PSTN can be routed over the internet too, that would be included as well. but i am talking about the system that uses a standardized protocol over a federated network with a VOIP or SIP client with a public address that allows you to reach any other public address on the internet, just like email.
whatsapp is a private network, not federated and only works with a whatsapp owned client. to qualify i would have to be able to call someone on whatsapp with a generic VOIP client.
this is comparable to googles text messaging system that is built on xmpp. it used to be possible that i could use any xmpp client on any xmpp server to reach people on google. at that point google was xmpp. but when they removed public access it stopped being standard xmpp but became a custom fork of it.
VOIP is any voice sent over IP. It can be the internet or the PSTN. I assume India doesn't forbid telcos using IP internally, because they surely do that because TDM switches are obsolete technology, but they Shall Not Connect to a public IP network.
so when india is talking about banning VOIP they can not mean any voice sent over IP, which makes that distinction matter.
voip is pretty effectively banned, or at least marginalized, in the USA. Can't use a Google Voice number for most payment services, for example.
Does jmp.chat work?
Title should specify that it is Indian government. I was worried for a second there that it was the American government. I should have read the url though.
> I was worried for a second there that it was the American government.
Midterms are coming up and the regime has spoken openly about "rigging" them so... just give it some time (and download a copy!).
I get it but you shouldn’t assume everything is about the USA. YC may be based here but it’s a big world out there.
I was fully expecting that was about Trump administration, and was a bit disappointed that my prediction turned out to be wrong. I do not support this; I expected the first federal court and then all the appeals to serve a verdict cementing the right of encrypted communication to exist in the US.
Be careful what you wish for. Bringing a test case to the current supreme court is playing with fire, and we are far more likely to end up with precedent rejecting a right to encrypted communications, given the current make up of the court. They have already shown a willingness to show deference to national security, and our fifth amendment protections are already eroding (State v. Andrews in NJ, government can compel the production of a password under the foregone conclusion exception). For now this is still state dependent, but its only a matter of time before a case reaches the supreme court.
We're much safer not opening that can of worms for now.
At least then we'd have hard proof of what kind of country the USA is.
You’ve got mountains of proof at this point. Recent Supreme Court rulings on presidential immunity should be enough.
Not everyone believes it, because it's too complicated for them to understand.
But how far are they from such a headline do you think?
Something like this would be basically impossible in the US, and it wouldn't even matter what kind of administration tried it. The US government doesn't even order ISPs to block websites because they run afoul of all kinds of 1st amendment litigation. They just have the FBI seize a domain after a court order.
Honestly I would think something like this would come from the EU or UK. UK is trying to ban VPNs, EU is trying to ban private chat completely. EU countries routinely block whole swaths of IPs and websites, etc.
The UK for now have given up on trying to ban vpns
'This is the right call' — VPN industry praises the UK’s decisions to leave VPN alone | TechRadar https://share.google/CyBImh95bt3VTubJV
Oh boy , this is American exceptionalism at its finest. The US has by far the most authoritarian government of all mentioned entities. Really you should protest against your government.
What a mix!
Yes, it is American exceptionalism (and quite foolish) to make the claim that "This could never happen in the US".
No, the American government is NOT more authoritative than the UK in the way they handle freedom of websites. The grandparent comment is correct: the US government does not (currently) order ISPs to block specific websites.
Yes, those in the US should protest the current government (many of us already are doing so).
I think maybe there is more than one way to quantify authoritative.
Just looking at the percentage of the population in prison, or murders by cop per inhabitant, that are also good indicators of "repression", and the US might rate first worldwide.
First worldwide? Are you on crack? Are you familiar with the country called North Korea? Or Saudi Arabia?
As a note, I think you meant authoritarian; authoritative means “preeminent/most trustworthy”
I thought the USA have more murders by cop per capita than both of those
The American government censored a Dutch porn site (Motherless) just last week.
Sorry OPs first sentence mentions this is basically impossible in the US and then compared to EU or UK. There is a certain tone and I don't think this comment was a good faith criticism on EU or UK policy
How many people has the US sent to jail due to saying naughty things on Twitter vs the UK? If were going to speak of authoritarianism. Just due to ensuring free speech and right to bear arms the US is possibly the least authoritarian developed nation outside of maybe Switzerland.
This is 100% not true. On multiple measures of freedom the US scores around the 75th percentile if I remember correctly; I believe the category is something like “flawed democracy” on the economist’s democracy index, and that’s not even an publication that I particularly like. It’s not even in the top 30.
The US government killed two people protesting against their migration policy. Oh boy, MAGA is deep into America. Thanks for reminding me.
Alex Pretti would like a word.
Henry Nowak would as well.
Most europeans love their chains, they call it freedom as a coping mechanism
say what you like but at least in Germany when you say free Palestine, they bring you to a court instead of a summary execution
Will there be a headline?
Few months.
If Modi government wants to ban something, it is usually good stuff.
> “The application’s design, which enables communication even during network restrictions, creates a substantial risk of misuse by anti-national elements, terrorist organisations, organised criminal groups, and cybercriminals seeking to evade lawful detection and continue communication despite legally imposed restrictions,” the notice mentioned.
Literally any encrypted mesh net communication protocol would be subject to the same propaganda. The point of this stuff is providing checks and balances for the people against a rogue government, or emergency situation.
Yeah, did you know criminals can use roads to commit crimes, too? We should destroy all of the roads. Terrorists also use food to give them energy to commit more terrorism, so we should start regulating access to food behind mandatory ID checks.
Honestly no idea what I’d do if I were in government.
Originally you’d communicate by mail and they could get a warrant. The day encrypted comms showed up, they wouldn’t just want to give up.
If you love the encryption but hate the terrorism, what to do? Double down on old school / physical surveillance? (Obviously not my field)
Originally, you'd communicate by mail, but some people didn't write things out in plain language; they used coated messages.
That was why the government decided to ban mail, and since that didn't cover all cases, they also banned people handing things to each other.
At least, I think that is how I remember it going in an alternate world where physical laws mimiced electronic laws.
Yes, exactly that. Tons of crime is committed using only in-person communication. Should we all have microphones in our homes? Do detective work, flip sources, follow the money.
We do though? They're called Alexa, and LG TVs.
Remember, the terms of service for your LG TV say you have to warn visitors to you house they're being eavesdropped.
I believe that most of terrorism does happen because the people behind it have some goals, not for funsies; so trying to fight the causes would be one thing to do. Obviously, that's difficult for many reasons, and making life more shit for everyone else is cheap and easy, and hence preferred.
But if the cause is "death to the West" or "from the river to the sea" or "India should not be secular" then it's a bit of a problem. How do you fight the cause?
Provide a better alternative that satisfies the material grievances underlying the ideology
I don't think it's everyone's job to do that, though. If an ideology is innately, for the last 1300 years, expansive, by military might or by population demographic change, you can't blame past grievances for that. It's just innate.
I love how you lumped “I’d like my literal children not to be killed because they might grow up to be ‘terrorists’” in with “death to secular society”
Which one is that?
What poor taste, to attempt to equate terrorism to Palestinian liberation from colonial oppression, apartheid and genocide. You should be ashamed for making such a comment.
They need to adapt then. Plenty of encryption users have been busted. Whether by grabbing their device while it's unlocked or by turning a prison sentence into house arrest if they snitch on their peers.
If you were sane, you would realise that restricting the right of billions of people to communicate privately, a right they have enjoyed for all the thousands of years of human history, is handing terrorists a complete and total victory far beyond any act of violence they could commit. The purpose of a government is not to prevent 100% of all crime and terrorism by locking every citizen in a straitjacket.
This also isn't even motivated by terrorists, but rather people daring to oppose the government.
What terrorist is rooting for a government to eliminate private communication? For one, it makes their activities harder to carry out.
It inflicts terror, doesn't it?
If you make the government do your terror for you, you win. Like the TSA after 9/11.
What if the two groups are the same?
So there was no terrorism or crime or trafficking or money laundering prior to encrypted comms?
> Honestly no idea what I’d do if I were in government.
It's not ordinary citizens' job to figure out solutions to these problems. Government has teams of intelligence agencies to answer these questions. Encrypted chat is fundamental infra that shouldn't be blocked.
It did. The answer it came to? Make encryption illegal.
Most governments today are corrupt and the actions or inactions of the government cannot be used to draw general conclusions about the necessity of and right to private communication as a check and balance against tyrannical governments.
Become a society where nobody feels it necessary to fall back on "terrorism" to get themselves properly heard.
Yeah, I don't think the terrorism in India is from lack of being heard.
It is generally extremist arms interested in destabilizing India to strengthen other regional powers (usually Pakistan).
The goal of much of these terrorist attacks simply end with ... no India, not "we demand change to policies in a reasonable way"
My read[0] suggests it's a combination of religious, political, ethnic and economic issues, which are all inherently social things. From the causes of the splintering into 2 countries to what's happening today. And social issues crop up when the needs of some group in a society aren't being met, because they aren't being properly heard. I've seen things in the news about Modi; he doesn't sound like the type to listen to/heed anyone not in his circle.
[0] https://www.visionofhumanity.org/terrorism-counterterrorism-...
"hey pakistani spies if you bring us Pakistan's plans we'll give you a hundred thousand bucks"
> Honestly no idea what I’d do if I were in government.
Spending crazy amounts in public education, healthcare, and nuclear arsenal?
We do regulate food. Tons of substances are not allowed.
We also regulate roads. You can not drive around in tanks. Or without license plate...
You clearly do not stand by your own argument, given your use of a throwaway. You realize that you're arguing a straw man. There is no reason to seriously engage with your reply.
Bluetooth based messaging apps are naturally able to circumvent internet restrictions that inhibit protests, citizen journalism and other kinds of unapproved activities but there are several ways Bluetooth could be updated as a protocol to introduce compatibility with some kind of antibody-esque suppression of communication standard.
It's just a matter of interested parties setting up a body to create the standard, which might genuinely be a huge bottleneck under the current geopolitical landscape.
Meshtastic, reticulum, meshcore... We need more.
I was thinking the same thing. We do need more. I set up a Meshtastic node at the house and joined https://chicagolandmesh.org/ which has been a fantastic community for beginners in mesh based comms.
Question, what do you do with the network?
reticulum, in theory, can go over any medium. Radio or internet, whichever is present.
you use it to access the internet, but the point is if the internet access is disabled you still have a local network for p2p communication across the city. also multiple people/hubs in the network can provide provide internet access over different ISPs providing resilience if some ISPs go down, but not all of them.
freifunk in germany and funkfeuer in austria do the same thing.
But here it shows another problem: who controls the distribution channel, they also control which program can be found and installed (by the mass) and which not.
Without a critical mass of adoption, mesh applications are largely useless.
You think the spooks are just sitting and watching people using other tech unmonitored and do nothing about it?
No, not doing nothing. They are probably funding it, like Tor, as this kind of technology is useful in intelligence and the promotion and sustainment of foreign resistance movements.
(For once my tax dollars are producing something I appreciate, even if I don’t love the reason behind it.)
Still available.
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat
To add:
The request has not yet been published by GitHub to https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns/tree/master/India/20...
Also not mentioned in the project's GitHub repository yet per https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Apermissionlesstech%2Fbitc...
India.
Indian government also blocked Telegram a while back to prevent exam leaks and stopped Whatsapp's rollout of usernames (which has some legitimate concerns) but more or less it wants complete China-like control of it's citizens' communications. Except no one uses any homegrown chat app (for good reasons)
Thank you Indian government for announcing the existence of this app to the public.
Sing it for me, Streisand!
In long term, it seems democracies transform to autocracies. Well, china is the future indeed.
Some relevant wisdom from the founding fathers of the United States:
When asked about when kind of government the founding fathers had created, Ben Franklin replied "A Republic, if you can keep it."
On democracy, John Adams wrote: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
Thomas Jefferson further wrote that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
tl;dr democracies need to be fought for, or else they won't stay democracies forever.
John Adams wrote that as a reason why the United States is not a democracy. It's a Constitutional Republic. It's a consistent theme throughout the Federalist Papers.
Individual States and localities have elements of democracy, but the US—built upon knowledge of Rome—is not.
The United States of America is the second iteration of American government, after the one that failed in 1787. The arguments leading up to the 1789 Constitution are quite explicit around why democracies don't work. America is a nation of nations, which is why "these United States" as a plural term was used frequently until after the Civil War, when having it be a singular concept once-and-for-all was of paramount importance.
That said, this is ban is clearly a restriction on freedom of expression, and highly un-American.
> It's a Constitutional Republic.
Which is a kind of democracy. Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people. This is a weird framing that I see brought up by Americans only, and I don't understand it, because direct democracies (what these Americans are actually referring to when they say 'democracy') are basically extinct in the modern world. They keep trying to distance themselves from the term. Most democratic nations today are presidential or parliamentary republics, just like you, or something that can be approximated to one of them. I'm doubtful that the US founders didn't recognize they were founding a democratic nation, just a specific subcategory - but ultimately still a state that should hopefully answer to the people.
Neither does federalism relate to the form of government - you could have a federal or distributed direct democracy if you wanted to. They're just different categories of things, the way you choose how to best represent the will of a group of people is a different question from how you subdivide these groups into self-governing blocks.
But Adams was specifically arguing not against democracy in the broad term, but specifically, unconstrained direct democracy, so this is not relevant to this discussion.
I don't know. Is it irrelevant?
Is it interesting that all these "democracies" around the world have persistent speech bans? When someone says something they don't like?
I seem to have a recollection of flipping through HN for a decade or so and people talking about all the meanie-pants who want people to be able to speak freely, even if it hurts people's feelings and might not be endorsed by the elected government.
> Democracy is a broad term describing all forms of government where power is granted by the people
No. It's not. I encourage you to read the quite enlightening treatment of democracies in the Federalist Papers. And Greece's government was nothing like Rome. If there is a conflation there, it is one largely created by America.
Which in its own right is interesting. What is interesting about the longest-running continuous constitutional government in history (America)?
> And Greece's government was nothing like Rome.
I presume you're referring to the various systems of democracy introduced in different ancient Greek city-states, as opposed to the Roman Republic. Of course, they're different. But it doesn't run counter to what I said - being descendant from the ideas of democracy doesn't promise you that any aspect of the government will be in any way similar, only that the power will ultimately originate from the people in some way. You don't even have to go ancient for this - there are dozens of different takes on democracy in the modern world.
To emphasize - I'm not arguing against the distinctions or the new ideas that were made during the founding of the US, or that some of these ideas weren't novel. I'm arguing against the school of thought that seemingly arose long after that happened, which tried to categorize the US into a bespoke category of government that included it and excluded other nations, modern and historical - despite them all definitionally being ruled by the people and often even having similar ways of organizing their governments. Let's review the terms.
An autocracy is a state where power descends from a single person, the autocrat. An absolute monarchy is a subset of autocracy, where that person is a monarch, usually with religion tying into their perceived legitimacy. An aristocracy is a state where power descends from an upper elite class. In anarchy, the power descends from no one in particular. Democracy is the class that is opposed to these other forms, it's a system of rule by many where power descends from lots of people. It includes many flavors and forms that result in different types of government - direct, indirect/representative (you are here), as well as many sub-variants that define the exact way of how power moves from the ruled to the rulers or other characteristics.
Therefore, republics are a strict subset of the broad term of democracy. There are lots of republics in the modern world, all of which are democratic states, just as there are constitutional democracies. If you want to distance the US from these other states, you would need to prove why it was not envisioned as a power-from-the-people state and what exactly would place it in a different category that no one else occupies. The US may have been the first, but it's not that unique in the modern landscape of governments.
Great point about what Adams is actually arguing! Of course, I know the country was founded as/is a Constitutional Republic, but it's always interesting to see how much our modern (American) understanding of democracy differs from how the founders understood it – and also how they shaped the fact that most of us now equate Constitutional Republic with the best form of democracy.
Define "most" and "us".
If us means humans living in democracies, I would say that parliamentary democracy has more supporters and constitutional republics.
And even if us == the US, I would argue that most US citizens actually have only a very hazy idea about how their own system of government works, much less how others work. Most of these people think that chanting "USA, USA" in unison is democracy.
> And even if us == the US, I would argue that most US citizens actually have only a very hazy idea about how their own system of government works, much less how others work. Most of these people think that chanting "USA, USA" in unison is democracy.
That's a very dim view of your fellow Americans. I don't have such a dim view myself; there are certainly people who don't care and didn't pay attention in their high school civics classes, but I've found that most people do care and do pay attention. I wonder if your opinion is colored by recent events, and whether you'd have thought the same in 2008?
https://www.history.com/articles/what-are-platos-5-forms-of-...
Democracy -> Tyranny
Regression to the mean...
If your country's security depends on someone on the internet taking their product off for the whole world something must be wrong with the people in power. This is censorship and suppression at its peak.
Fun fact: They have deployed facial recognition vans, AI smart glasses and illegally tracking the protesters (most of which are students) without their consent to threaten and deter them.
Ooh definitely time to install this on my personal device then. Thanks Mr. Modi!
Aside: oof yeah this seems like terrible policy and takes India off my bucket list.
Be careful. It seems a massive battery, CPU and memory drain. Be aware when it's running and when not.
For clarity: Indian government.
What Jack Dorsey could do for decentralized local chat, better than creating yet another copy of what already exists, is taking 0.1% of his wealth and using it to solve the problems that Briar project has: money.
https://briarproject.org/news/2026-maintenance-mode/
It is not the first time.
In 2014, the Hong Kong protesters used an app called FireChat.
I had the pleasure of meeting the founder, Micha, a few times. The company was called OpenGarden.
The app was popular - distributed in the App Store. Same idea: Bluetooth and wi-fi networks.
User numbers growing like a hockey stick. 100k+ downloads a day.
Micha was in Hong Kong during the 2014 protests (originally for a layover en route to meetings in China) and gave many interviews to international/Western media outlets while there, including the New York Times, TIME, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, BBC, and Reuters. Mica expressed support for free speech.
Authorities limited or blocked downloads and information about the app.
The term sheet for the funding round disappeared.
Too early?
> “The application enables anonymous communication without mandatory user registration, phone number verification, or centralised logging of communications.“
Those are features, not bugs ;) Seriously tho, the I4C is describing face-to-face communication. Is that illegal too? Perhaps the problem here is not the protesters, but an overreaching government.
On the contrary, these projects should be given a boost.
Agree, sounds like it is working for its intended purposes.
The thing about it is they specifically are targeting the repo which is interesting because the only thing that can really stop the proliferation of these apps is not allowing user to install from other sources which would have to come from Google preventing this.
Hopefully google won't prevent people from installing from outside sources /s
This change is largely drivin by claims that installing apps from other sources is insecure... I'd argue this is why it's insecure... Not insecure for individuals. Insecure for oppressive governments.
Incidentally, this is the same reason that we no longer have the ability to receive from everyone on AirDrop in perpetuity anymore.
Apple caved to pressure from the Chinese government to block distribution of flyers during protests by changing it to 10 minutes only.
Remember that Google is working to introduce developer verification to Android soon, making it trivial for governments to force Google to revoke a certain developer's apps within that country. The whole developer verification thing is about security... for Google's grip on Android and goverments' grip on communication
Too bad it operates on Nostr, which is crypto-adjacent, otherwise they could move to Codeberg.
Not any more though, right? Didn’t we just learn that Codeberg now bans vibe-coded projects, and that’s how Jack developed it?
He should talk to the codeberg guys anyway. They may grant an exception if the app is widely used and useful.
Lets imagine that github does give in and it does take down bitchat, will it result in the death (or at least a huge loss) for github? I mean of course a lot of open-source projects on github won't feel safe when they know that github can easily give in to the government pressure. Plus the general state of github right now is already causing projects to migrate to some better alternatives.
GitHub is currently a dead zombie, but it won't get any deader from this than it did when it deleted a bunch of stuff to please the Russian government or the American government.
I sincerely hope that Microsoft responds with "If the Indian government wants to block content hosted on U.S. servers, they are more than welcome to set up their own Great Firewall."
and just stop doing business in a country with 17% of the world population? fat chance :)
But how much of the world's GitHub revenue? That's the important thing.
Democracy Dies in Darkness
Also in broad daylight
Democracy dies. Always.
This may not be much, but if you’re outside India, please write to your local representatives and also to the Indian government that you are going to avoid products made in India as much as possible, will avoid visiting the country for tourism or work, and will not invest in the Indian markets or in foreign currency bank deposits. Clearly state the reasons why, and ask how the “largest democracy in the world” could be so short sighted and dictatorial.
Note that India is heavily dependent on money from elsewhere (hence a lot of recent policy changes to bring in more foreign money). It is a net importer and isn’t strong enough on exports.
There are some recent policy changes to attract more foreign currency deposits with lots of expectations.
If there is a hint that these subversive actions are also going to hurt the economy, there is a tiny, tiny sliver of a chance that the powers that be will be a bit more afraid of losing the next round of elections in the state governments and in a few years at the union level. That could possibly limit the ignorant knee jerk reactions and bans.
I understand the source is thehindu.com - but I'm assuming there's no way we can get that title updated? "Government orders..." sort've misleadingly implies something that "Indian government orders..." does not.
Just to clarify -- this article is about Indian government order.
I figured with an app name like "bitch at", the government was simply getting tired of hearing peoples' gripes. I was saddened to see I was way off.
thats one, only 3.999, kiloforks to go
https://github.com/permissionlesstech/bitchat/forks
Wow I didn’t know about this technology but it sounds like seriously cool stuff
Ban Post-It notes and any other piece of paper than can be passed around with messages written on them by bad people. No whispering into people ears either unless your lips are plainly readable.
I hadn't heard of Bitchat before, will need to check it out! Streisand Effect in full force...
What about encrypted ultrasound modems?
Fun idea. You should make that.
Unfortunately Bitchat feels like an unfinished proof of concept.
At a festival I got notifications there are "other users nearby", which made me question if and how the app is broadcasting it's presence, possibly at all times. I also couldn't figure out a way to turn off these notifications (there's barely any settings) and I ended up uninstalling the app.
I do hope they were ignored. But then this is ultimately Microsoft we're talking about.
Not stated in the headline: it's the government of India.
For context, there are currently mass protests against the Indian government which the government is violently suppressing. It also just cut off the internet in a major city to stop the protesters communicating, so this ban is probably to try and suppress other means of communication.
India is now going after domains too: https://www.reuters.com/world/worlds-biggest-domain-seller-f...
To imagine that US MNCs readily obey these orders. There was a time when Gmail exited China due to Aurora attacks, and Chinese GFW is universally hated, so why is India allowed to create a GFW like censorship on US platforms? Indian courts have even blocked Reuters articles GLOBALLY before. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/19/india-judg...
In a few hours someone will release Streisand Chat as a fork
for their goverment and every goverment the problem is not the comunication channel, the problem is the dissenting ideas...
There are certain shadow govt groups who have added aspects to Bluetooth protocol itself literally opening up any device
Like what
#2 post on HN currently is: India’s first privately developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch. In the same page, there is this news about banning an OSS app, built on open tech. Just saying.
2 Indias
We evaluated Bitchat and determined it would be a really useful tool for Gaza - Israel controls all internet access to Palestine and would frequently cut off internet access to Gazans. We tried building our own but when Bitchat came out we focused on that instead.
https://updates.techforpalestine.org/bitchat-for-gaza-messag...
Oh good someone is using it?
They'd have been safe on Codeberg. Just saying, given yesterday's outrage.
Chilling hearing communicating with willing nearby people being called "misuse of communication". Maybe in a prison.
Holy crap, this article has been active here for 13 hours - it really needs a country callout (ie India) in the title.
Well, this also shows why we all should remove our dependency on Microsoft-GitHub in the long run. The US government just fiddle-influences too much here. Tomorrow it could be your project too.
Bitchat, berty, briar, all do use Bluetooth for communication. It would be funny if popular apps also add p2p Bluetooth options or just over any network, and seeing them trying to ban the internet.
Translation: "We can't spy on you and we don't like it"
inb4 some government tries to ban independent IRC, since it can be used over a VPN and thus can be equally unspyable
I think VPNs are banned in India
TItle is missing a clarification: Indian government.
With google banning side loaded apps, is what India wants to do just a waste of time by India.
Does Apple still allow side loaded apps ?
Only despots are afraid of people talking in channels they can't eavesdrop on.
What an excellent idea. This will surely make the protesters go away.</s>
guess im downloading a copy of each version + the source code lmfao and im not even in india
Aside of if it's right or not (i actually think it is), the bag is out in the open, anyone any countries, any bad person or security persons are going to look at it now
If a country wants to ban private open source communication, then they do not deserve to enjoy the benefits of modern technology.
Uggh in any given project I tend to gauge the hype to working tech ratio. The higher it is, the more annoying the project. BitChat is about as annoying as you get. The reason is simple: bluetooth connectivity only works at scale if everyone has the app, and even then it only works under extremely high node density -- packed stadiums, maybe an apartment building if you're super lucky. The combination of extremely wide distribution and extreme density never happens.
To make it even more annoying, good projects like Briar have been doing this for over 10 years. Why would BitChat suddenly succeed or get any attention at all?
Because it’s Jack Dorsey and that’s it. I agree it’s not novel or interesting. It’s frustrating for me particularly because I want some kind of widely decentralized network but something that actually has a chance to work, which Dorsey has the capability (financially, connections, etc) to make happen. Instead he decides to waste time on something that’s DOA.
It’s more in his own self-interest to vibe-code a rudimentary solution than to just support a good existing project, sadly.