Information

The Center embarrassed after name in list given to Pakistan actually present in Mumbai, slipup is serious

From time to time, the Center does various slipups in terms of law and order, or statements which seem to portray that proper research has not gone into its investigations and some of the documentation is shoddy. In the past, some of the material supplied to Pakistan as proof of its complicity in terror attacks in India have had problems. The situation between Pakistan and India is extremely tense, and any such slip-ups can cause Pakistan to immediately react and point out problems, and use these problems to justify concerns about the accuracy of the rest of the documentation. It is absolutely necessary that such documentation, such dossiers (which do go through a fair amount of international appraisal as well) be absolutely accurate and can stand any scrutiny.
In the latest such slipup, the Government sent a list to Pakistan that contained 50 most wanted criminals that are present in Pakistan, and whom India wants Pakistan to send back to India. This list contains people who top the criminal and terrorist list such as Dawood Ibrahim, his henchmen, Hafeez Mohammad Saeed (the head of the Lashkar), Syed Sallahuddin, and many others. India has the stipulation that these people are all present in Pakistan based on various information collected by Indian agencies and even by international agencies such as Interpol and by various media. One expects that such a list would be the basis for a discussion, where the Indian Government will push for Pakistan to send these people back if it is serious about combating terrorism and also if it wants to convince India that it is not acting against India.
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Blackout for BlackBerry in India – some services facing problems

BlackBerry Services are under fire from the Indian government, with the latest word from the Intelligence Bureau stating that BlackBerry services will be banned in India if the concerns raised by the Indian government are not addressed by the Canadian developer of BlackBerry Smartphone Research In Motion Limited. Although it’s not a total ban, if the ban is enforced, then the BlackBerry phones will not become a pack of junk; it is just that the BlackBerry Messenger and business enterprise services will be shut down but the USP for BlackBerry will be lost for sure. India is not alone in the demand; United Arab Emirates has already planned to halt these services from Oct. 11.
BlackBerry uses a push based service. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server in Canada redirects new e-mail, calendar updates, documents and other data straight to the user over the internet and cell phone network. While it sends data to the handset, it encrypts the data with triple data encryption standard. This high level of encryption is making it tough for Indian security agencies to monitor via the servers of BlackBerry, which are in Canada. RIM declines to provide access to its servers and to lower the encryption level as sought by Indian agencies. RIM has offered to help India track the emails without sharing the encryption details and also the ‘Metadata’ (in terms of who sent the email, to whom it was sent, and so on) but the security officials are not impressed with it.
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RTI: Getting personal information is allowed

In a recent court order, the Madras High Court has interpreted the usage of RTI to allow obtaining personal information of current Government officials or pensioners for some specific reasons. It is a public perception about RTI that the usage of RTI is only meant for obtaining information, either about the process of movement of information in the Government, or about actions taken by units of the Government. So, RTI has typically been used to obtain details about spendings (with recent high profile cases being about trying to determine the expenses of ministers on re-doing their offices or official houses, or even of the cost of holding a Cabinet meeting, as was done in Karnataka).
This case is a more difficult case that was refused by the RTI Commission against an application, where there was a court order against a former employee of the Government, but the court order could not be executed since the person could not be found. At the same time, there was another arm of the Government that was actually aware of the address, since the person was receiving pension from the Government, and the pension was being paid out of a post office. So, if you were to take the right perspective, the court order execution should have been possible by getting the address from the post office; but it is impossible to believe that the Government would be so proactive. So, it is the interested person who had to use the RTI form for the required purpose (link to article):

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