The video surveillance caught the bad guys but a dragnet gets a pat on the back for 26,000 violations of privacy.<p>This is one good story however it is presented with a narrative that seeds unquestionable support for warrantless surveillance.<p>702 is on the horizon, what will we choose? Privacy or security. There is no such thing as both. In this well painted narrative the answer is simple. Security. What about other narratives though?
Damn, they asked Google to turn over IP addresses visiting specific URLs, Google refused, then they collected the data “from the Internet gateway” anyway? So TLS is just broken in India, and the “Internet gateway”, whichever hop that refers to, sees everything in clear text?
I am trying to understand how it is possible to filter all IP activity for such a (broad) search term. As opposed to say superbowl livestream.<p>They only looked at requests sent to YouTube? Doesn't YouTube use https by default?<p>Did they do a simple YouTube search for 'Tom and Jerry' note down the full URLs for first two pages of search results... and look for those in the ISP logs?<p>DNS lookups only show "www.youtube.com" but not the VideoID or full URL I presume. So ISPs must be logging all URLs being visited by all their users?
This reminds me of the TOR service that tells you how unique your presence is on the network, based on a whole lot of things the browser reports.<p>Sometimes it'll be a single font that gives a person away, even when so many other bits of information are essentially the same.<p>It works pretty much exactly like how Akinator The Mind Reading Genie works. You narrow down by various yes and no answers, and get to the right answer, or a very close subset, surprisingly quickly.
What surprised me the most was 26,000 people watched Tom and Jerry between 7:30pm and 6:30am on some website. That’s a lot more than I would have expected.
Reminds me of the Maury Travis case. Documented in the Forensic Files episode "X Marks the Spot". "Shear Luck" is another memorable episode about a suspect who cut up a floppy disk containing evidence.<p>Edit: Just remembered the episodes "Ticker Tape" and "Hack Attack", which are of a similar theme.
The news story is bogus. Internet service providers can't see what webpage their clients are seeing because everything is HTTPS and there is no MITM from government here as one suggested in the comments. The only technical censorship in India is SNI based HTTPS website blocking and the HTTPS website blocks.
Another aspect to the same kidnapping drama -- the perpetrator was a YouTuber and her parents, apparently looking for ways to make up for losing income streams due to demonetized YouTube channel ...<p><a href="https://indianexpress.com/article/india/kerala/kerala-kidnapping-couple-youtuber-daughter-arrested-9051566/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://indianexpress.com/article/india/kerala/kerala-kidnap...</a>
Is this just a "submarine" for the government to get the general public on board with online surveillance?<p><a href="http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a>