DATA Encryption

India boasts of being one of the giants in IT in this part of the world at least, but look at the fact that our telecom ministry forced the IP providers & the Telecom Industry to reduce the encryption levels to 40 bits or lower so that our security agencies could have access and control on all incoming and outgoing data & mails. This was done only last last year. In fact the Government forced RIM Canada, the manufacturers of the Blackberry mobile phones to reduce encryption levels from 256 bits ( International Standards ) to 40 bits or lower, before these phones could be allowed in the country. What a regressive thinking that is ?? Instead of moving with the times & upgrading the capabilities of our systems and that of our security agencies and bringing them at par with the international standards, we moved backwards. We did not realize that this not only makes the lives of the hackers that much more easy, but also leaves huge loop holes in our banking and financial systems. The Government has woken up at last. But again, instead of taking a quantum jump from 40 bits to 256 bits it has chosen to move to 128 bits initially. Are we not underestimating our IT capabilities, even now ?