On Saturday 22 August 2009, Easwar Hariharan wrote:
In light of JTD's concern regarding the potential for abuse of the UID being planned by the Government,I was browsing Wikipedia when I came across [1].According to Privacy International,we are an extensive surveillance society,but more due to lack of safeguards than real privacy violations,or so is the inference I took from the summary under the India heading on the page.
[1]http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559597
Not only we dont have constitutional safeguards, we have rampant violations of whatever protections are there by the agencies supposed to protect you. As far as civil democratic norms go we are perhaps marginally better than china. The saving grace is that we have atleast a vociferous and partly independent press. While communicating with modern tech (cell and net) your data is tapped and stored and available to the police without a court warrant.