An article from last week’s Outlook magazine on the new cyber law makes the following points:

Cyber police is watching Government can monitor, intercept or even block any online content including e-mail that it thinks is offensive or could threaten national security. Could lead to misuse.

Personal data up for grabs Government agencies can now demand users’ personal data from internet service providers. Could lead to privacy issues and litigation.

Beware of e-mail/MMS/SMS jokes Exchange of messages/data that are “offensive, annoying or cause inconvenience” over any computing device will be treated as an offence. Open to interpretation.

Intermediaries are better off Service providers will not be held responsible for offensive content put up by websites, but will have to respond to state orders to block/ remove content within two hours. Could lead to technology issues.

read the rest of the article here

To illustrate how patently ludicrous and invasive the idea really is, read it in conjunction with Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson interview on Der Spiegel via Salon.com. Commenting on the idea of news “filters”, Anderson speaks of the shift from professional filters like news editors to social filters via tools like facebook and twitter. To quote:

I read lots of articles from mainstream media but I don’t go to mainstream media directly to read it. It comes to me, which is really quite common these days. More and more people are choosing social filters for their news rather than professional filters. We’re tuning out television news, we’re tuning out newspapers. And we still hear about the important stuff, it’s just that it’s not like this drumbeat of bad news. It’s news that matters.

While Anderson reflects on the incredible possiblities of the internet, and its creative destabilisation of existing media empires (an argument that has been around for a while), the new IT act appears directed at precisely such possiblities.