This is a great piece on India's surveillance policies. The government is trying to gain access (and will probably succeed) to messages exchanged on messenger services like Blackberry and Skype and is also demanding access to mail servers like Gmail. Experts say this will hit businesses trying to come up in India and impact India's dream of becoming a technology hub. They are doing this for 'security reasons' - an oft-used reason for doing pretty much anything in India these days.
To tie this to some of the topics we studied in class, I would say this closely relates to the power struggles that corporations and nation states show from time to time. By implementing this 'Big Brother' policy, the government is essentially showing the citizens of India who's boss.
Is this really fair in an era of globalisation where the focus should be on eliminating any remaining barriers between a country and the rest of the world? Interestingly, the article also mentions that countries like United Arab Emirates and Indonesia are also trying to implement similar measures.
I believe this reinforces the belief that a local idea is no longer local because there is a framework for it to go global - even if the idea does little for a society or countryhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/business/global/28secure.html?_r=2&hpw.