Govt to ban use of Gmail, Yahoo in its offices
Govt staff to official email accounts at work to ensure secure usage of data
As India grapples with rising foreign cyber snooping cases, the central government has decided to put in place a national email policy aimed at ensuring “secure access and usage” of official data by public servants.
As per the proposed policy, official email accounts will be given to all the government employees and it will be mandatory for them to use this email account for all official communications.
All intra and inter departmental communications of the government will be routed only through the official email accounts, particularly, those given by the National Information Centre (NIC).
The use of email accounts of external service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Rediffmail etc., whose servers are housed outside India, will be prohibited for official communication.
This, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) said, was in consonance with international practice. “In the United States of America, the White House does not allow its officials to access emails of private email service providers at work,” DeitY told the Delhi High Court.
It informed the HC that the government will soon bring in new guidelines on use of information technology resources by public servants. It will be covered under the “Policy on Acceptable Use of IT Resources of Government of India”, which is currently being finalised by the committee of secretaries.
“The objective of this policy is to ensure proper access and usage of government’s IT resources by all its users and protect the Information and Communications Technology infrastructure of the government from any misuse,” DeitY added.
Currently, about 4.5 lakh government employees have already been allotted an NIC account. But, another 50 lakh public servants are yet to get their official account. This would require setting up of additional infrastructure. Taking a serious view of the issue, the HC directed the government to give all necessary funding and computer hardware to complete the process in a time bound manner.
The HC order came on a PIL filed by former BJP leader KN Govindacharya seeking direc- tions for the government to ensure protection of country’s secrets from foreign cyber snooping. The PIL had pointed out an instance in which the National Investigation Agency (NIA) had used Gmail in an advertisement to get information on February 21, 2013 Hyderabad twin blasts.
In 2013, HT had reported that the Indian security agencies knew that US National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance systems had been reading emails and other supposedly secure cyber data on a regular basis since 2005-06 but could not take counter-measures due to lack of an alternative to systems like Gmail.