A recent amendments to the IT Act of India the investigation agencies applauded the decision and amendments passed by Parliament requiring companies like Google, Yahoo, Rediff and Microsoft and all others who provides free email services to set up their email service servers in India. Adding to the complexity of implementation the act requires all of them to ensure they host accounts of all Indian national in the Indian servers only. There is also an "unclear" area which interprets that Indian internet users will have free email account ending in .in TLD instead of .com TLD.
These changes made information access faster and efficiently for cyber crime investigation agencies which are facing challenges to get right information at right time.
In India, the issue assumed critical proportion after the Mumbai terror attacks, where the terrorists used BlackBerry mobiles. As the parent company initially refused to part with information critical to the investigation, there was even talk of banning BlackBerry.
The question now is, will global email providers agree to the idea of hosting servers in India to service their Indian client base?
Let's keep tab on this development. I will post more information as it becomes known to me.
Source of Knowledge: Economic Times