Oh this is too rich. Thank you, thank you, thank you to tipster IslandGirl for placing on the news tab the story about the reams of confidential visa application info that the Indian Consulate in San Francisco sent off for recycling to an open-air facility that doesn’t shred, and where anybody can stroll in off the street. The San Francisco Chronicle did just that.
Thousands of visa applications and other sensitive documents, including paperwork submitted by top executives and political figures, sat for more than a month in the open yard of a San Francisco recycling center after they were dumped there by the city’s Indian Consulate.
The documents, which security experts say represented a potential treasure trove for identity thieves or terrorists, finally were hauled away Wednesday after The Chronicle inspected the site and questioned officials at the consulate and the recycling facility.
Among the papers were visa applications submitted by Byron Pollitt, chief financial officer of San Francisco’s Gap Inc., and Anne Gust, wife of California Attorney General Jerry Brown.
The best part, though, are the tin-ear responses by the various Indian consular officials. There’s a semantic argument:
Information on the documents includes applicants’ names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, professions, employers, passport numbers and photos. Accompanying letters detail people’s travel plans and reasons for visiting India.
“As we see it, the documents are not confidential,” said B.S. Prakash, the consul general. “We would see something as confidential if it has a Social Security number or a credit card number, not a passport number.”
A cultural argument:
At the Indian Consulate, Consul General Prakash said there may be a cultural dimension to the level of outrage related to the incident among Western visa applicants.
“In India, I would not be alarmed,” he said. “We have grown up giving such information in many, many places. We would not be so worried if someone had our passport number.”
An environmental argument:
Deputy Consul General Sircar said that in other countries, Indian officials are able to go to the roofs of their offices and burn documents they’re no longer able to store.
“In America, you cannot do that,” he said.
All this stuff was sitting out there, in boxes marked “Visa Applications” at an open-access, community recycling center in Haight-Ashbury. I’m waiting for them to blame Nancy Pelosi!
That was hilarious! Though you forgot thinksoutofthebox and partofsolution¬ofproblem… (or is it the other way around?)
i think the way the consulate is run depends on which one it is. the SF consulate is small… way out on the burbs of the City (in… like… the Richmond district) and far from the actual business center. there is no parking around and basically you wait in the living room of some house with a bunch of other people with handwritten numbers on scraps of paper.
the consulate in chicago is a totally different animals. it’s modernized (electronic signs, an actual business bulding) and from what i understand a major consulate outpost, not just a “station.”
that being said, you’d think the US govt would be more vigilant about this at most– considering all the hype about terrorists faking visas/passports to get into the city. i suppose a terrorist isn’t going to fake being the COO of Gap, Inc. but who knows what else was in the box?
oh, and one more thought:
there’s a difference between confidential and private. something might not be confidential, but i certainly don’t want it blowing in the wind on some street corner.
We all know whose fault it is. These bastards fault.
1/31/07 We will never forget.
You’ve never had to spend an entire day
in hellat the INS? Oh wait, you must be Amreekan.India and it’s representatives are definitely on the right path. The United States during the cold war was notorious for dumping things, unshredded (or not incinerated), and the Soviets would pick through the trash and piece things together. It was a treasure trove for them.
So in a giant sweeping conclusion, India is progressing (Using the United States as a model of a large representative and diverse republic)
Hema, I don’t see that underpaying the consular staff should result in a no-shredding office management system, although I see that it could be all of a piece
I’m certainly not condoning the SF consulate’s document management system (such as it is). My point was more directed to all the complaints here re: the level of customer service you can expect at an Indian consulate. The frustration of being underpaid while having to deal with a lot of desi customers probably does take a toll.
I would add that I’ve seen a number of desis behave badly at the Indian consulate. They would never behave this badly at a BCIS office…or heck, even at a USPS office. It’s almost as if the normal rules of decorum no longer apply.
A big 🙂 to hairy_d #45, Hema #46 and Neale #49 I came back from Indian consulate today (Houston). Their org. skills left much to be desired. But they were trying their best to clear traffic. WITHOUT attitude. Same can’t be said about the customers. Downright abusive jerks. Older desis cheerfully bashing India. Bemused but polite firangees watching it all. Finally me and a woman next in line had to tell the haters to shut it. Quite a tamasha.
Yeah, you’d think he’d know the difference, wouldn’t you. He’s actually got an op-ed in this morning’s Hindu, on the subject of, jeepers-creepers, India as a Hub for Innovation.
Here’s a quote:
No no, I didn’t think you were codoning it, and I shall treasure the image of one’s channa being served up in one’s own passport application. Sure, it must be hell to deal with the Desi Bhais and Behenjis who bring their spittooniest selves to their consular homecomings. I was thinking, though, that just as any operation in Kolkata can hire a separate guy whose specialty and privilege it is just to throw switches three times a day, the consulates could underpay an extra person, if underpay they must – with whatever arcane justification is employed for the purpose- to do nothing but shred all day or even once a week.
On the flip side, it’s true that the Amreekan Babus at US consulates are rude and stubborn and hell on wheels when aroused, but they don’t treat their own countrymen worse than they treat firangis, and they are pretty damn secretive.
What the Amreekan babus do is irrelevant. As a contrast, the Indian consulate in Singapore is efficient even as it operates from a colonial mansion and has to deal with large numbers of Indian laborers (rather than upper class expats). Numbers there are taken seriously. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that most employees there (local and indian) are tamil?
Shodan #57, I concur with your Houston experience. The Indian Consulate comes to Dallas once a month I think and I went there to get my passport renewed. The staff was SUPER friendly. They went OUT OF THEIR WAY to help atleast me and another person that I know of. I was so pleasantly surprised. GOD bless the staff of Houston Indian consulate.
Heh, I haven’t read the rest of the post yet but at the opening line: “Oh, this is too rich” I thought, “Aha, let’s see if Siddhartha is the author…”
😉
WRONG .. to say the least .. some people sit in air conditioned offices, read other people’s work, think very hard sitting on their armchair, conjure up a world, and start TYPING …
I used to work to convert grassroots innovations in India into enterprises … scout for them in villages, slums, remote areas, convert the crude product into a prototype, link its development with design students from IITs, protect the farmer’s knowledge (file for patent), disseminate the knowledge and link the person with an interested entrepreneur (and help negotiate a good benefit sharing mechanism). Prakash has a very limited idea of what innovation looks like (probably something like an Apple iphone); but in today’s world opinions are a dime a dozen. In fact argumentation has come to 1)how fast you can arrive at an opinion and 2) vigorously defend it (mostly by your expertise of English; evidence works sometimes – but with the covert application of selection)
http://www.sristi.org/Scouting_for_Homegrown_Ingenuity_shailja_niketan.htm
For a start, Prakash should start walking, instead of typing.
Coming back to the alarming news – yeah it is pretty scary for an economy which runs on credit cards, where patriotism is sometimes linked to ‘buy, buy, buy’. But what the hell, much identifiable information is likely to be in the hard discs of the e-waste dumped into India.
I’d like to get a reception like that someday.
From the article by B S Prakash, that chachaji had posted.
It is true … I have first hand experience of the immense difficulty in building institutions that can harness innovations. The more I experience the US universities, the more I marvel at these extraordinary institutions. I am sorry for the digression, and the tone in my earlier post. Prakash does point out many things rightly.
Well, even if he makes a few good points in the article, don’t apologize too much. It’s not like you made fun of his initials or something. It just boggles me that someone like him could fail to pick up on how big a deal the privacy/confidentiality issue is in the zeitgeist.
I’d like to get a reception like that someday.
Deepa, I must say, I was surprised, because the passport guys at JFK and Newark are usually so stony-faced.
The only other place where I’ve gotten an even warmer welcome was at Dublin airport, after handing in an Irish passport, along with my mother. The man behind the desk stamped them, and handed them back with a broad smile, saying “Welcome back, ladies.”
wonder why the consulate would not just pay a mobile shredding company to pick up the stuff. that’s what every two bit lawyer does with all their waste
Had a pleasant experience last time at Heathrow. The desi woman at immigration, on realizing we were a ss couple, kind of perked up. Made us feel very welcome. And the sardar at the train window was even more helpful. I loved London. oops didn’t mean to ramble.
filmiholic, i enjoyed your kitten tale, and i know just what you mean about being waved right through: i brought my dog to boston from pakistan in 2002–she was a stray i’d rescued from the streets of islamabad two years earlier, after she’d been injured as a puppy by a hit-and-run driver. after dealing with all the masses of paperwork required to export a live animal from pakistan, i expected that going through customs with a big mutt from pakistan at logan airport six months after 9/11 would be an ordeal. so you can imagine my surprise when no one even glanced at her–but they were very interested in the unopened can of pedigree dog food i’d brought along as a spare. they took it from me and waved us through. i could have had mullah omar in that crate and no one would ever have been the wiser.
Funny how Sid “third world” dhartha aint gotz no prawblem writing “rich” put downs of Indians (sourced from anti-third world mercenaries like the author of the sourced article) but when it comes to Africa or African-American hip-hop, the man gets too emotional to even countenance a critical discsussion! Oh be wary of the dealers in double standards.
Naiverealist, I just saw this piece on data security in India. It’s a start, but like the proffered reason for Alberto Gonzalez v. Google, they’re mostly investigating porn a yet…
Thanks, Amrita for the link. The way things are going, India will go through similar experiences (like the US) in the spheres of economy, work-family balance, corporate governance etc. And India being the repository of all possible problems in the world, US can learn a thing or two in reconciling the melting pot/salad bowl, Spanish/English (a miniscule problem compared to India’s language problems) debates.
“And I learned that if you want to feel like a celeb, take a small pet in carrier with you around the airport and in your aircraft cabin, and you’ll be the centre of attention.” The U.S. still has pretty lenient laws about animal entry, at least of pet type animals. However, England has draconian animal-entry laws. There was a famous case of 60s a film star, Francois Dorleac (her more famous sister is Catherine Deneuve) whose little dog was DESTROYED when she tried to sneak it through Heathrow. Granted, she shouldn’t have been sneaking, but the poor pup shouldn’t have had to die. I don’t understand why the dog was not just quarantined per the law. But apparently, if you tried to sneak an animal, they would destroy it. Very unexpected for such a canophilic country.
Come and say that to my face, you cowardly, illiterate troll.
Technically embassies and consulates are in India. An US embassy and consulate in India is US soil. So they are governed by their laws. India does not have any privacy legislation, so they can legally dispose any thing including SSN.
“The man behind the desk stamped them, and handed them back with a broad smile, saying “Welcome back, ladies”
And thats what happens to us whenever we return to the US most of the time in Los Angeles with our US Passports. On the other hand I have to travel to India on business twice a year and every time I am about to land in Delhi, I tense up with the feeling that anything can happen at the immigration desk – you never know what the babu with the finger up his nose constantly looking at you and back to the passport photo and back to you might be conjuring up. I have experienced many instances where they have tried a shake down both while entering and happily leaving but when I shout back at them in english, they back off. But I have seen Indian workers coming back home from the middle east always get the third degree. With a US passport, even a brown will be met with a smile and a “Welcome Home” but not in India!!
So much BS! So many desi – and all so indignant. 1. You are the losers who immigrated to india – like rats from what you considered a sinking ship. ( Oh what delicious irony that your jobs.. hmm.. java.. database… oracle..) will come to india.. and you will be left in US with your green card 🙂
Most of your data is freely available. Check out Zabasearch.com. Not just your current address, but you last 10 years worth of addresses are there, so is your birthdate etc.
Hmm. Hope you equally mad when choicepoint (and fidelity, and citibank) all had data leaks. Oh, I am sorry, you did not did you. So I guess you get mad only with Indian officials ‘cos you feel you are better. In the US – you are like scared, second class puppies. You kiss the immigration officer’s feet – and keep to yourself!
Have any of you whiners ever spent a whole day at any of the US Consulates in India? Have you experienced the humiliation meted out by boorish consular ‘officers’ to students, business travellers, old couples waiting for months for that appointment to visit their children in your country? Have you ever experienced what it feels like to leave every shred of dignity behind and be barked at by jerks who think it’s their divine right as Americans to be as rude, insensitive and obnoxious as possible? Maybe you should make that effort, take some feedback from the thousands of visa applicants to your nation’s consulates. Maybe then comments like “We are not in INDIA” can be put into some perspective.
Subhadeep
And do you know why we Indians are treated like that – it’s not because of our brown skin or our accent – it’s because we do not tell the truth. There maybe a lot of money pouring into India but culturally we have gone bankrupt. We spend all our time trying to be someone we are not. We ape the West, we copy most of their movies at bollywood, today all our hindi hits are mixed with English words and scantily clad whores dancing around, we prefer being seen in the local McDonald or another western fast food joint and if we meet a fellow Indian on the streets of Delhi, we do not want to put our cards on the table. We are so used to not giving a straight answer that it’s become our nature to act shady. People from the West find this irritating and if this American does not treat you with respect it is because 90 % of the visa applicants he sees daily do not give him a straight answer. And this is how other European Embassies look at us too.