“Everybody spies on everyone else. Some just have better gadgets”, said Gopalapuram Parthasarathy, an ex-diplomat in an interview to The Guardian. This was in the context of the revelations that the United States of America has been surreptitiously spying on governments across the world – friends and foes included. The full extent of the Snowden files is still unknown. Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, recently told British MPs that less than 1% of the data in their possession has been made public.

Following the Snowden revelations, the complacence with which technologically ignorant government agencies treated the internet evaporated overnight. Suddenly, obscure government departments all over the world found themselves scrambling to come up with official IT policies and drafting memos to explain how they plan to deal with the latest techniques of cyber espionage.

Not the Prime Minister of our fair country, though. “The prime minister doesn’t use a mobile phone and he doesn’t have an email account”, was the PMO’s reply to NDTV when asked whether the PM was concerned about the implications of the NSA spying. The spokesman added, “We have no information and no cause for concern”.

 Despite this derring-do statement, the government has announced that in December it will unveil Meghraj, a programme which will “move government data, services and application to remote servers”. This national cloud initiative will build a “secure and unified cyber space for shared government services and infrastructure”. Maybe there is some concern after all, if not at the PMO, but amongst the ministries. And if you look at where the government’s online data is stored as of now, you’d understand why.

The multitude of tentacles that the US has wrapped around the Internet since its inception has suddenly become visible and threatening. “The control of Internet was in the hands of the US government and the key levers relating to its management was dominated by its security agencies”, says an internal memo of the National Security Council Secretariat.

Officially and unofficially, the United States of America controls the internet.

The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Number) which hands out domain names and basically acts as a governing body for the internet, is a US-based non-profit which is nominally independent of the United States government. It plays a huge role in maintaining US hegemony over cyberspace, ensuring that US companies control most of the important top-level domains. Verisign, for example, has always administered the crucial .com domain. While this system has worked fairly well for the most part, it can also be exploited or misused. An American court order could potentially take down any dot com site regardless of where the website is based.

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, ICANN, the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Architecture Board, the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Society recommended ending the current regime. Through a statement they recommended “accelerating the globalisation of ICANN and IANA functions, towards an environment in which all stakeholders, including all governments, participate on an equal footing”.

Most of the largest internet companies, store the majority of their users’ data in massive datacenters located in the United States. This allows the American intelligence community unprecedented physical access to data in addition to their considerable influence over administrative processes. These datacenters are ostensibly cloaked in secrecy – one Google datacenter reportedly operates in complete darkness with technicians wearing flashlight-helmets like the ones worn by miners.

Snowden has made it clear to the world that it is all too easy for US governmental agencies to obtain access to their contents. The Indian government’s response to this perceived vulnerability has been to draw up a new email policy requiring almost 5 million of its employees to be transitioned from private communications providers such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to an official government system. The man in charge of the department tasked with developing and implementing this system, Kapil Sibal, still prefers his Hotmail account though.

It is unclear whether the proposed email platform will come under the ambit of the ambitious Meghraj initiative. The security implications of lumping so much sensitive information into a single repository which could potentially become a one-stop shop for potential hackers to tap into, has not been addressed by the GOI. There is also the added concern of foreign spy agencies being kicked out only to be replaced by local ones like the National Informatics Centre.

It has taken a violation of privacy and sovereignty, the likes of which the world has never seen before, in order to wake our administration up to threat posed by the internet. What it will take for them to come up with a bulletproof plan to deal with these threats is anyone’s guess. The biggest worry – with the pace of the internet being what it is, and the pace of our government functioning being what it is – is that by the time we catch up to the current cyber-security standards prevailing elsewhere, the curve could have moved much further ahead.