JUNE 12 — It was widely reported this week that Singapore had banned its civil servants from accessing the internet while at work.

The rationale was reported to be an effort to secure sensitive data and prevent data leaks. Netizens and global news outlets put a negative spin on the move — likening the actions to a North Korea-style closed-loop intranet or a China-style firewall.

Others simply attacked the government for being regressive — harking back to the 90s where work places had internet and intranet terminals, and also impractical given the sheer number of government services and the vital role played by the internet across virtually every sector. Would teachers no longer have access to the internet, would policemen be fighting crime on the intranet?

The government did later clarify its position saying that civil servants would be able to access the internet on their personal devices including their mobile phone but that it was moving to segregate machines into Net-connected and Net-free devices with sensitive data handled by Net-free machines.

It is still a rather unprecedented step for a government — it would mean installing hundreds of thousands of Net-terminals and Singapore’s bureaucracy is not small.

Away from the sensational headlines and inevitable Kim Jong Un analogies, I actually think there’s some merit in the government’s actions.

Data security is no joke — and while I’m not a big fan of the government keeping secrets, there is information that any government legitimately needs to keep secure. But the internet makes this virtually impossible as various high profile leaks and releases have made clear a range of agents, not just hard core hackers, from service providers, telcos, internet heavyweights like Google and Facebook, not to mention US intelligence gathering agencies can gather vast amounts of information on any of us and more or less any institution — very quickly.

In a modern city state like Singapore, people take the internet for granted. — Reuters pic

Whether it is world leaders, government institutions or well, you and me there are fewer and fewer secrets these days. It really represents a monumental shift in the world.

Just a few decades ago when pen and paper still ruled and a fixed line telephone was as instant as communication got, it was not really possible for someone to grab my credit card details, know who my friends are, and catalogue my reading and shopping preferences in a few moments.

Now this information and much else besides is easily accessible, pretty much everything you type on social media and, thanks to malware etc, most of what is on your computer can’t be considered private in any serious sense. 

Social media channels are, for the right people, an open book and given we use these channels for almost every aspect of our lives, basically everything about us is now online. It is even reported that your phone camera and microphones can be switched on remotely for a total Orwellian effect.

In short, privacy has died in the space of a few decades and this is as large a problem for the government as it is for you and me. And of course the security of the government’s data affects you and me, your tax records, medical records, addresses and identification documents — the government holds all this information so a breach of security at the government level can have implications for all of us.

Yet even the best government security systems have proved permeable to hacks and relentless intelligence gathering and so it seems the Singapore government has come to the conclusion that the best solution is to go offline ie. go back to the 90s albeit a 90s powered by a secure civil service intranet routed through secure Singapore-based servers and Singapore-based fibre lines — that will keep out pesky international telcos, global snooping agencies and whoever else wants our data.

So is the best way to keep data secure in the age of the internet to keep data as far away from the internet as possible? That could be a lesson we all might want to think about.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.