Digital Natives Blog
Text of DIT's Response to Second RTI on Website Blocking
CIS had filed a request under the Right to Information Act with the government, asking a number of questions relating to blocking of content under the IT Act. We have reproduced below the response we got from the government.
The Present — and Future — Dangers of India's Draconian New Internet Regulations
The uproar surrounding India's Internet Control Rules makes clear that in the Internet age, as before, the active chilling of freedom of expression by the state is unacceptable in a democracy. Yet if India's old censorship regimes are to be maintained in this new context, the state will have little choice but to do just that. Are we ready to rethink the ways in which we deal with free speech and censorship as a society? Asks Anja Kovacs in this article, published in Caravan, 1 June 2011.
You Have the Right to Remain Silent
India has a long history of censorship that it justifies in the name of national security. But new laws governing the Internet are unreasonable and — given the multitude of online voices — poorly thought out, argues Anja Kovacs in this article published in the Sunday Guardian on 17 April 2011.
DIT's Response to RTI on Website Blocking
For the first time in India, we have a list of websites that are blocked by order of the Indian government. This data was received from the Department of Information Technology in response to an RTI that CIS filed. Pranesh Prakash of CIS analyzes the implications of these blocks, as well as the shortcomings of the DIT's response.
The Making of an Asian City
Nishant Shah attended the conference on 'Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives' organised by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, in Bangkok, where he presented the final paper based on his work in Shanghai. The paper, titled 'The Making of an Asian City', consolidates the different case studies and stories collected in this blog, in order to make a larger analyses about questions of cultural production, political interventions and the invisible processes that are a part of the IT Cities.
Privacy, pornography, sexuality (a video)
The video is an attempt to use the material collected for purposes of provoking a discussion around privacy, pornography, sexuality and technology. It focuses largely on an Indian context, which most viewers would be familiar with. The video is pegged around the ban of Savita Bhabhi – a pornographic comic toon – but uses that to open up a discussion on various incidents and concepts in relation to pornography and privacy across Asia.
Negative of porn
The post deals with what has been written about Savita Bhabhi in an attempt to make sense of her peccadiloes and with the seeming futility of Porn studies located in America to our different reality. I take the liberty of exploring my own experiential account of pornography since I feel that in that account (mine and others) when done seriously, certain aspects of pornography emerge that address questions that are about cinema, images, sex, philosophy and how desire works. The title is mischeviously inspired from Dr. Pek Van Andel's recent video of MRI images of people having sex.
Primer on the New IT Act
With this draft information bulletin, we briefly discuss some of the problems with the Information Technology Act, and invite your comments.
Comments on the Draft Rules under the Information Technology Act
The Centre for Internet and Society commissioned an advocate, Ananth Padmanabhan, to produce a comment on the Draft Rules that have been published by the government under the Information Technology Act. In his comments, Mr. Padmanabhan highlights the problems with each of the rules and presents specific recommendations on how they can be improved. These comments were sent to the Department of Information and Technology.
