Internet Governance Blog
- Censure for its process
- Its (in)compatibility with fundamental rights
- The failure to incorporate the suggestions of the Yashwant Sinha-led Standing Committee to UPA’s NIDAI Bill
- The possibility of surveillance that it presents
- The lack of measures to protect personal information
- Its inadequate privacy safeguards
- The questions around the realisation of its stated purpose.
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Institute a formal redressal system and policy with regard to sexual harassment within ICANN. The policy must be displayed on the ICANN website, at the venue of meetings and made available in delegate kits.
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Institute an Anti Sexual Harassment Committee that is neutral and approachable. Merely having an ombudsman who is a white male, however well intentioned, is inadequate and completely unhelpful to the complainant. The present situation is one where the ombudsman has no effective power and only advises the board.
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Conduct periodic gender and anti sexual harassment training of the ICANN board to help them better understand, recognise and address instances of sexual harassment.
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Conduct periodic gender and anti sexual harassment training for the ombudsman even if he/she will not be the exclusive point of contact for complainants as the ombudsman forms an important part of community and participant engagement
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Conduct periodic gender sensitisation for the ICANN community.
MHRD IPR Chair Series: Information Received from Delhi University
This post provides a factual description about the operation of Ministry of Human Resource Development IPR Chair’s Intellectual Property Education, Research and Public Outreach (IPERPO) scheme in Delhi University.
Identity of the Aadhaar Act: Supreme Court and the Money Bill Question
A writ petition has been filed by former Union minister Jairam Ramesh on April 6 challenging the constitutionality and legality of the treatment of this Act as a money bill. The Supreme Court heard the matter on April 25 and invited the Union government to present its view. It is our view that the Supreme Court can not only review the Lok Sabha speaker’s decision, but should also ask the government to draft the Aadhaar Bill again, this time with greater parliamentary and public deliberation. Vanya Rakesh and Sumandro Chattapadhyay wrote this article on The Wire.
Facebook: A Platform with Little Less Sharing of Personal Information
As Facebook becomes less personal, what happens to digital friendship?
Privacy Issues with DRM
This post has been written by Jalaj Pandey interning at CIS. It elaborates upon the various privacy issues with the Digital Rights Management. The author talks about the various ways in which content producers use DRM as a tool to infringe the privacy of the end users.
Cyber Security of Smart Grids in India
An integral component of the ambitious flagship programme of the Indian Government- Digital India, which paves way for a digital data avalanche in the country, is a well-designed digital infrastructure ensuring high connectivity and integration of services, the potential areas being smart cities, smart homes, smart energy and smart grids, to list a few. Likewise, the 100 Smart Cities Mission envisions changing the face of urbanization in India, to manage the exponential growth of population in the cities by creating smart cities with ICT driven solutions, along with big data analytics. Smart grid technologies are key for both these schemes.
The Aadhaar Act is Not a Money Bill
While the authority of the Lok Sabha Speaker is final and binding, Jairam Ramesh’s writ petition may allow the Supreme Court to question an incorrect application of substantive principles. This article by Amber Sinha was published by The Wire on April 24, 2016.
Can the Matters Dealt with in the Aadhaar Act be the Objects of a Money Bill?
In this infographic, we highlight the matters dealt with in the Aadhaar Act 2016, recently tabled in and passed by the Lok Sabha as a money bill, and consider if these can be objects of a money bill. The infographic is designed by Pooja Saxena, based on information compiled by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Amber Sinha.
Can the Aadhaar Act 2016 be Classified as a Money Bill?
In this infographic, we show if the Aadhaar Act 2016, recently tabled in and passed by the Lok Sabha as a money bill, can be classified as a money bill. The infographic is designed by Pooja Saxena, based on information compiled by Amber Sinha and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.
RTI regarding Smart Cities Mission in India
Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) had filed an RTI on 3 February 2016 before the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) regarding the Smart Cities Mission in India. The RTI sought information regarding the role of various foreign governments, private industry, multilateral bodies that will provide technical and financial assistance for this project and information on Government agreements regarding PPP’s for financing the project.
The Last Chance for a Welfare State Doesn’t Rest in the Aadhaar System
Boosting welfare is the message, which is how Aadhaar is being presented in India. The Aadhaar system as a medium, however, is one that enables tracking, surveillance, and data monetisation. This piece by Sumandro Chattapadhyay was published in The Wire on April 19, 2016.
Online Censorship on the Rise: Why I Prefer to Save Things Offline
As governments use their power to erase what they do not approve of from the web, cloud storage will not be enough.
Aadhaar Act and its Non-compliance with Data Protection Law in India
This post compares the provisions of the Aadhaar Act, 2016, with India's data protection regime as articulated in the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011.
FAQ on the Aadhaar Project and the Bill
This FAQ attempts to address the key questions regarding the Aadhaar/UIDAI project and the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016 (henceforth, Bill). This is neither a comprehensive list of questions, nor does it contain fully developed answers. We will continue to add questions to this list, and edit/expand the answers, based on our ongoing research. We will be grateful to receive your comments, criticisms, evidences, edits, suggestions for new answers, and any other responses. These can either be shared as comments in the document hosted on Google Drive, or via tweets sent to the information policy team at @CIS_InfoPolicy.
Surveillance Project
The Aadhaar project’s technological design and architecture is an unmitigated disaster and no amount of legal fixes in the Act will make it any better.
A Large Byte of Your Life
With the digital, memory becomes equated with storage. We commit to storage to free ourselves from remembering.
Mapping MAG: A study in Institutional Isomorphism
The paper is an update to a shorter piece of MAG analysis that had been conducted in July 2015. At that time our analysis was limited by the MAG membership data that was made available by the Secretariat. Subsequently we wrote to the Secretariat and this paper is based on the data shared by them including for the years for which membership details were previously not available.
Will Aadhaar Act Address India’s Dire Need For a Privacy Law?
The article was published by Quint on March 31, 2016.
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The passage of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016 (will hereby be referred to as “the Act”) has led to flak for the government from privacy advocates, academia and civil society, to name a few.
To my mind, the opposition deserves its fair share of criticism (lacking so far), for its absolute failure to engage with and act as a check on the government in the passage of the Act, and the events leading up to it.
The government’s introduction of the Act as a ‘money bill’ under Article 110 of the Constitution of India (“this/the Article”) is a mockery of the constitutional process. It renders redundant, the role of the Rajya Sabha as a check on the functioning of the Lower House.
Article 110 limits a ‘money bill’ only to six specific instances: covering tax, the government’s financial obligations and, receipts and payments to and from the Consolidated Fund of India, and, connected matters.
The Act lies well outside the confines of the Article; the government’s action may attract the attention of the courts.
Political One-Upmanship
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| Finance Minister Arun Jaitley (left) listens to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan. (Photo: Reuters) |
In the past, the Supreme Court (“the Court”) has stepped into the domain of the Parliament or the Executive when there was a complete and utter disregard for India’s constitutional scheme. In recent constitutional history, this is perhaps most noticeable in the anti-defection cases, (beginning with Kihoto Hollohan in 1992); and, in the SR Bommai case in 1994, on the imposition of the President’s rule in states.
In hindsight, although India has benefited from the Court’s action in the Bommai and Hollohan cases, it is unlikely that the passage of the Aadhaar Act as a ‘money bill’, reprehensible as it is, meets the threshold required for the Court’s intervention in Parliamentary procedure.
Besides, the manner of its passage, the Act warrants
Instead, a part of the Aadhaar debate has involved political one-upmanship between the Congress and the BJP, pitting the former’s NIDAI Bill against the latter’s Aadhaar Act.
While an academic comparison between the two is welcome, its use as a tool for political supremacy would be laughable, were it not deeply problematic, given the many serious concerns highlighted above.
Better Than UPA Bill?
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| The Act may have more privacy safeguards than the earlier UPA Bill. (Photo: iStockphoto) |
And while the Act may have more privacy safeguards than the earlier UPA Bill, critics have argued that they not up to the international standard, and instead, that they are plagued by opacity.
Additionally, despite claims that the Act is a significant improvement over the UPA Bill, it fails to address concerns, including around the centralised storage of information, that were raised by civil society members and others.
Perhaps most problematically, however, the Act takes away an individual’s control of her own information. Subsidies, government benefits and services are linked to the mandatory possession of an Aadhar number (Section 7 of the Act), effectively negating the ‘freedom’ of voluntary enrollment (Section 3 of the Act). This directly contradicts the recommendations of the Justice AP Shah Committee, before whom the Unique Identification Authority of India had earlier stated that enrollment in Aadhaar was voluntary.
To make matters worse, the individual does not have the authority to correct, modify or alter her information; this lies, instead, with the UIDAI alone (Section 31 of the Act). And the sharing of such personal information does not require a court order in all cases.
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| Kanhaiya Kumar speaking in JNU on 3 March 2016. (Photo: PTI) |
These recent events around Aadhaar have only underscored the dire urgency for comprehensive privacy legislation in India and, the need to overhaul our data protection laws to meet our constitutional commitments along with international standards.
TRAI Consultation on Differential Pricing for Data Services - Post-Open House Discussion Submission
The Centre for Internet and Society sent this submission to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) following the Open House Discussion on Differential Pricing of Data Services, held in Delhi on February 21, 2016.
Too Clever By Half: Strengthening India’s Smart Cities Plan with Human Rights Protection
The data involved in planning for urbanized and networked cities are currently flawed and politically-inflected. Therefore, we must ensure that basic human rights are not violated in the race to make cities “smart”.
CIS' Statement on Sexual Harassment at ICANN55
The Centre for Internet and Society
Statement on Sexual Harassment at ICANN55
The Centre for Internet and Society (“CIS”) strongly condemns the acts of sexual harassment that took place against one of our representatives, Ms. Padmini Baruah, during ICANN 55 in Marrakech. It is completely unacceptable that an event the scale of an ICANN meeting does not have in place a formal redressal system, a neutral point of contact or even a policy for complainants who have been put through the ordeal of sexual harassment. ICANN cannot claim to be inclusive or diverse if it does not formally recognise a specific procedure or recourse under such instances.
Ms. Baruah is by no means the first young woman to be subject to such treatment at an ICANN event, but she is the first to raise a formal complaint. Following the incident, she was given no immediate remedy or formal recourse, and that has left her with no option but to make the incident publicly known in the interim. The ombudsman’s office has been in touch with her, but this administrative process is simply inadequate for rights-violations.
Ms. Baruah has received support from various community, staff, and board members. While we are thankful for their support, we believe that this situation can be better dealt with through some positive measures. We ask that ICANN carry out the following steps in order to make its meetings a truly safe and inclusive space:
