We are anonymous, we are legion

The Idea of the Book

nishant — 2012-04-10T09:53:27Z

Its future lies in a trans-media format that is ever evolving, writes Nishant Shah in an article which was published in the Indian Express on April 8, 2012.

If you are a true bibliophile, you have long transcended making mortal judgements about books, based on insignificant factors such as plot, narrative, or writing style. A true bibliophile is in love with the form of the book — the joy that comes from the rustle of a turned page, the euphoria of holding a book in your arms, the satisfaction that rises from watching a tottering stack of books. For hardcore bibliomaniacs, the love is at a sub-molecular level, so to speak, finding their happiness and content in shapes of fonts, thickness of paper, methods of binding, imprints and meta-data that tells its own story. For all these true lovers of books, their affection goes beyond the content of the book. They love the book as an artefact, as an object of desire. It is as if there was a “bookness” to the book that they deeply appreciate.

It is these people, along with many others, who mourn the death of the book in the age of digital mass production. With the advent of the e-book and the ubiquitous presence of reading devices, many have announced the death of the book. The ‘dead-tree book’, as it is often derisively described in many circles, is a thing of the past. As we live in worlds of increasing interface, the surfaces we read on, the way we read, and the forms that we read have undergone a dramatic reconfiguration. Swype-and-touch has replaced turn-and-fold and the book as we know it, is growing extinct.

Professor Bruno Latour — one of the first theorists and critics of digital technologies, large-scale networks, and new methods of knowledge production — from Sciences Po in Paris, during his recent visit to Bangalore, suggested that instead of accepting the imminent death of the book and mourning its demise, it might be more fruitful to look at its future. The digital, he says, does not question the idea of the book, but merely the form. This, for me, is a fascinating idea. We often recognise the book as a form — something that is written, something that is bound, or something that is found in libraries. If you were to define a book, you would talk about the different kinds, shapes, colours and sizes of books but you won’t necessarily be able to explain it. This is because a book is only a material manifestation of a much larger idea and this is what we need to focus on.

The book has seen many transitions in its form from the pre-print, hand-written manuscripts by trained scribes to the print-on-demand paperbacks which can be assembled easily. Technologies have not threatened but actually helped it change, evolve and keep up with the times. When we think of the digital book and the possibilities it offers, these are much more exciting than the rather Luddite lament about how the book is dead.

In the digital medium, the future of multimedia narratives is convergence. An ability to tell stories, record knowledge, share information and make connections through a variety of media forms and styles changes the future of the book. Imagine a book that begins with a text, continues through music, blends into user-generated pictures and ends with a video. Imagine this book being written, not only in different media but also by different people, simultaneously, resulting in a layered palimpsest rather than a static page. Imagine each page and every word on the page not as a fixed thing but one of a series of alternatives. Imagine a book that is written as it is read, and no longer excludes print-challenged or differently-abled people from contributing to the writing, reading and sharing process.

A trans-media format would stay true to the democratic and inclusive vision of a book and correct the limitations of print. Such a book would also free knowledge and information from businesses — let’s not forget that the publishing and education system is a business — and allow a new audience to participate in knowledge production. This is not a mere fantasy. We already have new models such as mash-ups which give us a new logic to sort and store information. Imagine Facebook as a collaborative platform where different information can come together to supplement the traditional book. Wikipedia is a space of knowledge production, which might simulate the older encyclopaedia form, but it is written by unpaid contributors, collaboratively, even as the Encyclopaedia Britannica announces its last ever print publication.

The form of the book is going to change as it has over the last 500 years. However, the idea of the book — a receptacle that contains and records collective wisdom, information, ideas, knowledge, experiences and imagination of humankind – is here to stay. The digital book has to be understood not merely as a digitisation of an older book, but has to be imagined as a smorgasbord of possibilities which will revolutionise the form of the book and bring it closer to its intended vision. It is time indeed to announce, ‘The Book is Dead! Long Live the Book!’

Read the original from the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/idea-of-the-book

Government washes hands of Google's new privacy policy

praskrishna — 2012-04-10T09:40:55Z

The government has more or less washed its hands of internet giant Google's new privacy policy that is being criticised in Europe and elsewhere, but wants Indian residents to watch out for themselves, writes Jayadevan in this article published in the Economic Times on April 10, 2012.

Google's new privacy policy provides information on how personal information is collected, processed and secured, as required by relevant Indian laws. "The end users, however, need to fully understand the privacy policy of Google, the consequences of sharing their personal information and their privacy rights before they start using online services," Sachin Pilot, India's minister for information technology, stated in Rajya Sabha on March 30.

Ever since Google came out with a unified privacy policy in January, it has been facing criticism from many users and privacy advocates, especially in Europe where privacy is a fundamental right. The new policy unified separate privacy polices relating to nearly 60 of Google's services.

The new policy also lets the separate Google services, such as Gmail, Google Search or Youtube, share data among each other. In Europe, Google is facing potential sanctions or even fine over its new privacy policy.

Section 43A of the India's amended Information Technology Act (2000) has established a legal framework for data privacy protection in the country. The rules notified last year explain security practices to be followed and the need for guarding sensitive personal information. The Act also requires Indian corporations to publish a privacy policy.

"Google has published a Privacy Policy on their website," said the minister. "Any change in the privacy policy is not within the purview of amended Information Technology Act 2000," Pilot added. Venkatesh Hariharan (Venky), head of public policy and government affairs at Google India, has left the company last month and did not want to comment.

According to the Pilot, while France's independent privacy watchdog, the CNIL (nationale de I'informatique et des libertes) has said that the changes to Google's privacy policy do not comply with the European law, rectification of conflict between Google, an American company and European directive on data protection is not within the purview of the Indian government.

CNIL, the data protection watchdog in France had asked Google to answer 69 questions including what it does with the data collected from users and how long it is retained to better understand the consequences of the new policy for Google users.

Experts agree Google privacy policy is in compliance with Sec 43A of IT Act but cautioned that it may not be enough. "Section 43A does not have all the privacy safeguards that exist for citizen in developed countries," said Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society.

Abraham advocates the creation of a privacy commissioner. "It is important to have a independent and autonomous regulator who can respond on a proactive basis when confronted with evidence of abusive practices," he said.

Legal provisions will have to enable the creation of such a regulator, says cyber law expert Vakul Sharma. "You can not create a regulator out of thin air. You should have legislation for privacy. In India we do not have any such legislation," said Sharma.

The IT act classifies information into two - personal information and sensitive personal information. Safeguards under the section 43A and rules apply to sensitive personal information which includes biometric information, information related to health, passwords, sexual orientation and financial information among others.

"Users must be aware that Google's new policy does not have room for categorization according to Indian laws," says Sharma. "It is a plain vanilla document. The users need more," he added.

Read the original published in the Economic Times on April 10, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/govt-washes-hands-of-google-privacy-policy

Look Who’s Chasing... The Twitter God

praskrishna — 2012-04-10T09:24:52Z

The celebrity isn’t the known face, it’s the Twitter handle that gets the following, writes Arpita Basu in this article published in Outlook's April 2012 issue. Sunil Abraham is quoted in this article.

If Abhishek Asthana felt the jitters as he prepared to face an internship interview on his B-school campus, this 35-character nugget of information would have lifted his spirits: He had a fan on the interview panel. “One of the panelists asked me, ‘Are you the same @GabbbarSingh from Twitter? I’ve been following you for a long time’!” recalls Abhishek, still chuffed. At 25, and in just over two years on Twitter, this Gabbbar Singh’s answer to ‘Kitne aadmi the?’ would be a formidable 19,540. That’s his follower count: people who hang on to his every word, retweeting, replying and generally relishing the irreverence that has made stars out of tweeters like Abhishek.

Twitter, the microblogging site that turned six last month, has raised a smart brood of commentators who go from politics to policies to pop culture and back, riding on 140 characters, trailed by a few thousand followers. Neither netas nor abhinetas, they are rabble-rousers and opinion-makers in their own right. Executives, entrepreneurs, tech geeks, students and creative types, these are ordinary people who have found anything but ordinary fame on the strength of their one-liners alone.

Take @BollywoodGandu, a blockbuster of a Twitter handle with a 57,000-strong audience, including, till recently, big-ticket followers like Karan Johar and Abhishek Bachchan. “They unfollowed me for reasons only they know,” shrugs the man behind the tweets, who’s used to having celebs follow him and then dropping him when they “don’t like” what he writes (Here’s a teaser: “Aishwarya looks like a mannequin in #Robot posters. Oh wait, on second thought, that kinda makes sense”.) The 30-year-old tweet icon, an industry insider who swears by Amol Palekar comedies, relishes the effect he has on filmwallahs; film crews have been known to scroll through his timeline during shooting breaks. “It makes me want to storm in like Russell Crowe in Gladiator and yell ‘Are you not entertained?’!” he adds dramatically.

Entertained, yes. Enlightened? You bet. These new stars on the media horizon, explains Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society, “provide information, comments, and a sense of humour and cynicism that is missing from mainstream media”. With Twitter launching its Hindi version in September last year, language too is no longer a barrier. Again, on this turf, the threshold for entry is much lower. “Unlike TV,” Abraham elaborates, “where you have to look and dress a certain way and then say something interesting, these tweeters hold people’s attention sitting in their homes. We don’t even know what they look like.”

Which only makes them more relatable. After all, they are swimming in the same fish bowl as everyone else, right? And feeling the same fears when the water rises too high above the head. Only, they express it way better. Snappy, sharp and always questioning, their unforgiving, emperor-has-no-clothes approach scores with people fed up with what Twitter veteran Ramesh Srivats calls “curated mainstream media”.

Photograph by Amit Haralkar

Varun Grover @JayHind 11724 followers
Famous tweet Keep army busy. Give them an IPL team of their own.

It’s no wonder that popular media wants a piece of them too. Varun Grover, a 32-year-old engineer-turned-satirist whose witty observations made the Twitter handle @JayHind a hit, landed a TV deal: to script, along with his team, the spoofy The Late Night Show on Colors. “Tweets are my research; a scratchboard for the gags,” Varun reveals. The show, which carries forward JayHind TV’s online sketches, looks at current goings-on with a shovelful of salt. “Having grown up in Lucknow, analysing politics came naturally to me,” says Varun.

There’s more that comes naturally to the Tweet brigade—the art of getting Twitterverse’s 12 million inhabitants (that’s just counting India) to listen, for one. Writer and IT professional Arnab Ray @greatbong (see accompanying column) recalls how his legion of followers grew over three years, drawn in by his “funny, spontaneous, politically incorrect tweets that honour no holy cows”. “I am not a celebrity, so there was no opening day surge for me,” Arnab quips, conceding that his reputation as Greatbong the blogger preceded him on Twitter. For Rake$£ Jhunjhunwala ['Fake Jhunjhunwala'] @jhunjhunwala too, tweeting about blog posts got his foot in the door back in 2009, when very few had warmed to Twitter in India. Today, some 43,000-odd Tweeple prick up their ears to catch what this trader-investor, video-gamer and combat sports freak has to say during his “recreation hours”. Blogging also helped Priyanka Sachar @twilightfairy increase her tweet-worth. Priyanka passed up eleven-and-a-half years as a computer engineer to become a fine art wedding photographer, and regularly tweets links to her work. She hardly blogs now, having “lost patience with lengthy posts”, and can’t say enough about the mercurial nature of Twitter, though her strike rate of 70-plus tweets on a good day says enough.

Photograph by Narendra Bisht

Priyanka Sachar @twilightfairy 14913 followers
Famous tweet ...markets are full of Easter eggs already. On Navratre. That’s the way the Indian cookie crumbles.

“We have to stay in the moment. Or if possible, before the moment,” offers Utsav Chakraborty @SatanBhagat, who counts power-lister Anand Mahindra amongst his fans. The 21-year-old media grad, “bottom-tier stand-up comic” and er... not the biggest fan of Chetan Bhagat, distills the essence of a quality tweet: “A view is just a view without analogies and wordplay. No one likes raw chicken. You have to marinate, cook, season, garnish and serve it on a warm plate. We’re all assembly line gourmet chefs.”

Each, though, has perfected his or her own specialty dish, be it satire, humour, current affairs, business dos, boudoir don’ts.... Then there is Twitter’s tryst with literature—Twisters. Twitter stories penned, like their nomenclature, by Arjun Basu, a Montreal-based writer and publishing veteran in his 40s, whose Twitter readership stands at 1,46,895 and counting. “After my first tweet wishing I had ordered another vodka on a flight, I wrote a story, which came in at 140 characters with some editing. Within a day, I had written a few and then I became a bit obsessed.” That’s understating it: Arjun has written 5,000 Twisters since. One of them—“They tolerated the ennui of their jobs, bought off by promises of spectacular riches sometime in the future. At retirement, they bought guns”—has been made into an award-winning short film, Life. He hopes to compile his Twisters into a book—or at least put them on posters or coffee mugs.

Another compilation of tweets worth a shot—@Kweezzz trivia. Conscientiously hosting tweet-sized quizzes on everything from Guatemalan currency to the inventor of earmuffs to the actress whose “toothbrush fell in the toilet”, Kweezzz is instant food for the brain.

There’s grist for gossip mills too. Malini Agarwal @MissMalini has much to reveal about “Bollywood and the Bombay party circuit unplugged”. With tidbits from fashion shows, who-wore-it-best couture contests, and shirtless celeb twitpics (sample this: “Lean, mean and undressed Rana Daggubati”) she keeps her tweet wattage high. Devotees leave posts at her shrine on the hour.

Photograph by Nilotpal Baruah

Ramesh Srivats @rameshsrivats 35798 followers
Famous tweet Two weapons against corruption: Lokpal and Chappal

For Ramesh Srivats, it’s all in a day’s work to have fans come up to him to say hello. Characteristically, he makes light of it: “My bald head makes me easy to recognise!” Utsav’s celeb moment translates into “an occasional free meal or a job offer”. “Other than that, my ‘celebrity’ mostly extends to Linkedin and Google+ invites,” he says modestly.

For some Twitterati, think Pragmatic Desi, The Comic Project, Bombay Addict and C_gawker, it’s enough for just the pseudonyms to be recognised. They refuse to step out from behind their famous handles. Hear it from BollywoodGandu: “I never thought anonymity would be a criterion for popularity, but I was wrong. As Indians, our first response to anyone usually is ‘Tu kaun hai?’. And when you don’t know the answer, it adds to the mystery,” he says. It adds on immunity too, as you throw that virtual chappal. Anonymity and accountability are, after all, inversely linked. Social scientist Shiv Visvanathan insists that the freedom of expression which Twitter affords exists only up to a point: “If you keep making outrageous comments, there will come a quiet point when people will say ‘See you later’. The loudmouths disappear over time. What works best is self-policing.”

Photograph by Jignesh Mistry

Abhishek Asthana @GabbbarSingh 19540 followers
Famous tweet No. of hours you spend wearing shorts in a day/no. of hours wearing trousers = work/life balance index

Besides its obvious merit, the anonymous Twitter handle is also a great creative opportunity. No wonder the handles, alter-egos for their owners, are attention magnets themselves. Abhishek recalls how starting the Gabbbar Singh account to write a blogpost about a Twitter-savvy cast of Sholay, got him 50 followers in five minutes flat, and a thousand in 20 days.

Bollywood Gandu’s irresistible handle, he says, was inspired by a meeting with “a certain Bollywood star and his/her friends (read chamchas)”. He adds, “The irony is that the real ‘gaali’ in my handle is ‘Bollywood’.” Many in his Twitter circle would have noted that already. Twitter’s wit wagon, after all, is teeming with like-minded tweeple, befriending each other, following each other. Ashish Shakya, for instance, follows Gursimran Khamba and Overrated Outcast, who, in turn follow him; Ramesh Srivats and Lakshmipathy Bhat @bhatnaturally follow each other. Yes, it is a small world. But by no means a closed one. Most of them also follow those who could become potential ‘material’ for tweets. JayHind follows news sites to keep himself updated, just as diligently as he keeps up with “unintentionally funny people who falter almost daily” (read celebs).

With the variety and versatility on offer, it’s a goldmine out there for anyone who can keep pace with a tweet a minute. The format helps, of course, as Abraham points out: “It forces people to be brief. You don’t have to wade through too much information to find the next big thing.” Or star. After all, in the democratic republic of Twitter, all it takes to go from voice in the wilderness to vox popular is to say something worthwhile. And find people who’ll gladly repeat it after you.

Read the original in Outlook

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/look-who-s-chasing-twitter-god

Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet 2011

Rishabh Dara — 2012-04-21T18:05:58Z

Intermediaries are widely recognised as essential cogs in the wheel of exercising the right to freedom of expression on the Internet. Most major jurisdictions around the world have introduced legislations for limiting intermediary liability in order to ensure that this wheel does not stop spinning. With the 2008 amendment of the Information Technology Act 2000, India joined the bandwagon and established a ‘notice and takedown’ regime for limiting intermediary liability.

On the 11th of April 2011, the Government of India notified the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011 that prescribe, amongst other things, guidelines for administration of takedowns by intermediaries. The Rules have been criticised extensively by both national and international media. The media has projected that the Rules, contrary to the objective of promoting free expression, seem to encourage privately administered injunctions to censor and chill free expression. On the other hand, the Government has responded through press releases and assured that the Rules in their current form do not violate the principle of freedom of expression or allow the government to regulate content.

This study has been conducted with the objective of determining whether the criteria, procedure and safeguards for administration of the takedowns as prescribed by the Rules lead to a chilling effect on online free expression. In the course of the study, takedown notices were sent to a sample comprising of 7 prominent intermediaries and their response to the notices was documented. Different policy factors were permuted in the takedown notices in order to understand at what points in the process of takedown, free expression is being chilled.

The results of the paper clearly demonstrate that the Rules indeed have a chilling effect on free expression. Specifically, the Rules create uncertainty in the criteria and procedure for administering the takedown thereby inducing the intermediaries to err on the side of caution and over-comply with takedown notices in order to limit their liability and as a result suppress legitimate expressions. Additionally, the Rules do not establish sufficient safeguards to prevent misuse and abuse of the takedown process to suppress legitimate expressions.

Of the 7 intermediaries to which takedown notices were sent, 6 intermediaries over-complied with the notices, despite the apparent flaws in them. From the responses to the takedown notices, it can be reasonably presumed that not all intermediaries have sufficient legal competence or resources to deliberate on the legality of an expression. Even if such intermediary has sufficient legal competence, it has a tendency to prioritise the allocation of its legal resources according to the commercial importance of impugned expressions. Further, if such subjective determination is required to be done in a limited timeframe and in the absence of adequate facts and circumstances, the intermediary mechanically (without application of mind or proper judgement) complies with the takedown notice.

The results also demonstrate that the Rules are procedurally flawed as they ignore all elements of natural justice. The third party provider of information whose expression is censored is not informed about the takedown, let alone given an opportunity to be heard before or after the takedown. There is also no recourse to have the removed information put-back or restored. The intermediary is under no obligation to provide a reasoned decision for rejecting or accepting a takedown notice. The Rules in their current form clearly tilt the takedown mechanism in favour of the complainant and adversely against the creator of expression.

The research highlights the need to:

increase the safeguards against misuse of the privately administered takedown regime;

reduce the uncertainty in the criteria for administering the takedown;

reduce the uncertainty in the procedure for administering the takedown;

include various elements of natural justice in the procedure for administering the takedown; and

replace the requirement for subjective legal determination by intermediaries with an objective test.

This executive summary is a research output of the Google Policy Fellowship 2011. The Centre for Internet & Society was the host organization. For the entire paper along with references, please write to rishabhdara@gmail.com or sunil@cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/intermediary-liability-in-india

GIGA International Conference Series - 1

praskrishna — 2012-04-03T06:18:28Z

The Institute of Global Internet Governance and Advocacy (GIGA) at NALSAR University will hold the first International Conference in association with Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEIT) of Government of India on the theme "Revisiting Internet Governance - Lessons Learnt and Road Ahead" at NALSAR University of Law, Justice City Campus, Shameerpet on April 5 & 6 of 2012.

Lex Witness, India's first magazine on legal and corporate affairs is the media partner for the conference, Sunil Abraham will be speaking in this conference,

The first International Conference on Internet Governance of GIGA aims to:

To map the emergence of Internet Governance globally in the last two decades and to analyse its high points and low points in terms of its development, dynamism, diversity, divide and deficit.
To map the multiple definitions of Internet Governance and its rapid evolutionary trajectory of consolidating convergence and confronting challenges of divergence.
To critically evaluate the creative disruption of processes of accountability, empowerment and governance processes.
To levitate the legislative landscape for connecting the real life citizens and virtual life netizens.
To reshape the emergent issues of privacy vs. social responsibility, freedom of expression vs.social & cultural harmony, self conduct vs. legislative intervention, adolescence vs. adult behavior.
To reconcile the sovereign principles with Universal principles.

Conference Schedule

Day 1, April 5, 2012

S.No.	Time	Inaugural
	9.00-10.15	Welcome Address by	Prof. V. C. Vivekanandan Director, GIGA
		Address by	Prof. Faizan Mustafa Vice Chancellor, NALSAR
		Address by	Mr. N. Ravi Shanker Additional Secretary, DOT, Govt. of India
		Address by	Dr. Ajay Kumar Jt. Secretary DEIT, Govt. of India
		Key Note Address by	Mr. J. Satyanarayana Secretary, DEIT Govt. of India (to be confirmed)
		Vote of Thanks by	Prof. M. Sridhar Faculty, GIGA

	10.15-10.45	Coffee Confluence
		Theme	Chair / Speaker
1.		Internet-Comparative Perspective Opening Remarks from the Chair	Mr. Ajit Balakrishnan Chairman-Board of Governors, IIM Calcutta & CEO-Rediff.com
		A. Internet as key to development-an African perspective	Mr. Jean Jacques SUBRENAT ALAC Member, ICANN
		B. Adding a Billion-Challenges in Asia Pacific world	Dr. Katim Seringe Touray Former Board Member, ICANN
		C. Indian policy response to Internet Governance	Prof. Hong Xue Director- IIPL- Beijing
		Netizen speak	Dr. Govind Sr.Director, DEIT, CEO-NIXI
		Closing remarks of the Chair
		Theme	Chair / Speaker
2.		Internet Governance & Technology Opening Remarks from the Chair	Mr. Sanjay Jaju Secretary (IT) AP Govt. (to be confirmed)
		Key Note Address gTLDs- Managing the genie out of the bottle-Techno-Legal issues	Mr. N. Ravi Shanker Additional Secretary, DOT
		A. The business of gTLDS-Roses & Thorns	Prof.V.C.Vivekanandan Director, GIGA
		B. IDN Challenges – Unity in Diversity- Indian Response	Mr. Akshat Joshi GIST, CDAC-Pune
		Closing remarks of the Chair

		Lunch
		Theme	Chair / Speaker
3.		Internet Governance & Society Opening Remarks from the Chair	Prof. Ranbir Singh Vice Chancellor, NLU, Delhi
		Key Note Address Balancing the Privacy-Transparency Conundrum in Internet Governance	Mr. Carlton A. Samuels ALAC Member, ICANN
		A. Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva- Trinity as the State	Mr.U.Ramamohan SP, Cyber Crimes, A.P.
		B. Digital Natives Vs. Digital Naivety	Mr. Sunil Abraham Executive Director, CIS
		C. A development agenda for global Internet governance	Mr. Parminder Jeet Singh Executive Director, IT for Change
		Netizen Speak
		Closing remarks of the Chair

		Coffee Confluence
		Theme	Chair / Panelist
4.		Panel Panorama - Internet Governance - Crossroads or crossing the Road Opening Remarks from the Chair
		Panelists - 15 minutes each	Prof. Amita Dhanda Professor of Law, NALSAR Dr. Anindya Sircar AVP & Head IP , Infosys Prof. Srividhya Ragavan Professor of Law, University of Oklahoma College of Law Prof. S. Matilal RGSOIPL-IIT, Kharagpur
		Netizen Speak
		Closing Remarks of the Chair

Day 2, April 6, 2012

1.	9.00-9.05	Internet Governance & Law Opening Remarks from the Chair	Prof. R. Venkata Rao Vice Chancellor NLSIU, Bangalore
	9.05-9.25	Key Note Address Whose Privacy is it Anyway?	Prof. Graham Greenleaf Co-Director, Aust LII
	9.25-9.40	A. Netizen vs. Citizen-the Sumo Game	Prof.Izumi AIZU TAMA University,Japan
	9.40-9.55	B. Number or Name- Shift in Domain Names	Dr. V. K. Unni Associate Prof., IIM,Calcutta
	9.55-10.10	C. Dial M for Internet Governance	Mr. Pavan Duggal Advocate, Supreme Court of India
	10.10-10.25	D. Chartering rights in Unchartered waters	Mr.Na.Vijaya Shankar Cyber Law Consultant
	10.25-10.35	Netizen Speak
	10.35-10.45	Closing Remarks of the Chair

	10.45-11.15	Coffee Confluence
		Theme	Chair / Speaker
2.	11.15-11.20	Internet Governance & Media Opening Remarks from the Chair	Prof.V.Vijaya Kumar Vice Chancellor, TNDALU-Chennai
	11.20-11.40	Keynote Address Social Media- a New Wine in a New Bottle	Prof. Ang Peng Hwa NTU, Singapore
	11.40-11.55	A. The Republic of Facebook –The Bill of Frights	Prof.V.C.Vivekanandan Director, GIGA
	11.55-12.10	B. Objecting the Objectionable-the chronicles of criminology	Dr.K.V.K.Santhy Co-investigator, GIGA
	12.10-12.25	C. Street Talk vs. Social Talk-Loud Decibels	Prof. M. Sridhar Co-investigator, GIGA
	12.25-12.35	Netizen Speak
	12.35-12.45	Closing remarks from the Chair

	12.45 -2.00	Lunch
		Theme
3.	2.00-2.05	Wrap Up – Internet dreams & delusions – Setting the agenda for the new decade Opening remarks from the Chair	Prof. S. Sivakumar Director In-charge, Indian Law Institute
	2.05 – 3.20	Panelists -15 minutes each	Mr.G.R.Raghavender Registrar of Copyrights Copyright office Ms. Ankhi Das Head of Public Policy, Facebook India Ms. Tulika Pandey Addl.Director- DEIT Mr.R.Muralidharan Advocate- Bangalore Mr. Raman Jit Singh Chima Policy Analyst , Google India Pvt Ltd
	3.20 –3.30	Netizen Speak
	3.30 – 3.40	Closing remarks of the Chair
	3.40 – 4.00	Summing Up - The Hyderabad Declaration	Prof.V.C.Vivekanandan Director, GIGA

	4.00	Coffee Musings & Farewell

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/giga-conference

Global Censorship Conference

praskrishna — 2012-03-30T11:34:07Z

The Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression at Yale Law School is holding a conference on global censorship from March 30 to April 1, 2012, at Yale Law School. The programme is sponsored by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and Thomson Reuters.

"This conference is the first major event for the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression, and it brings together an exciting group of thinkers from law, political science, computer science, business and the non-profit sector to discuss the lessons of the past few years,” explained Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin, director of the Abrams Institute and the Information Society Project. “We think the study of free expression in the digital age should be international and interdisciplinary."[1]

Rishabh Dara, Google Policy Fellow who worked at CIS office in Bangalore on freedom of expression and internet-related policy issues is participating in the event as a speaker in the panel on Case Studies of Censorship. The panel will explore recent instances of censorship in the United States, Egypt, Syria, Brazil, and India and the common themes and important differences that emerged.

This conference will consider how censorship has changed in a networked world, exploring how networks have altered the practices of both governments and their citizens. Panels will include discussions of how governments can and do censor and how speakers can command technical and legal tools to preserve their ability to speak. The conference will conclude with a discussion of new controversies in censorship, including laws designed to prevent online bullying and intellectual property infringement.

Agenda

Friday March 30, 2012

2:00	Begin Registration
3:15 – 4:45	The Means of Change, Familiar and New (co-sponsored by Sponsored by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights) In the popular story of the political upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa, information technology stands out as the new factor that was critical to rapid mass mobilization for demanding change. The media have been credited with making popular demands for change contagious. Enthusiasts for the potential of technology to foster progressive change have labeled these apparently sudden developments a Facebook revolution. Governments responded by seeking to curtail the use of mobile phones and the Internet. What role has technology played in igniting, sustaining and shaping recent political changes in the Arab world? Anupam Chander, Professor of Law, University of California, Davis and Director, California International Law Center Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation John Pollock, journalist
5:00– 6:30	Keynote Lecture (co-sponsored by Sponsored by the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights) Irwin Cotler, Canadian Parliament, former Attorney General of Canada
6:30– 9:00	Reception for Panelists of the Global Censorship Conference

Saturday March 31, 2012

9:00 – 10:00	Registration and Breakfast
10:00– 11:30	Panel One: Old and New Forms of Censorship Years ago, activists met in person to plan protests and quietly shared subversive texts. Now, events can be planned over social networking sites, and arguments for change are posted online. How have governments responded to these changes? How have activist practices and governments’ reactions changed the way we conceptualize censorship? Jack Balkin, Yale Law School Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School Navid Hassanpour, Yale Political Science Deptartment Rebecca MacKinnon, Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation
11:45 – 1:15	Panel Two: Technical Architectures of Censorship There are a number of choke points across the Internet and a number of different censorship mechanisms that can be deployed at various points across the network. Censorship can be executed at the router level, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) level, the Internet Content Provider (ICP) level, or the device level. Additionally, countries can employ a number of different technologies at each level. This panel will explore the many technical options for censorship and the strategic value of different choices. Laura DeNardis, Associate Professor of Communication at American University, and Affiliated Fellow, Information Society Project at Yale Law School Nagla Rizk, American University in Cairo Hal Roberts, Fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Technology Ashkan Soltani, Independent Researcher and Consultant on Privacy and Security
1:15 – 2:15	Lunch
2:15 – 3:45	Panel Three: Case Studies of Censorship In the wake of censorship both domestically and abroad, many questions emerged about how the censorship was executed, what effects it had, if and how activists were able to route around the it, and how, if it all, it was eventually stopped. This panel will explore recent instances of censorship in the United States, Egypt, Syria, Brazil, and India and the common themes and important differences that emerged. Sherwin Siy, Deputy Legal Director and the Kahle/Austin Promise Fellow at Public Knowledge Lina Attalah, Journalist, Managing Editor of Al-Masry Al-Youm Anas Qtiesh, Blogger, Editor of Global Voices Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza, Vice-Coordinator of the Center for Technology & Society (CTS) at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) Law School Rishabh Dara, Researcher at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
4:00 – 5:30	Panel Four: Technical Methods of Circumventing Censorship New technology may provide governments with new tools to censor, but it also creates opportunities for speakers and “hactivists” everywhere. How can individuals evade identification online and access blocked content? Can activists circumvent attempts to shut down the internet during periods of political unrest? What new methods are being developed to preserve free speech online? Roger Dingledine, The Tor Project Peter Fein, Telecomix Alex Halderman, University of Michigan, Dept. of Computer Science Sascha Meinrath, Open Technology Initiative Director, New America Foundation Wendy Seltzer, Senior Fellow, Information Society Project at Yale Law School
6:00 – 9:00	Dinner for Speakers

Sunday, April 1, 2012

9:00 – 9:30	Breakfast
9:30 – 11:00	Panel Five: Legal Solutions to Censorship Given the way censorship technologies have slowly crept into acceptable use because of concerns like piracy, child pornography, or national security, there is much debate about the role and capacity of law in combatting these new, digital forms of government censorship, domestically and internationally. This panel will discuss if and how legal solutions to censorship can be deployed most effectively. Derek Bambauer, Brooklyn Law School Jim Dempsey, Vice President of Public Policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology Molly Land, New York Law School Linda Lye, ACLU Northern California Jillian York, Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
11:15 – 12:45	Panel Six: New Controversies in Censorship Does new technology change the appropriate scope of free expression rights? Can policing intellectual property infringement burden free speech interests? Does surveillance ever have a censoring effect? This panel will wrestle with whether a variety of government activities constitutes inappropriate censorship or necessary actions to protect the public interest. Rebecca Bolin, Fellow at Information Society Project, Yale Law School Mark MacCarthy, Vice President for Public Policy, Software and Information Industry Association; Adjunct Professor, Communication, Culture and Technology Program, Georgetown University Preston Padden, Senior Fellow at the Silicon Flatirons Center and an Adjunct Professor at the University Of Colorado's Law School and Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program David Post, Temple University, Beasley School of Law Christopher Soghoian, Graduate Fellow, Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research, Indiana University
12:45	Bagged Lunch Available

[1].Global Censorship Conference to be Held March 30-April 1 at Yale Law School | Yale Law School, last accessed on March 30, 2012, http://www.law.yale.edu/news/15140.htm

Read the original posted in Yale Law School website

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/global-censorship-conference

Data protection experts slam state for sending mass SMSes

praskrishna — 2012-03-27T03:46:00Z

Experts in the field of data protection, privacy law and media have criticised the West Bengal government's mass SMS sent to individuals, companies and media houses through private mobile networks last Friday. Lara Choksey reports this in an article published in the Statesman on March 25, 2012.

The government's use of private data in order to spread political messages is ethically dubious and dangerous, say some. The SMS indirectly refers to The Telegraph's publication of the Poonam Pandey tweet, warning against the transmission of “provocative and indecent photographs for hurting the religious sentiments of people and disrupting communal harmony.” It urges recipients to “frustrate the designs of … unscrupulous people and maintain peace and communal harmony,” and is signed by “Mamata Banerjee, Chief Minister”.

Speaking to The Statesman on Saturday, Mumbai-based media lecturer Ms Geeta Seshu identified two issues with the government sending out political messages through mobile phone networks.

Firstly, from an ethical standpoint, the unchecked freedom of mobile phone companies to hand out private data is “completely wrong”, she said.

Secondly, the use of government funds for such dissemination needs to be transparent. If the state government has used public funds to distribute its message through a mobile phone network, then this information should be readily available, said Ms Seshu.

The Telecom Regulation Authority of India's (Trai) unsolicited commercial communications regulations allow unsolicited advertising through mobile phone networks.

Mr Apar Gupta, partner of Delhi-based law firm Advani and Co., explained, “The regulations are not wide enough to prohibit communications from a political party.” He observed, “Using SMS messages is a very efficient propaganda tool because so many people have access to mobile phones.”

Mobile phone networks such as Vodafone make it clear in their privacy policies that the personal data of its customers “may be used for inclusion in any telephone or similar directory or directory enquiry service provided or operated by us or by a third party” (source Vodafone website).

Any third party ~ governmental or corporate ~ can therefore access the company's directory of private mobile numbers at the discretion of the network in question.

It is not yet clear which government department coordinated the SMS, or what funds were used to cover the costs. Representatives from the ministry of information and cultural affairs were not able to shed a light on the matter. “I know that a message was sent out,” said the I & CA director Umapada Chatterjee, "But it was not sent from this department. I do not know that information.”

Some commentators did not condemn the government's SMS. Delhi High Court lawyer and cyber law expert, Mr Praveen Dalal, criticised the publication of the Poonam Pandey tweet on the grounds of it violating the due diligence guidelines of the Cyber Law of India. He commented, “If casual and careless publications … continue, there would be no other option left for the government but to regulate their affairs in a more intrusive manner.”

However, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, Mr Sunil Abraham, called the state government's use of unsolicited SMS a “clear abuse of the powers afforded by elected office.” Mr Abraham explained that elected representatives would be justified in such measures, and in utilising public funds, in the event of a disaster, or when public order, public health or national security are compromised.

“However in this case, the government is abusing the provisions of the law and using this incident as a pretext to threaten media professionals with surveillance and to intimidate for the purposes of reigning in free speech,” he told The Statesman. The chief minister was unavailable to make a comment on the matter.

Read the original published in the Statesman

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/data-protection-experts-slam-state-for-sending-mass-smses

Statutory Motion Against Intermediary Guidelines Rules

pranesh — 2012-04-03T09:35:41Z

Rajya Sabha MP, Shri P. Rajeev has moved a motion that the much-criticised Intermediary Guidelines Rules be annulled.

Motion to Annul Intermediary Guidelines Rules

A motion to annul the Intermediary Guidelines Rules was moved on March 23, 2012, by Shri P. Rajeeve, CPI(M) MP in the Rajya Sabha from Thrissur, Kerala.

The motion reads:

"That this House resolves that the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011 issued under clause (zg) of sub-section (2) of Section 87 read with sub-section (2) of Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 published in the Gazette of India dated the 13th April, 2011 vide Notification No. G.S.R 314(E) and laid on the Table of the House on the 12th August, 2011, be annuled; and

That this House recommends to Lok Sabha that Lok Sabha do concur on this Motion."

This isn't the first time that Mr. Rajeeve is raising his voice against the Intermediary Guidelines Rules. Indeed, even when the Rules were just in draft stage, he along with the MPs Kumar Deepak Das, Rajeev Chandrashekar, and Mahendra Mohan drew Parliamentarians' attention to the rules. Yet, the government did not heed the MPs' concern, nor the concern of all the civil society organizations that wrote in to them concerned about human rights implications of the new laws. On September 6, 2011, Lok Sabha MP Jayant Choudhary gave notice (under Rule 377 of the Lok Sabha Rules) that the Intermediary Guidelines Rules as well as the Reasonable Security Practices Rules need to be reviewed. Yet, the government has not even addressed those concerns, and indeed has cracked down even harder on online freedom of speech since then.

Fundamental Problems with Intermediary Guidelines Rules

The fundamental problems with the Rules, which deal with objectionable material online:

Shifting blame.

It makes the 'intermediary', including ISPs like BSNL and Airtel responsible for objectionable content that their users have put up.

No chance to defend.

There is no need to inform users before this content is removed. So, even material put up by a political party can be removed based on anyone's complaint, without telling that party. This was done against a site called *CartoonsAgainstCorruption.com". This goes against Article 19(1)(a).

Lack of transparency

No information is required to be provided that content has been removed. It's a black-box system, with no one, not even the government, knowing that content has been removed following a request. So even the government does not know how many sites have been removed after these Rules have come into effect.

No differentiation between intermediaries.

A one-size-fits-all system is followed where an e-mail provider is equated with an online newspaper, which is equated with a video upload site, which is equated with a search engine. This is like equating the post-office and a book publisher as being equivalent for, say, defamatory speech. This is violative of Article 14 of the Constitution, which requires that unequals be treated unequally by the law.

No proportionality.

A DNS provider (i.e., the person who gives you your web address) is an intermediary who can be asked to 'disable access' to a website on the basis of a single page, even though the rest of the site has nothing objectionable.

Vague and unconstitutional requirements.

Disparaging speech, as long as it isn't defamatory, is not criminalised in India, and can't be because the Constitution does not allow for it. Content about gambling in print is not unlawful, but now all Internet intermediaries are required to remove any content that promotes gambling.

Allows private censorship.

The Rules do not draw a distinction between arbitrary actions of an intermediary and take-downs subsequent to a request.

Presumption of illegality.

The Rules are based on the presumption that all complaints (and resultant mandatory taking down of the content) are correct, and that the incorrectness of the take-downs can be disputed in court (if they ever discover that it has been removed). This is contrary to the presumption of validity of speech used by Indian courts, and is akin to prior restraint on speech. Courts have held that for content such as defamation, prior restraints cannot be put on speech, and that civil and criminal action can only be taken post-speech.

Government censorship, not 'self-regulation'.

The government says these are industry best-practices in existing terms of service agreements. But the Rules require all intermediaries to include the government-prescribed terms in an agreement, no matter what services they provide. It is one thing for a company to choose the terms of its terms of service agreement, and completely another for the government to dictate those terms of service.

Problems Noted Early

We have noted in the past the problems with the Rules, including when the Rules were still in draft form:

Other organizations like the Software Freedom Law Centre also sent in scathing comments on the law, noting that they are unconstitutional.

We are very glad that Shri Rajeeve has moved this motion, and we hope that it gets adopted in the Lok Sabha as well, and that the Rules get defeated.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/statutory-motion-against-intermediary-guidelines-rules

Is your facebook page your mini resume?

praskrishna — 2012-03-26T07:27:43Z

As privacy debates heat up across the world, Bangaloreans reveal the trend of employers asking job aspirants for their Facebook IDs and passwords has caught on here too. When Adil Pasha, 24, revealed at an advertising job interview that his main strength was creativity, his interviewers asked for his FB password to check his latest updates.

This was published in IBNLive on March 26, 2012 . Sunil Abraham is quoted in this.

They rejected him, as he was going through a break-up and had put up song lyrics as his status message. On the other hand, Sukanya Srinivasan, 19, got an internship chance at a leading IT firm solely based on her FB photo albums.

“A company recently rejected my application after looking at the number of people I’d blocked on my chat list. They thought I didn’t have good interpersonal skills. I might be a friendly, harmless flirt, but the company might think I could sexually harass women employees. If they see my photos at a party, they might think I’m an alcoholic,” said Kiran Giridhar (name changed), who has attended over 12 interviews in the last two months, where his social life mattered more.

Recently, Facebook chief privacy officer Erin Egan said they had seen a distressing increase in reports of employers seeking to gain access to people’s Facebook profiles or private information.

“The most alarming of these practices is the reported incidents of employers asking prospective or actual employees to reveal their passwords,” she wrote on the website’s privacy page. The controversy is now being fought on moral and ethical grounds.

"This is a privacy infringement but there is no provision in the law (IT Act-2008) that prohibits employers from asking for personal information. This is happening with the willingness of potential candidates. If a person finds it unacceptable, he/she shouldn’t share the password. Background checks are common as some companies deal with sensitive information. So it’s not illegal, but intrusive. I think some power relationships can be abused if they cross the social networking barrier — like a boss-employee and teacher-student relationship. Corporate policy should prevent such things," explained Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/facebook-page-mini-resume

Why your Facebook Stalker is Not the Real Problem

nishant — 2012-03-21T05:02:16Z

We live in networked conditions. This is a statement that can now be taken at face-value, and immediately explains our highly connected, inter-meshed environments finds Nishant Shah in this article published in FirstPost on March 20, 2012.

Especially within the digital world, the World Wide Web has become synonymous with social networking systems, where increasingly all our access, communication and interaction is located within a series of interconnected networks.

From the imagination of the web as a complex network, we have evolved to looking at the web as facilitating networks where different relationships, transactions and connections can be mapped and managed. This is why we often have romantic imaginations of networks as free, open, collaborative, shared spaces of interaction and expression.

However, we have reached a stage where this idea of a network as a liberatory space is under threat. Even as I write this, Internet Service Providers are now planning to set up sophisticated, automated systems that will do a deep-spy on your data transfer to see if you are sharing files (sometimes also called piracy) using the Internet.

These systems will now keep track of all your digital transactions and will monitor what you consume, who you talk to and determine whether you are a good ethical subject who is only using the Internet in ways that the powers to be want you to.

For me, this particular networked condition of being constantly monitored and watched is scary. And it surprises me that this invasive process is less in public attention than Google’s recently changed privacy policies or the TOS-in-progress nature of privacy on Facebook.

This is because the ubiquitous presences of networks in our lives have made them transparent to us – we do not think of the networks themselves as entities but as spaces where interactions with other objects is possible. Hence, if I ask you, right now, to name the top 5 entities that you interact with the most on Facebook, I am sure you will be able to name them. More probably than not, these top 5 entities with people that you have formed strong Facebook Friendships with.

In fact there are platforms designed to let you know who you are talking with most on your networks. Network influence measurement indices by services like Klout are able to tell you not only who you talk to but also what are your key areas of influence. This is a way by which the network becomes invisible to us. It hides the fact that the thing that talks to you the most on Facebook is Facebook itself.

The marketing of Facebook might tell you that you are talking to other human beings, but reality is that the network is more than the sum total of all human beings on the system. Just look at the amount of information Facebook produces on your behalf and to you. Notifications for adding friends, for liking people, for people writing to you, for people commenting on your walls and posts, form more than 50% of the information traffic on Facebook or social networking systems.

This information is produces and shared by scripts, coded bots, algorithmic applications, and non-human entities that not only support and sustain the network but are also significant members of the networks.

This is the actual networked condition – where the processes and entities that make the networks possible, produce an illusion of seamless communication and interaction, while performing and extraordinary amount of information and for you.

This blindness to our own ‘networkedness’ has crucial ramifications for our online activities because it makes us oblivious to questions of privacy, control, safety and trust. We have privacy settings to protect us from human entities on Facebook. There is very little concern about the non-human entities who store, distribute and use the data that we produce. If we don’t even know what these watchers are, how do we protect ourselves from being watched? What happens when between you and your ‘friend’, is a series of silent interceptors who are recording and using your data without your knowledge?

Being in a network is like being in a glass-house. We cannot see the walls and hence, we presume that we need our privacy from the other inhabitants of the same house. However, in that, we forget that the walls are watching, and that there are invisible watchers beyond the walls, who are in control.

It is time to make our networks visible again. It is time to realise that what we really need to be afraid of, on social networking systems, is the social network itself, and not the mythical stranger who wants to stalk us or that unwanted friend you want to exclude from your information sharing.

Privacy and safety are not merely compromised at the interface, where information might leak and travel into zones outside of your knowledge and control. The real questions of being safe are actually in the protocols and designs of the network itself.

We need to start looking at larger invasive policies exercises by the different invisible actors like the ISP, ICT ministries, corporate policies, design choices and architecture of interception that sustain the networks we so gladly embrace.

Nishant Shah is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society and recently edited a 4 volume book on youth, technology and change, titled ‘Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?’

Read this in FirstPost

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/facebook-stalker-is-not-real-problem

Click, Play, Watch

praskrishna — 2012-03-20T12:52:44Z

Filmmakers are casting the net for viewers and opting for online releases to reach out to a wider audience, finds Rinky Kumar in this article published in MidDay on March 18, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in this.

Till some time ago, the movie-going experience was a means for people to spend quality time with their loved ones. An evening planned in detail (right from booking the tickets to buying snacks), followed by dinner was de rigueur. Today, however, that has been replaced by an evening indoors where you can watch a commercial film or a critically-acclaimed documentary within the confines of your home, thanks to online releases.

A growing phenomenon

Take the case of Marathi movie Jana Gana Mana, which released online as well as in theatres on January 26. It wasn't the only one. Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ashvin Kumar released his documentary Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror free of charge on YouTube on the same day. The very next month, debutant director Adeeb Rais released his film Kuch Spice To Make It Meetha, starring Purab Kohli, online on February 29.

Jana Gana Mana was the first commercial Marathi film to see an online release

Director Amit Abhyankar's Jana Gana Mana, which revolved around a teacher's relationship with the kids of the Faasi Pardi tribe in rural Maharashtra, garnered as many as 2,000 views within four days of its online release. He says, "We tied up with geodesi.com, which owns filmorbit.com, and ensured that viewers could log on to the site, select Jana Gana Mana and watch the film. While Indian viewers were charged Rs 30, people abroad had to pay $2.99. Surprisingly, only 30 per cent of the audience comprised Indians, the remaining 70 per cent were expatriates from far-flung countries like Tanzania and Israel."

A still from Inshallah, Kashmir: Living Terror, which was released online by director Ashvin Kumar to bypass censorship that his previous two films faced

In fact, Abhyankar has been flooded with requests to screen his movie abroad. He claims that apart from the Maharashtra Mandal of Los Angeles, which approached him to screen the film, 28 shows of the movie have been lined up in various parts of the world till May 5.

Kuch Spice To Make It Meetha recently received the YouTube Bronze Award for Most Trending Video

Likewise, Kumar's documentary, which sees Kashmiris open up about the brutality they suffer at the hands of militants and the Indian state alike, was supposed to become pay-per-view after the first 24 hours. "But when I saw the overwhelming response (over 50,000 views in three days), we kept it free for over a week. These figures are quite impressive since it's an 80-minute film and it's a known fact that India doesn't boast speedy Internet connections. But the fact that people had the patience to watch the film is heartwarming. Also, we didn't promote the film at all, I only posted about it on Facebook," enthuses Kumar.

Rais's film got as many as 1 million hits within three days of its release. Recently it also received the YouTube Bronze Award for the Most Trending Video. This medal is given to videos that have gained huge attention over a certain span of time and are currently seeing exceptional growth in viewership.

A new medium

Why are filmmakers choosing the online medium to release their movies? Some say it gives them an opportunity to showcase their work to the audience without shelling out a lot of money, while for others it is a way of making a statement. After his two earlier films, Inshallah Football and Dazed in Doon were banned, Kumar chose the Internet to screen Inshallah Kashmir to bypass the censor authorities, take a stand against them as well as give viewers the real picture of what is happening in the strife-torn valley. "There were several reasons why I uploaded the film online. Firstly, I wanted to make a statement that pre-censorship of any art form is unnecessary in this age of the Internet when everything can be accessed easily online. Secondly, viewers didn't have to pay for watching it, and that way more people saw what was actually happening in Kashmir," he explains.

For Abhyankar, the primary motive was to reach out to a larger audience. "It's well-known that distribution of Marathi films isn't great. I was very clear that my movie should reach out to more people and shouldn't just be limited to a theatrical release." Twenty-something Rais realised that releasing Kuch Spice To Make It Meetha on the Internet was the only way for him to showcase his work as well as reach out to a large audience. "Since it is a 25-minute short film, I didn't have the option of releasing it commercially. Either I could release it online or screen it at film festivals. The movie is a quirky take on a young commitment-phobic man, so I didn't think it was a good fit for the festival circuit."

According to Rais, he understood that it wasn't an easy task to make an impact in the online world, given the sea of videos that are uploaded every minute. So he decided to market his film well. He explains, "Because the movie was made on a limited budget, I had to seek sponsorship. I tied up with around 17 or 18 brands, including Tata Housing, Bharat Matrimony.com, Miss Malini.com and Upper Crust to market the film through online contests."

Sociological change

What has led to this phenomenon? Sunil Abraham, Executive director of Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, explains, "The times are changing. Earlier, creative artistes depended on intermediaries like studios, TV channels and theatres to screen their work and connect with viewers. Now, they are looking at the online medium to connect with the audience directly."

Kumar couldn't agree more. He opines that he had uploaded Inshallah Kashmir with an open mind and accepted the bouquets and brickbats with equal aplomb. "The Internet is a fairly democratic medium. Your audience shares views, opinions and abuses. While some loved the movie, others called me an Islamic fundamentalist. But I didn't mind as it was their honest opinion."

According to Abhyankar, the online medium is a boon for filmmakers as it is the only way for them to earn a considerable profit individually without sharing it with other entities. "When your movie is screened at theatres, apart from paying the satellite agencies for beaming the film, you have to incur expenses for screen prints and advertising. Later, you have to recover your money from exhibitors, which can be a long-winded process. In case of an online medium, the money is transferred directly to your account. Apart from converting the film into a format that can be viewed by everyone, you don't have to invest too much money."

Filmmakers also love that there is no pre-screening process involved online. "Only after the movie is uploaded and a user comments against objectionable or defamatory content, can it be removed from the website," informs Abraham.

Looking ahead

With the expanding reach of the Internet, filmmakers believe this trend will only grow. On their part, they are looking to explore it further. Enthused by the response to Jana Gana Mana, Abhyankar is now planning to make it available offline too. He shares, "Right now we are in talks with a company that has a unique technology whereby you don't have to visit the site and stream the movie. The technology enables viewers to get offline copies of the movie, which you can copy onto your pen drive. Once you connect your pen drive to the computer, the software will automatically connect you to the site and you have to just make the payment. In a few months time, we are also looking at releasing ad-supported versions of the film wherein viewers don't have to pay to watch the movie but will have to see it along with all the ads." As Rais, who is working on another project, Beyond Hatke, which will have an online release in October this year, says on a parting note, "Today people no longer have to go to theatres to watch a film, they can see movies on their laptops, mobile phones, while doing household chores and travelling to work. The Internet is definitely a boon for everyone."

The history of online releases

Rajshri Films released its Shahid Kapoor-Amrita Rao-starrer Vivah simultaneously in cinema halls and on the production company's official site -- Rajshri.com in 2006. The site served one million streams within seven days of its release. Each stream was priced at $9.99 approximately and the company managed to earn Rs.4.5 crore in the first week itself.
Siddharth-starrer Striker had a theatrical release in India and premiered exclusively for its foreign audiences through YouTube in 2010. While the movie was available for rent on YouTube in the US, in other foreign countries, people could view it for free on Studio18's YouTube channel.
After selling the film's soundtrack exclusively through the digital medium, the makers of F.A.L.T.U, released their movie simultaneously in Indian theatres and on the online medium for foreign audiences in 2011. Viewers had to pay a booking fee of $2.89 in order to watch the stream on www.zeetv.com/faltu.

Read the original published in MidDay

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/click-play-watch

Save Your Voice — A movement against Web censorship

praskrishna — 2012-03-13T11:44:27Z

‘Save Your Voice (SYV)’ is a movement against Web censorship and its main demand is the repealing of the Information Technology Act, said SYV founders, Aseem Trividi, a cartoonist, and Alok Dixit, a journalist, on Monday.

DNA Correspondent covered a press conference held on March 12, 2012 in Bangalore. Sunil Abraham was quoted in the story.

Trivedi’s website — www.cartoonistagainstcorruption.com — was banned during Anna Hazare’s movement. Trivedi said: “Mumbai police banned the website without any prior notice and cases of ‘treason’ were also filed. The website was banned without a judicial order and I haven’t received an explanation about the crime committed.”

Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society, said the private sector does not protect the freedom of expression.

Read the original published by Daily News & Analysis on March 13, 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/save-your-voice-2014-a-movement-against-web-censorship

India’s Big Bet on Identity

praskrishna — 2012-03-07T05:44:12Z

The world’s largest biometric authentication system reaches its first major milestone, but lots of challenges remain, writes Joshua J. Romero in ieeespectrum. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this story which was featured in March 2012 edition.

Driving around Bangalore, it’s immediately clear that the infrastructure hasn’t kept up with the IT boom in this once-sleepy South Indian city. Auto rickshaws, scooters, and motorcycles squeeze into a tight phalanx at each red light and choke the air with exhaust. Construction, such as the concrete supports of the new metro rail line that looms overhead, causes detours everywhere, and in spots the entire road abruptly disintegrates into gravel.

But something miraculous happens as you make your way south, past the outer ring road. A ramp lifts a select few vehicles out of the weaving traffic and onto an elevated tollway, where you suddenly have a bird’s-eye view of the urban landscape. This is the road to Electronic City, an oasis of glass and steel high-rises overlooking pristine black asphalt paths that snake through the perfectly manicured lawns of tech companies like Wipro, IBM, and Infosys Technologies.

“If you can have such good roads in the Infosys campus, why are the roads outside so terrible?” That’s the common question foreign visitors would ask Nandan Nilekani, one of the company’s cofounders. “Politics” was his usual reply, according to Nilekani’s 2008 book, Imagining India. Now the man who has been called the Bill Gates of India has jumped into politics to try to use what he learned at the IT giant to transform the dysfunctional country that lies beyond the borders of Electronic City.

Since July 2009, Nilekani has been a cabinet minister, leading hundreds of engineers and entrepreneurs as chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). By the most conservative estimates, at least a third of the country’s 1.2 billion citizens live below the poverty line and outside the formal economy. The UIDAI is expected to connect those hundreds of millions of people to government programs, save public money, reduce fraud and corruption, and foster new business opportunities—all by creating an unprecedented biometric system and outside the formal economy. The UIDAI is expected to connect those hundreds of millions of people to government programs, save public money, reduce fraud and corruption, and foster new business opportunities—all by creating an unprecedented biometric system.

“On the one hand, within India and across the world, people of Indian descent have done some remarkable work,” says Nilekani. “And on the other hand, here is a country that needs to solve some very basic problems. This project marries these two worlds.” UIDAI plans to use fingerprints and iris scans to assign every person in the country a unique 12-digit ID number that can be verified online. It’s one of the biggest IT projects in the world, and getting bigger: By early February, the UIDAI had issued 130 million ID numbers, and it can issue up to a million more IDs every day. The agency has set up 36 000 enrollment stations staffed by 87 000 certified enrollment operators. In India the project is called Aadhaar, which means “foundation” or “support,” because it’s meant to be a fundamental technology platform that will enable dozens of new public and private services to be created.

That’s if it all works. It’s easy to list major challenges: How exactly do you collect biometrics from every single person in the world’s second most populous country, especially those living at the margins? How do you keep bad data from getting into the database in a country rife with corruption? And how can you build the entire system around online authentication in a country where fewer than one in 20 people have access to the Internet?

The answers to these questions are getting more than the usual amount of scrutiny, because a lot of political fortunes are riding on the UIDAI.

The program has been heavily supported by the ruling Indian National Congress party; Nilekani was appointed by the prime minister himself, Manmohan Singh. But Singh and his Congress party have had a difficult time enacting many of their biggest policy goals, and the UIDAI has increasingly become the target of criticism.

Earlier this year, the whole scheme seemed in imminent danger of collapse, when a parliamentary committee killed the bill that would have given the program statutory authority, and a political turf war erupted between the UIDAI and the National Population Register, another government project collecting biometrics for the national census. But by late January the two sides had reached an agreement to share biometric data collection, and Aadhaar is once again moving full steam ahead with a new mandate and an estimated budget this year of 15 billion rupees [PDF] (about US $300 million).

Photo: Joshua J. Romero

EXISTING DOCUMENTS: A poster lists the variety of IDs a  person can use to register for an Aadhaar number.

To understand why the government has invested so heavily, it helps to know the current state of affairs in India. Aadhaar is meant to provide a form of identification that’s free, national, impossible to counterfeit—and available to everyone. “There’s an ID divide,” Nilekani explains, between people who have multiple official IDs and the hundreds of millions who have none. Only about 60 million people in India have passports, he says, and only about 100 million have photo ID bank cards. The most prevalent document is a voter ID card, which has been issued to about 700 million people, covering just over half of the country. But these and the rest of the official IDs created by the country’s vast bureaucracy all have shortcomings.

The primary reason for creating a biometric ID system is to give India’s poorest citizens better access to an array of welfare programs. India spends about 2 percent of its gross domestic product on social programs like the Public Distribution System, which provides subsidized rice, wheat, and other staples, and a rural employment scheme that guarantees 100 days of work. But all such programs suffer from severe “leakage”: According to the World Bank, corrupt officials and middlemen siphon away 59 percent of the money before it reaches the intended recipients. Eventually, the government hopes to provide funds directly to each person who needs them.

Most states issue ration cards, but they usually aren’t valid in other states. An official ID that can be used throughout the country is increasingly important as more and more people move away from their hometowns to follow employment, Nilekani says.

Complicating the problem further, existing ID cards are easy to duplicate. Some states have more names on their food ration lists than there are people living in the state. To fight counterfeiting, the Aadhaar team decided to use biometrics instead of issuing just another ID card. From the beginning, they consulted biometric experts, used existing standards when they could, and studied similar systems like the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, run by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

One thing the team realized early on is that a single biometric measurement wasn’t enough to guarantee uniqueness. In proof-of-concept studies, researchers determined that only by using all 10 fingerprints and a scan of both irises could error rates be kept manageable. Adding iris scans also makes the program more inclusive for people whose fingerprints have been worn down by manual labor.

Photos, clockwise from left: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times/Redux; Joshua J. Romero (2)
NECESSARY GEAR: Each enrollment station has the same basic set of equipment, including an iris scanner [top], a fingerprint scanner [bottom right], a webcam and light [bottom left], a laptop, a second monitor for the resident to view, and a scanner and printer to handle documents.

Getting an Aadhaar number is not a quick process. One Friday after midnight, I watch dozens of families wait patiently in a municipal building where only half the lights are on and there’s always a baby crying. While Anurodh Kanchan waits, he explains that he came at this hour because he’d heard the lines were even longer during the day. He’d already been once before to schedule this appointment. Now his 7-year-old daughter dozes on his wife’s shoulder as the whole family waits another half an hour for the enrollment agent to return from a break.

Hiring and training people to work as agents has been one of the project’s biggest logistical challenges. The UIDAI outsources enrollment to “registrars”—often state governments or banks—which in turn hire accredited agencies to actually set up and staff the centers. The agencies get paid a flat rate for each successful enrollment, as do the agents they hire. A coordinator for one of the largest agencies told me that his organization had significantly overestimated how many enrollments an agent could complete in a day. UIDAI says that an average station (see photos, “Necessary Gear”) can process each enrollment in under 10 minutes, but in the days I spent observing, it wasn’t uncommon for the process to take twice as long. And if you’re an agent looking at a line of people stretching out the door, it’s easy to see how you might begin to rush through your tasks.

That’s why enforcing quality is left to a piece of software known as the enrollment client, installed on each agent’s laptop. The program manages every step of the process and was developed jointly by engineers at UIDAI and MindTree, an Indian IT company. Because enrollment often takes place in remote locations with no Internet access, the client must be fully independent and be able to run off a single laptop. The developers also had to make sure that the enrollment client could work seamlessly with any of the 11 biometric devices from various manufacturers that had been certified for use. And the initial version had to be built fast: MindTree won the contract at the end of April 2010, and the UIDAI wanted to enroll the first resident by that August.

MindTree met the deadline, and the client it designed now manages to prevent and correct most errors an enrollment agent might make. In addition to a simple quality check, the software looks for self-consistency—for instance, verifying that each fingerprint isn’t coming from the operator or another recently enrolled resident and that all 10 fingerprints and two irises are distinct from each other. If something goes wrong in a biometric capture, the software tells the operator how to correct it—for instance, it can distinguish between a facial photo that’s too dark and one in which the person was photographed at the wrong angle.

Still, over the last 21 months, the software engineers have had to continually improve the program to address new challenges encountered in the field. For example, when the UIDAI began enrolling people in the Punjab region of North India, where many men wear long beards and large turbans, enrollment agents had a hard time taking a photo that the software considered acceptable: The turban would be interpreted as an unacceptable background, or the automatic cropping feature would crop around the turban instead of the face. The software team was able to quickly tweak the parameters and release a new version of the client so that enrollment could continue.

It isn’t just the biometric collection that’s tricky. A resident must also supply basic demographic data—name, age, gender, and address. Residents can fill out paper forms in any of the 16 official Indian languages, which agents must first transfer to the computer and then translate into an English version of the form. This is by far the most time-consuming part of the process, and MindTree has tried to speed it up by building transliteration into the client software. But Indic languages have many variations—some are written right to left, and many use unique character sets. Still, the agent is expected to check the results and clean up minor mistakes.

There are obviously both privacy and security concerns when you’re collecting personal data from more than a billion people. “You can’t change your biometrics,” points out Sunil Abraham, the executive director at the Center for Internet and Society, in Bangalore, so if they become compromised, it’s a difficult problem to fix.

Among the precautions the UIDAI takes is to encrypt all data as soon as they’re collected. The data can be decrypted only by UIDAI servers, so the records aren’t even accessible to the operator or enrollment agency that collected them. At the end of each day, all the encrypted enrollment data are stored on USB flash drives, and the drives are transported to a place with Internet access so the data can be uploaded to UIDAI’s servers. It’s in the best interests of the enrollment agencies to safeguard the data, because otherwise they won’t get paid.

From the enrollment centers the action moves to the racks of servers at the UIDAI Central Information Data Repository, which is also in Bangalore. Here is where deduplication—checking each new enrollment against every other record in the database—will arguably make this identity scheme rise above the rest. Ensuring that no person can get two numbers is key to making biometrics a worthwhile investment. A few years ago, one Indian state collected biometrics for everyone below the poverty line, but it didn’t have the technology or a plan to prevent duplicates. It ended up capturing 1.2 times the population, which resulted in a significant leakage of benefits.

Many critics, including members of Parliament, have doubted that it’s even possible to deduplicate records from the entire Indian populace. It’s certainly a big task. In order to issue 1 million Aadhaar numbers in a single day, the current maximum rate, the data center must conduct 100 trillion person matches. To improve this process, the UIDAI came up with an unusual arrangement. Rather than hiring a single firm for the job, it awarded the project to three contractors, each responsible for processing a portion of the enrollments, with the overlapping records used to compare performance between the systems. This arrangement lets the UIDAI know if a system isn’t working correctly and also gives the companies a financial incentive to improve their software—they’ll get to process more records, and get paid more, if their products perform better. The vendors were even required to use the same kind of hardware to build their systems, so the agency isn’t tied to any one company.

In late January, the UIDAI released a report [PDF] that for the first time detailed the results of this deduplication effort. There are two primary factors that determine the accuracy of a biometric system: the false-positive rate, which in this case is how often a newly registered person is incorrectly judged to be already enrolled, and the false-negative rate, which is how often true duplicates are not recognized as such. To measure the false-positive rate, the UIDAI tested 4 million unique records against a subset of the enrollment database containing 84 million records: Of the unique records, 2309 were falsely rejected, for a false-positive rate of 0.057 percent. The agency also tested 31 399 known duplicates. The system caught all but 11, for a false-negative rate of 0.035 percent.

The false-positive rate applies to the total number of records in the database. As that number grows, the rate should increase in a linear fashion, because there are more opportunities for false matches. The false-negative rate, on the other hand, applies only to the small minority of enrollments that really are true duplicates (the UIDAI estimates that these make up only 0.5 percent of all incoming enrollments). Because the false-negative rate doesn’t depend on the total number of records, it should remain steady unless more people try to enroll multiple times.

R.S. Sharma, the director general of UIDAI, says that preventing all duplicates with technology alone is impossible. There are some people who just can’t be uniquely identified through biometrics, because the data for them aren’t good enough—children under age 5, for instance, and people with multiple disabilities. That’s why the responsibility for accuracy and uniqueness isn’t all left up to the software. Several full-time employees manually review the roughly 0.2 percent of cases that the software can’t handle, resolving errors and looking for evidence of fraud.

Even if the system isn’t perfect, it’s likely to be much better than any existing alternative, simply because it will eliminate “ghost identities,” says M.R. Madhavan, who works at the Centre for Policy Research, in New Delhi. “At least people who died in 1995 or 2005 will not get into the system,” he says.

Photo: Joshua J. Romero

AUTHENTICATION TERMINAL: Widespread use of Aadhaar will  rely on biometric terminals, like this prototype at MindTree.

Now that the UIDAI has shown it can collect biometric and demographic data and eliminate duplicate enrollments, much of the attention will shift to the authentication system, where people can prove their identity with just the swipe of a finger. Such systems are still under development, so most residents I met weren’t clear about the benefits of the program. When I asked people why they were enrolling, they often had vague reasons: “It might make it easier to get my benefits,” said one middle-aged woman in Bangalore. “I heard you’ll need it to buy heating gas,” said another woman. “I think it’s mandatory,” an elderly man told me. Nilekani thinks that getting authentication services up and running will be the best way to demonstrate the power of the entire project.

Here’s how such a futuristic system might work: Walking up to a wirelessly connected terminal at a local shop, a person will type in his name and Aadhaar number, and then he’ll scan his fingerprints. The data will be sent to a central database, where the Aadhaar number will be used to locate his record. The submitted name and biometric data will be compared to those on file, and the software will determine whether they match.

The UIDAI imagines that such biometric terminals will eventually be ubiquitous. The first devices deployed will likely be micro-ATMs in rural shops. These machines process transactions electronically, just like a full-size ATM, except they don’t store and dispense cash—that gets handled from the shopkeeper’s till. The hope is that such systems will deliver financial services to the 40 percent of the Indian population who have never had bank accounts. When people enroll for Aadhaar, they simply need to check a box and an Aadhaar-enabled bank account will be created for them.

In January, the UIDAI began a pilot project in the state of Jharkhand, where workers in the rural employment program could collect cash payments by scanning their fingerprints at a micro-ATM. Another pilot program in Maharashtra transferred small amounts of money to individual Aadhaar numbers, showing that bank servers could be easily linked with the UIDAI system.

The authentication system is already available as an application programming interface (API), which means it won’t be limited to just government programs and banks. Private service providers could use it to verify new customers as well. Take India’s vaunted mobile-phone culture: Phone companies are currently required to collect and retain significant documentation for every person they sell a SIM card to, as I found out in the two days I spent collecting the photos and local references I needed to get one myself. “If you look at any service provider, they’re not going to offer the mobile-phone service unless they verify who you are,” says Bala Parthasarathy, an entrepreneur who worked in Silicon Valley but came back to India to volunteer on the project for a year. Parthasarathy says that using Aadhaar for identity verification could provide the telephone companies with major savings.

Still, setting up a nationwide network of biometric terminals has plenty of its own challenges. First, India will need better connectivity. Wireless voice networks now cover most of the country, but wireless data networks have trailed behind. Current penetration of 3G is mostly just in the cities, says Debabrata Das, an IEEE member and a professor of electrical engineering at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, who has been studying the network challenges of authentication as a technical advisor for the state of Karnataka.

The API will also need to be flexible enough to handle variations in the demographic data that are submitted. The system can’t enforce strict matches: Many Indians use initials in their names, and there is no guarantee that they will always spell their names the same way in English. Further, sometimes a married woman will use her father’s family name instead of her husband’s. Because of the ambiguity in names and addresses, the database must be able to perform partial and fuzzy matches. Eventually, Sharma says, the UIDAI hopes to be able to do database matching for all the Indian languages as well, so the API will continue to undergo revisions.

Now the UIDAI must wait for its partners to begin taking advantage of the system, and Nilekani admits that starting up such services is largely beyond his control. Cooperation with other agencies and industries is all part of Nilekani’s approach to how government initiatives should work. “The big thing to my mind has been, How do you create a model of change, and how do you carry a lot of people with it? How do you think this through in a way that everyone comes on board?” he says. In building the project to this point, he’s managed to bring, if not everyone, then certainly a pretty diverse crowd: technical experts; national, state, and local officials; banks and businesses; and all those millions who willingly wait in line for hours.

“Everyone puts their own aspirations on it…like Obama,” he jokes. But the downside of being so inclusive is that as the project matures, it may be difficult to keep all the interested parties happy, and there’s bound to be disappointment if the project fails to achieve all its lofty ambitions.

The project has made it this far by adapting quickly as problems arise. “Think of it as multigeneration, continuous improvement,” Nilekani says. “You launch and get feedback and you get criticism. You need to build a rapid feedback loop, which is what we’ve built.”

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/big-bet-on-identity

International Conference on Mobile Law

praskrishna — 2012-04-03T08:24:37Z

Pranesh Prakash spoke in the panel on Mobiles - Privacy and Social Media on March 1, 2012.

Draft Agenda

March 1, 2012

9:00am to 9:30am	Registration
9:30am to 10:45am	Inauguration Session
10:45am to 11:15am	Icml Tea
11:15am to 11:45am	Session I: Mobile law- An introduction
11:45am to 1:15pm	Session II: Mobile Revolution, Mcommerce and Crimes
1:15pm to 2:00pm	Icml Lunch
2:00pm to 3:15pm	Session III: Mobiles - Privacy & Social Media
3:15pm to 3:30pm	Icml Tea
3:30pm to 4:45pm	Session IV: Mobiles & Security
4:45pm to 6:00pm	Session V: Safe Harbour Protection for Mobiles Service Providers In India

March 2, 2012

9:30am to 11:00am	Session VI-Mobile Banking & Payments
11:00am to 11:30am	Icml Tea
11:30 am to 12:15pm	Session VII: Mobile Law Challenges in India
12:15pm to 1:30pm	Icml Lunch
1:30pm to 2:15pm	Session VIII: Mobile Governance
2:15pm to 3:30pm	Icml Tea
3:30pm to 3:45pm	Session IX: Internet Governance In The Mobile Ecosystem
3:45pm to 5:00pm	Session X : 2G Spectrum Allocation: Post Supreme Court Judgment- Challenges & Opportunities
5:00pm	Valedictory Function

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Venue: ASSOCHAM House, 47, Prithvi Raj Road, New Delhi, India

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/intl-conferernce-on-mobile-law

Secure IT 2012 — Securing Citizens through Technology

praskrishna — 2012-04-28T04:06:47Z

The event is co-organised by DST and NSDI, Govt. of India in partnership with Elets Technomedia Pvt. Ltd. on March 1, 2012 at Claridges in New Delhi.

Draft Agenda

9.00 am – 9.30 am	Registration & Tea
9.30 am – 11.00 am	Inaugural Session

Securing Citizens through Technology

The SecureIT 2012 Inaugural Session would present an overview of the security scenario in the country, and place the use of ICT towards ensuring national security centrestage. The inaugural would also highlight the use that ICT is being put for in effective disaster management, minimising material as well as human loss.

The session would aim at identifying a policy roadmap towards making effective use of ICT for the purposes of national security, well-being of citizens and businesses in times of disaster and an uncertain external environment and identify the major policy objectives for the sector as a whole.

Introductory Remarks: Dr Ravi Gupta, CEO Elets Technomedia and Editor-in-Chief, egov
Welcome Address: Dr M P Narayanan, President, Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies
Inaugural Address: Anil K Sinha, Vice Chairman, Bihar State Disaster Management Authority, Government of Bihar – Chief Guest, SecureIT 2012

Panel Discussion:

S Regunathan, Former Chief Secretary, Government of NCT of Delhi
R S Sharma, Director General, UIDAI
Shankar Aggarwal, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Defence, Government of India
Shambhu Singh, Joint Secretary (North East), Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India
Ajay Sawhney, CEO, National e-Governance Division, Government of India
Major General (Dr) R Siva Kumar, Head, (NRDMS), Government of India

11. 00 am – 11.30 am	Networking Tea
11.30 am – 1.30 pm	Technical Session 1

Information Security – Securing Networks, Communications, Data and Applications

In the modern Information Age, knowledge is power like never before. A robust, secure communications network is not only desired, it is an absolute imperative in order to allow efficient functioning of the state. The communications networks have to be secured from state and non-state actors inimical to India. This session would highlight some major threats to the national communications infrastructure and the policies being adopted to counter these threats.

Chair: Ravi S Saxena, Additional Chief Secretary, DST, Government of Gujarat
Key Note Speaker: Dr Gulshan Rai, Director General, CERT-In

Distinguished Panellists:

S K Basu, Vice President, NIIT Technologies
Manas Sarkar, Head Pre-Sales (India & SAARC), Trend Micro
Ruchin Kumar, Principal Solution Architect, India and SAARC, Safenet India Pvt Ltd
Dr Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, Data Security Council of India
Rajan Raj Pant, Controller, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of Nepal
Prof. Anjali Kaushik, Management Development Institute, Gurgaon

1.30 pm – 2.30 pm	Lunch
2.30 pm – 5.00 pm	Technical Session 2

ICT in National Security and Policing

India faces a multiplicity of security challenges from within and without. Conventional responses to these challenges are no longer adequate and technology is being increasingly deployed to make the nation safer and more secure for residents, visitors and businesses. The legal framework has also been modified to incorporate modern technological advances.

The MHA has embarked upon a major project – Crime and Criminal Tracking System (CCTNS) that is expected to bring about a major overhaul of the policing system of the country. In this session, CCTNS and state adaptations of ICT in policing would be discussed along with an overview of technological advances in the field of security.

Chair: S Suresh Kumar, Joint Secretary (Centre-State), Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India

Distinguished Panellists:

NSN Murty, General Manager, Smarter Planet Solutions - India/ South Asia, IBM
Col Vishu Sikka, (Retd) General Manager – Defence, Aerospace & Public Security, SAP India & Subcontinent
Joachim Murat, Director of Sagem Morpho Security Pvt Ltd.
Hemant Sharma, Vice- Chair, BSA India Committee
Raj Prem Khilnani, DGP (Homeguard and Civil Defence), Maharashtra
Rajvir P Sharma, Additional Director General of Police, Bangalore Metropolitan Task Force
Loknath Behra, IGP, National Investigation Agency
Purushottam Sharma, IGP, State Crime Records Bureau, Madhya Pradesh
Ranjan Dwivedi, IGP, UP Police
Sanjay Sahay, IGP, Karnataka State Police

5.00 pm – 5. 30 pm	Networking Tea
5.30 pm – 7.00 pm	Technical Session 3

Managing Information for Safety and Security

In the modern age, ICT is deployed in a variety of ways for enhancing citizen safety and security. ICT is being widely used for disaster management, urban planning, census operations etc.

In this session, discussions would highlight some path-breaking uses of ICT for enhancing citizen safety in a number of diverse settings.

Chair: N Ravishanker, Additional Secretary, Universal Service Obligation Fund, DIT, Govt of India

Distinguished Panellists:

Sandeep Sehgal, IBM, VP, Public Sector, India and South Asia
Sanjeev Mital, CEO, National Institute of Smart Governance (NISG), Government of India
Dr R C Sethi, Additional Registrar General of India
Maj Gen R C Padhi, Assistant Surveyor General, Survey of India
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Center For Internet Society
V S Prakash, Director, Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre, Karnataka
Rajiv P Saxena, Deputy Director General, National Informatics Centre, Government of India
Jay Kay Gupta, Fire Chief, Delhi Development Authority

7.00 pm onwards

Valedictory Session: Way Ahead High Tea

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/secure-it-2012