We are anonymous, we are legion

When Whistle Blowers Unite

sunil — 2012-03-21T10:17:48Z

Leaking corporate or government information in public interest through popular Web service providers is risky but Wikileaks.org is one option that you could try out.

Leaking corporate or government information in public interest in the age of Satyam has new challenges. You couldn't just upload it to a blog, social networking website or even a document management system like Google documents. Google, Yahoo and most other Web service providers nearly always comply with the national law and cooperate with enforcement agencies. In India there have been several arrests in connection with alleged illegal email messages and content on social networking websites. It did not take court order – just a request from the local police station. Furthermore, you would have to undertake additional risky activity online to draw media attention to your documents. Also those who stand to lose from the leak can send a couple of copyright take down notices which will lead to deletion. So your only real option is Wikileaks.org, where they boast: Every source protected. No documents censored. All legal attacks defeated.

Launched in December 2006, Wikileaks.org stands alone on the Internet as the last refuge for the truth. Even though the promoters are European and US academic organisations, journalists and NGOs – a near neutral point of view is realised by sparing no one across the political and ideological spectrum. It is the archive of the whistle-blowers of the world and it is ugly: login information and private emails of a holocaust denier, secret documents from the Church of Scientology, Internet block-lists from Thailand and standard operating procedures for US guards at Guantanamo Bay, et cetera. One could safely assume that these guys have very few friends. Unlike Wikipedia.org whose technology it employs, Wikileaks does not have an open and participatory editorial policy. It accepts documents through a trusted journalist–source system.

Leaking controversial documents can result in loss of job, limb and life, so extreme caution is always advised. Remember that India still does not have laws protecting whistle blowers, in spite of a bill being introduced in 2006. What follows is only a very rough guide to digital whistle blowing, so please get expert advice before you try these at home:

Download and install military grade encryption software like Pretty Good Privacy. Generate a pair of keys – a public and a private one. Use your private key in combination to a journalist's public key to send him or her, a 'for your eyes only message' email. Only the journalist will be able to decrypt the message using your public key and his private key. Note however, that an Indian court under the 2008 amendment of the IT Act can ask you to disclose your key-pair.
Step outside. Working from home is a bad idea since DOT mandates that all ISPs retain logs for all users and for all services utilized for an indeterminate time-period. Office is still worse as your network administrator might be also logging your activities.
Find an anonymous public access point. Cyber-cafes, especially in New Delhi, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are asking users to provide identity cards and record contact details and in some cases web-cam photographs as well. Using your laptop in a coffee shop may work but DOT is considering cracking down on open wifi networks.
Use an anonymizing service so that the chain of digital evidence leading up to Wikileaks is obliterated. TOR is the anonymizing solution of choice. Several TOR servers that provide private tunnels across the Internet work in unison, to form a cloud of anonymity.

If you were leaking large amounts of data, uploading it may be too risky. Burn the data on DVDs and mail them to Wikileaks. However, do ensure that all digital files have been purged of personal information. For word files this can be done by converting to PDF. Also you may not want to leave any finger-prints on the package. India will soon have a database of finger prints thanks to the National Unique Identity (NUID) project. We know this thanks to the leaked NUID project document on Wikileaks.org, days before the consultation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/whistle-blowers-unite

When the war’s on WhatsApp

praskrishna — 2016-09-25T16:36:01Z

Slick, jingoistic videos are whipping up pro-war rhetoric on social media after the Uri terror attack.

The article by Manju V was published in the Times of India on September 25, 2016. Nishant Shah was quoted.

It packs a meaner punch than any 140-character tweet. In 140 jingoistic seconds, the cleverly packaged YouTube film veers from Mohammed Rafi to Chandra Shekhar Azad drumming up pro-war rhetoric to avenge the Pathankot attack. Set to the tone of chirping crickets on a moonlit night somewhere along the western border that India shares with its neighbour, the short film has two armymen in fatigues deliberate over the absolute need to respond with a counter attack. It ends in a staccato military drumbeat with a voiceover quoting Azad: "If yet your blood does not rage, then it is water that flows in your veins."

Posted about 10 days after the Pathankot attack in January, the video was resurrected last week after the country woke up to the Uri attack that killed 18 Indian soldiers in the deadliest assault on security forces in Kashmir in over two decades. Even as photographs of a grenade smoke-filled valley, tricolour-draped coffins, grieving sons, daughters and widows made the rounds in media outlets scores of Indians marched onto social media, some armed with incendiary prose and other with slick videos that expressed more anger than anguish.

In another video doing the rounds, a jawan, or someone in uniform, sings a poem warning Pakistan. His mates join in the refrain: "Kashmir toh hoga, lekin Pakistan nahi hoga."

These videos of jawans threatening to decimate Pakistan were shared by thousands. WhatsApp profile pictures and statuses were changed, Facebook posts got longer and vitriolic, Twitter #UriAttack exploded with expletives as the enough-is-enough sentiment peaked. It heralded the beginning of an era where the dynamics of Indo-Pakistan relations will play out not just in the diplomatic corridors of Delhi and Islamabad, the valley of Kashmir or the barracks of security forces; but also on the mobile phones, tablets and laptops of millions of Indians.

When contacted for a comment, the makers of the war-mongering 'Pathankot Tolerance' video didn't endorse war outright. "My individual opinion is that war is not a solution," said producer Santosh Singh, who heads the Mumbai-based V Seven Pictures. "Before we resort to war, we have to solve our internal problems. How can we let infiltration take place so blatantly?" he asked. Why then does the video not talk about this? Singh said that when one hears about such attacks, the instant reaction is to retaliate. "The video is based on that sentiment."

An electronics engineer, Singh also owns an IT recruitment firm. His film production company, which he runs along with his friend Vivek Joshi, made the Mauka Mauka World Cup video that went viral and also produces short films and videos for clients. "We have no political affiliations, in fact we turned down a couple of political parties who approached us," says Singh, adding that his company has made 30-35 films in less than two years. "Of these, about 10 are on issues close to our heart, like those on Afzal Guru and the Pathankot attack. We upload them on YouTube, they are aired without ads. We don't earn money from them," he adds.

Ugly gets outlet

Nitin Pai, director of Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy, says that social media and some television studios have enabled people to express their subconscious fears and desires. "It is not just today that the people of India have been angry with Pakistan for fomenting terrorism in our country. But it is only now that they have ways to express this anger; unfortunately, social media dynamics amplify this anger in a grotesque, distorted manner, allowing the ugly and less-sensible views to rise to the top of the public discourse," said Pai.

Tracing the many origins of this phenomenon, psychiatrist Harish Shetty says that in an angst-ridden, globalized world, we need a whipping boy. "With the Uri attacks, the entire nation had a common enemy. In expressing collective anger, there's catharsis." The current outpouring is not just over the deaths of soldiers; such an incident also opens up older wounds, he says. "For a long time, Indians have found their leaders to be helpless. It's like a family that is attacked again and again by a neighbour, but the father does nothing about it. There has been a lack of strong response from 'papa figures' across time, which has led to a sense of anger and rage. After the Uri attacks, the collective self-esteem of the country took a beating, and people felt a need to assert themselves on social media. At such times strong action is viewed as legitimate, valid and free of guilt," he adds.

Amplifying angst

If social media brought together protesters in Tunisia and Egypt during the Arab spring, in democratic India it has turned into a platform for expressing mass disenchantment with the government, especially in the wake of such attacks.

Social media plays several roles in times of crises, says Nishant Shah, professor of digital media and co-founder of the Centre for Internet & Society, Bengaluru. One, it amplifies what is already being said in friend circles and living-room conversations in front of the telly, but spreads it to a larger audience. "The second role it plays is distribution: social media allows people to inherit other people's opinions, thus exposing them to new ways of thinking but also find corroborators for their own viewpoints," he says. The third is catalysis — social media also has the capacity to generate new information. "The format creates new kinds of truths. Things that can be caught in Snapchat videos, or visuals which can be remixed, all become a part of this zeitgeist," Shah says.

Virtual wars

But in India at least, social media is no indicator of considered public opinion, points out Pai. Shah adds: "What we are seeing is a filter bubble of a privileged set of people who are engaging in this debate."

Then again, what's said on social media needn't be endorsed in real life. Vivek Joshi, who wrote and directed the Pathankot video, says nobody in the world would want a war. "But when it comes to the lives of our soldiers, an answer has to be given. If the government had taken any visible action, then there would have been no need to put out a video like this," Joshi adds. And therein probably comes the new-age heuristic of venting out on social media.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-september-25-2016-manju-vi-when-the-war-is-on-whatsapp

When the virtual world wakes up the real one

praskrishna — 2013-11-30T09:35:06Z

The unprecedented wave of voices speaking up against sexual harassment in recent times has as much to do with technology as the determination to seek justice. From Twitter to Tumblr, and blogs to pastebin, the internet's anonymity, reach and speed allow small, personal stories of abuse to swell into big stories.

The article by Malini Nair was published in the Times of India on November 24. Nishant Shah is quoted.

The outrage over the Tehelka case started with a post on pastebin, an anonymous document sharing site, on Wednesday evening. It contained the email managing editor Shoma Chaudhury had sent to the Tehelka staff with editor Tarun Tejpal's "atonement" letter appended below. A few hours later, the story had ballooned into a heated debate, and the outpouring forced what was being dismissed as an "internal matter" to be treated as a criminal case.

The two women who recently spoke up against harassment at the hands of a retired Supreme Court judge also used Facebook and the blogosphere to tell their stories, ensuring that the real world was actually moved into taking action. "The social web's biggest comfort is that we are no longer alone," says Nishant Shah, director, Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. "No matter what has happened to us, it has happened to somebody else. The possibility of finding credulous and empathetic audiences who but share our pain, understand it, and respond to it is unprecedented." Retweets and comments have often been described as the digital equivalent of holding hands.

Shah's pick of web campaigns that highlighted the problems include Blank Noise which calls women to talk of small, everyday stories of harassment, the Pink Chaddi drive and Why We Need Feminism, a web venture across American universities.

The other reason why the net encourages victims of abuse who might otherwise have stayed quiet to speak out is its "pseudonymity", as Shah terms it. In societies where there is shame attached to talking about sexual assault, the online space saves women from having to put themselves out in the "physical space" while ensuring that the perpetrator is exposed, he points out.

A plus for social web is that it gets other victims to speak up as well, gathering force and magnitude in the process. This happened in the instance of the legal interns. Another instance that surfaced just a month ago was of two American women science bloggers Danielle Lee and Monica Byrne. When Lee refused to write a piece for free for Biology Online, she was called "urban whore" by an enraged editor. She blogged about it and the ensuing storm over social media got her huge support. After Lee's expose, Byrne blogged about an acutely sexual conversation a powerful science writer inflicted on her. The outrage this provoked abated only after he made amends.

As an article in Gender and Culture blog project puts it: "( The digital world provided) a forum for these victims to document their abuse, and a courtroom where the abusers have been judged and found guilty by public opinion".

Of course there are problems with the internet's version of justice — it tends to play judge, jury and executioner with giddy recklessness. In the Tehelka case, the first questionable moment came when the survivor's email was tweeted and re-tweeted with no concern for her requests for anonymity. "The problem with Twitter and Facebook is the incredible and gross violations of privacy of the survivor. And otherwise responsible adults join lynch mobs calling either the survivor or the accused names, making ridiculous allegations, desperately looking for an easy narrative to hang everything on," says author Nisha Susan, who led the Pink Chaddi campaign.

Commentator Santosh Desai says that it is tough to choose between an unbridled but powerful social web and one that is cautious and governed by norms. "Earlier, there were receivers and broadcasters who were few and governed by licenses and a code of behaviour. Now everyone is a broadcaster, everyone is a circulator and everyone is an aggregator. Having no oversight here could be problematic," he says.

Susan says communities need to go beyond social media in such situations. "It should also be a time for us to reflect. On what we would do in such a situation, how we could perhaps prevent it, on the sense of entitlement powerful men have all over the world, on the awful pressures young women face. We should all be reflecting. Instead we are just re-tweeting."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-malini-nair-november-24-2013-when-the-virtual-world-wakes-up-the-real-one

When the digital spills into the physical

praskrishna — 2011-12-22T05:42:39Z

Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, tells us why flash mobs are an interesting sign of our times, and not just a passing fad.

What is a flash mob?
There are many different forms of flash mobs, if you look at their content. In terms of structure, it has to do with a bunch of people, who are connected to each other by common technologies but don't necessarily know each other, and yet, come together in a public space to perform a set of pre-decided actions. Congregate, Orchestrate and Disperse -- that is the anatomy of a flash-mob. Hence it is different from other kinds of mobilisations, because it is very rare for anybody to know who is the organiser of a flash mob.

There are no long speeches, political expositions or agendas used in order to bring people together for a flash mob. Once the brief performance has been done, people don't stay back to form communities and discuss. The word 'flash' draws its inspiration both from 'flash-floods' and 'flash-in-a-pan', both referring to the immanence and suddenness of a flashmob.

What is a smart mob?
Howard Rheingold coined the term smart mob in a book by the same name. Smart mobs are a more inclusive form of digital technology-based mobilisation. Rheingold uses the term to refer to a series of sharing, collaborative, performative engagements that have emerged around the world, especially with young people using the Internet. The people don't know each other, but through different Peer-to-Peer (p2p) protocols, are able to share their resources towards a particular purpose. So it might be a group of friends who want to dance at the train station, or geeks sharing their idle computing time to search for records of UFOs, or people using location based applications to meet each other in caf ©s and form friendships. Smart mobs are essentially different from flashmobs because they have a specific agenda and are geared towards a longer, sustained and enduring practice of community belonging and building.

What role does the Internet and digital technology play in organising flash mobs?
One of the fundamental tenets of flash mobs is the condition of anonymity. The web offers the necessary condition where the intended participant does not have to disclose any personal information. They are able to interact, communicate, receive and share information while giving out nothing more than their email addresses and cellphone numbers. It would have been impossible to think of a flash mob without the use of these technologies because while the postal service would also offer similar conditions (though the physical address is more of an identifier), the flash mob also requires a speed and scale which would otherwise have been impossible in an analogue world.

What is a flash mob best suited to achieve? Is it a form of celebration, a protest, campaign, a quick way to poke fun, or be ironic?
I would say the flash mob is a tool — a process that can be deployed for anything that you want. You can use it as a form of celebration or protest. You can also use it to bully somebody, to destroy public property or create conditions of danger. However, that is true of any tool that we use. A hammer, for example, can be used to hit a nail, or hit some one. The flash mob is a symptom of how our digital and physical realities are merging. It uses the aesthetics of p2p, interaction with strangers, gaming elements with more control over the spaces that we occupy, 'avatar'ification which allows for a pseudonymous existence, etc. to organise something in the physical world. And it is these spillages of the digital into the physical (and vice versa) that make flash mobs significantly more interesting than just a passing fad.

MidDay published this interview in their newspaper on 18 December 2011. The original can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/when-digital-spills-into-physical

When revolutions go viral

praskrishna — 2011-09-01T04:46:38Z

Thanks to Facebook and Twitter, the urban Indian youth, famously detached from the goings-on in the country, came out on the streets to support the anti-corruption movement - not only here but abroad as well. TOI-Crest looks at the anatomy of a modern protest movement.

I try to change my display picture, update my BBM status and send out a tweet as often as possible. I feel like I really need to do my bit for the country, " a college student was overheard saying outside Mumbai's Azad Maidan where protests against the anti-corruption movement are still under way. Once used to reconnect with long-lost school friends or to post vacation pictures, social networking sites have surfaced as the new forum for political activism. The world's attention is now on the potential of the digital sphere in historical revolutions as witnessed in Egypt and Tunisia. Though set in a vastly different political context, and used to different ends, the power of social media to drive citizen action in India has become apparent as Team Anna's call to action resonates through the Internet.

From earlier this year at Jantar Mantar to the culmination of the protests when Anna Hazare became a household name, the anti-corruption movement has harnessed technology and social media tools to engineer large-scale protests. Not only has the movement deviated from traditional methods of mass mobilisation, but it has also brought young urban India into the fold of political activism. Ritesh Singh, a third-year computer science student at IIT Khargapur, created the 'India Against Corruption' Facebook page in December last year. Since then, the page has gathered more than four lakh supporters. There are also several regional chapters and over 150 unofficial Facebook pages devoted to Anna Hazare and India Against Corruption.

The 'Students Against Corruption' group has been encouraging students to use social media for the cause by sending out messages such as "Students should share and promote this page for the goodness (sic) of the nation . . . This is the thing dat we can do for our nation. . . This is wat India needs. . . Promote it, share it, blog it, discuss it . . . then feel the change. " Petitions, calls to action and encouragement to join Hazare's fast also became commonplace in the last three months. The blog post '10 Ways to Support Anna Hazare on Social Media' by social media manager Sorav Jain has been shared 256 times on Facebook.

Relying on symbolism such as Gandhian photographs and references to the freedom struggle, Team Anna has created a media phenomenon. Text messages such as 'Behri sarkar ko janta ki aawaz sunai nahi de rahi hain! Lets show ppls anger!' and 'ANNA ki aag shuru ho gayi hai, Inquilab Zindabad' have helped in creating mass support. Meanwhile twitter has been abuzz with dialogue, support and reactions to the protests, as Anna Hazare's campaign became the top trending topic in India over the past few weeks. While the image of Hazare meditating at Raj Ghat became iconic on August 15, 2011, Team Anna's voice was heard on the TV, on mobile phones, YouTube and even on T-shirts. Developers are in the process of launching an India Against Corruption game, India Against Corruption mobile applications, India Against Corruption browser toolbars and more.

Though digital activism is often criticised as passive armchair activism or slacktivism, the use of technology in organising social protests has brought a different kind of activist on the street: young, urban India. "It's not as if what is happening is new, but it is happening on an unprecedented scale, " says Nishant Shah, research director for the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. "Traditional media has also done this in different ways, but in the past the protesters have been the disenfranchised. The use of social media has mobilised a new constituency - it has brought the urban middle class to the street. However, the use of such tools is producing a different kind of exclusion. There is a noticeable lack of poor urban people in the protests. This is not the representation of 1. 2 billion Indians as it is being made out to be. "

The use of social media has garnered support for Team Anna from the unlikeliest parts, catapulting 'India Against Corruption' (IAC) into a global phenomenon. Young Indians living in places like New York, Singapore, London and Hong Kong are tweeting, facebooking, organising and gathering to talk about Hazare and his cause. Some young professionals have even taken time off from their careers to fly down to India and physically support the cause.

Sunil Khaitan, an investment banker working with Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong flew down last Friday to attend the protests at the Ramlila ground and address the crowd at Mumbai's Azad Maidan. Khaitan, 28, is originally from Kolkata and graduated from IIM Bangalore in 2006. "I was involved in the Right to Information movement in 2005, have been in touch with Professor Trilochan Sastry at IIM Bangalore, and have been tracking this movement from the days of Jantar Mantar, " he says.

Khaitan is also active in the Hong Kong chapter of IAC, which organised a meeting on August 21, 2011, attended by over 300 people. "There is a clearly outlined process on the IAC website which tells you how to conduct a meeting, " says Khaitan. "As the news channels are not available in HK, so many people are not aware of the real cause. So we talked about the points of contention and showed videos with Arvind Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi and Hazare addressing the crowd. " He argues that harnessing social media has helped get people from different walks of life involved with the Hazare movement.

Social networking sites have also helped create a close-knit Indian community in Hong Kong. "Anna has also made a big point about the youth being present in the protests, and it is easier to connect with the youth through social media, " says Khaitan.

"Peer pressure also comes into the picture in that age group - people want to get involved to appear impressive to their friends. " But though technology has brought a new demographic of Indians into the realm of protest, it manifests its power through the oldest form of networking - word of mouth.

This article was published in the Times of India (Crescent Edition) on 27 August 2011, read the original story here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/revolutions-viral

When politics gets social

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T07:52:46Z

In the run-up to the general election, social media companies explain how the political campaigns this time are very different from what they were five years ago.

The article by Chanpreet Khurana was published in Livemint on March 11, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

“Okay, I didn’t gain anything. I lost,” Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)’s Arvind Kejriwal conceded disarmingly during a town hall meeting on Facebook last week. He was responding to a question from Candidates 2014 host Madhu Trehan on his much critiqued dharna (sit-in protest) during his 49-day chief ministership of Delhi.

Even as elections to 543 constituencies approach, political parties and politicians are putting their online campaigns in top gear. Sample some of the activity in just the last week. On Sunday, the Indian National Congress party asked voters to share their thoughts on what to include in the party’s Lok Sabha election manifesto—on Twitter. On 8 March, Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate, held the second session in his Chai Pe Charcha with NaMo series—this time on women’s empowerment. And All India Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee’s “Girls are our assets” post on Facebook was liked more than 22,000 times.

	Recognizing the high level of engagement around politics on social media, companies like Facebook and Google are driving initiatives on this theme in peak election season—polling starts on 7 April. The Facebook Talks Live’s Candidates 2014 series (also broadcast on NDTV), which in its first week featured Kejriwal, Banerjee, Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad and the Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, is one example. There are many new services being launched online in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.

Recognizing the high level of engagement around politics on social media, companies like Facebook and Google are driving initiatives on this theme in peak election season—polling starts on 7 April. The Facebook Talks Live’s Candidates 2014 series (also broadcast on NDTV), which in its first week featured Kejriwal, Banerjee, Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad and the Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav, is one example.

There are many new services being launched online in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.

Know your candidate

On 20 April 2011, US President Barack Obama appeared on Facebook Talks Live, opening the floodgates for a new kind of engagement between political leaders and the electorate. Cut to almost three years later, and the Facebook-led “town hall” meeting has come to India. On 4 March, Candidates 2014 launched with Kejriwal taking questions on issues like women’s safety, reservation for the backward classes and the plight of contractual workers, and detailing his vision for the country. A video of the town hall is available on Facebook and YouTube and has been viewed at least 30,000 times. As part of the format of the town hall, the questions came in equal parts from the live audience, Trehan and from a pool of questions submitted on the Facebook India page.

To the agile leader then, social media can be more than just another pulpit to broadcast views and give a speech from. It’s something Sunil Abraham, executive director of The Centre for Internet And Society, a non-profit research organization, can’t stress enough. “Social media provides unmediated access; in that sense it is a tremendously effective tool,” says Bangalore-based Abraham in a phone interview. “The question is, are political parties agile enough to take advantage of it?”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/livemint-march-11-2014-chanpreet-khurana-when-politics-gets-social

When Netas Network

praskrishna — 2013-06-19T06:19:00Z

In September 2009, a freshly re-elected Congress took exception to a light-hearted tweet by its newly inducted minister Shashi Tharoor, chastising him not only for causing offence but also for being too quick to air his views on social media.

This article by Rukmini Shrinivasan was published in the Times of India on April 27, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

So much can change in less than four years.

Rocked by allegations of corruption, and with anti-incumbency firmly setting in, the Congress is struggling to reconnect with voters, and is belatedly embracing social media. Tharoor has had the last laugh;his social media activity has earned him praise and is being emulated by others in his cabinet.

As political discussion spills over from the neighbourhood tea shop and coffee house to Facebook and Twitter, their potential impact on electoral politics is something that those in power and those hoping to get there are taking very, very seriously.

The BJP runs its social media operation out of its headquarters in Delhi. Most of the party's top leaders have an official Facebook page and a verified Twitter handle, while others, including octogenarian L K Advani, blog.

The Congress is late to the party;it does not have an official Twitter account and has such a halfhearted Facebook presence that it isn't immediately clear that it's official. But it seems to be waking up - young leaders including Deepender Hooda are now part of a social media strategy team, and the younger cabinet ministers are enthusiastic social media adopters.

Rural India Logs On

Despite representing a largely rural, relatively impoverished constituency, 48-year-old Biju Janata Dal MP Baijayant Panda is a Twitter natural. "Rural Indians are slowly beginning to get more active online and I am beginning to interact more often with my constituents there. In fact, particularly on Facebook, there are already a significant number of Odia users, from all around the world, but also those living in my constituency, " Panda says.

Simultaneously, social media entrepreneurs are responding to what they see as an area of huge growth. The Australian web-based citizen-politician interaction platform OurSay has just come to India (see interview on page 5). In the run-up to the elections, Twitter and Google are both reaching out to politicians and civil society organisations in the citizen engagement game and have pitched town-hall style interactions to several politicians, including union cabinet members and state governments.

Social media entrepreneur and analyst Mahesh Murthy believes that Indian social media users have discovered the wonders of political engagement online. "Only now are they figuring out that the real news doesn't seem to get out on traditional media - and more importantly, that their response on traditional media (at best, a letter to the editor) is puny in comparison to the impact they can have via social, " he says. Moreover, says Murthy, the impact is not online alone. "The Nirbhaya case, the Palghar case, the recent child rape case - all would have gone generally unnoticed a few years ago. Each of them, thanks to social media, became a cause to rally around. Add to this disclosures under RTI, NGOs becoming more transparent, online petitions and more - the staid and set political world of India is undergoing the first wave of massive, irreversible change. "

Such evangelism about the potentially transformational impact of social media was echoed in a recent study which claimed that Facebook users could swing elections in 150 constituencies in the next Lok Sabha election. Apart from being statistically flawed, the study also failed to look beyond the number of people on social media, to the kinds of conversations they are actually having.

A Broadcast Medium?

With some exceptions, the majority of politicians on Twitter and Facebook use it as yet another broadcast medium for purely one-way traffic, a rare few respond to the hundreds who leave comments on their Facebook and Twitter posts. So while Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi might have asked the FICCI ladies to get in touch with him on social media, what he omitted to mention was that he never responds.

Most politicians and parties are not doing a good job of engaging with citizens through social media, agrees Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. "Most of them are still outsourcing this function completely. This reminds me of the early days of email in large corporations and government offices when every email was printed before it was read by its recipient and the response dictated and recorded using shorthand before it was entered into the computer. This approach will not work with social media users. Personal involvement will be one way to improve results, " says Abraham.

Arvind Gupta, who sold off his analytics firm to run the BJP's IT cell from its Lutyens' Delhi headquarters, disagrees. "The volume of responses on Twitter or Facebook make it impossible for Sushmaji [Swaraj] or Modiji to respond to them all, but they often meet online supporters offline too, or highlight insightful comments on their blogs, " says Gupta.
Younger leaders tend to be better at online interaction. So while 89-year-old Karunanidhi of the DMK has a Twitter account but follows no one, the party's youngest MLA, TRB Rajaa, has five Facebook pages and a Twitter handle, and replies personally. "I get several hundred messages on Facebook in a day, but I try to respond to at least half, especially those who are raising grievances, " he says.

Some times, the proximity of a politician to the blaze of online outrage can force action. "When (IIPM director) Arindam Choudhary got a remote district court to ban a UGC web page, social media turmoil spurred first Shashi Tharoor and then [minister of state for information technology] Milind Deora and then the government into action - and the case was challenged and the ban was overturned, " says Murthy.

Influencing First-time Voters

But the big question remains - in a country where the internet is for a privileged few, is it too early to start talking of social media playing a role in electoral politics?

Sanjay Jha who runs the website Hamara-Congress. com and is a member of the party's social media strategy team, believes the impact will largely be on youngt voters. "It will have an impact on first time voters of urban India as also on voters who are unsure about their political leanings, " he says.

"Social media like mainstream media will influence its users. Internet users are still roughly around 10% of the population. However, they are elites and can influence wider offline discourse. Social media may have other benefits as it would help make the elections more transparent and free from manipulation, " says Abraham.

"One has to be careful - we don't know yet how many people on Facebook are registered to vote, and how many more will do so in time. We also need to understand better the ability of a youth on Facebook to influence his parents' and family's voting choices, " says Murthy.

In number terms, Murthy believes that social media will have some impact on 8-15 % of the electorate come 2014. "The 2014 elections will be a turning point. But I sense the 8% to 15% will more than double by 2019 elections - and that will be a moment when social media is far, far more important. The smarter parties and politicians will realise this and start making investments and efforts right away, " says Murthy.

Gupta strongly believes that a segment of the population that is politically engaged online but will not come to dharnas nevertheless votes, and should not be dismissed. "You often see people who make "I voted today" their Facebook status, " he says. Moreover, citizens politically engaged online are influencing each other and changing minds, he says.

Party Time

Many in politics also believe that besides the voter - who makes his or her decision based on a complex matrix of reasons - social media plays an important role in helping the leadership of parties connect with and energise their cadre and supporters.

"At the very least, social media will bring interested volunteers and party-workers closer to public representatives by making direct interaction possible. Certain candidates, even independent and otherwise lesser fancied ones, will have a shot at mobilising supporters at rallies, even though they have far fewer traditional resources to do so, " says Panda.
Rajaa agrees. "Not just voters, many motivated cadre also use social media to keep in touch with our youth wing and with the second-rung leadership, " he says.

With additional reporting by Kim Arora.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-crest-edition-april-27-2013-rukmini-shrinivasan-when-netas-network

When laugh lines turn worry lines

K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj — 2019-03-20T16:06:46Z

Trolls instil fear in cartoonists’ minds.

The article by K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj was published in Hindu on March 15, 2019. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The election season, with all its colour and drama, had been a festival for political cartooning. But no longer so. Cartoonists, especially those using social media platforms to publish their works, say they are under siege by a polarised electorate.

Several cartoonists have reported instances of their work being taken down from social media platforms and their accounts blocked after they were flagged by users for “offensive content, abuse and nudity”. They allege that while they have been experiencing a “tough time” with right-wing trolls over cartoons critical of the BJP, the situation has become worse in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.

P. Mahmud, a senior political cartoonist from Karnataka, has been locked out of his Facebook account for a week. His cartoon on March 8 portraying demonetisation and GST as an air strike on the economy went viral on social media, but it was later pulled down after it was allegedly flagged for offensive content. Shorty after, his account was locked. “This is an attack on my freedom of expression, robbing me of a platform,” Mr. Mahmud said. Another work of his, critical of Masood Azhar, founder of the terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed, was reported for hurting religious sentiments as he had called it Jaish rather than by its full name. A user reported it as an attempt at “obfuscating the religion of terror”.

“I can take criticism. But this campaign against my work seems organised and connected to my religion as well,” Mr. Mahmud said.

Another senior cartoonist from the State, Satish Acharya, had to lodge a complaint with the Udupi police recently when a right-wing troll threatened to “teach him a lesson in public”.

“I have had my Facebook account blocked thrice over the past five years. Each time it was mass reported over cartoons critical of the Modi Sarkar [government]. It’s part of a deliberate strategy to ensure that critical perspective doesn’t find currency online,” he said.

Senior cartoonists Tanmay Tyagi from Delhi and Mumbai-based Manjul have had similar experiences. Mr. Tyagi’s social media handles have been suspended over six times since 2014. Last year, his personal computer was shacked and 20 years of work deleted.

Cartoonists are worried about this concerted effort to muzzle them. Manjul expressed sorrow over the lack of space for nuance, wit, sarcasm, irony and satire — tools that a cartoonist relies on to get their message across.

“You are branded and pigeon-holed in a world that seems to operate on a ‘you are either with us or with them’ narrative. In a polarised society readers look for a confirmation bias in the cartoons,” he said.

A steady stream of abusive comments is a daily reality for cartoonists. “These trolls seek to enter your mind and create fear so that the next time a cartoonist sits at his table to sketch, he will rethink what he draws. It’s aimed at self-censorship,” Mr. Acharya said. He believes that traditional media houses are also developing cold feet.

Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based research organisation, termed it a “private censorship regime” that was also opaque.

“At most of the social media platforms the function is done partly by machine and partly in person. No company has invested heavily on human resources to review content being reported, making most of the process automated. Once you know what patterns the machine is looking for, you can game the machine and provide such patterns. It is an attack on freedom of expression,” he said.

Last year, Facebook made a detailed document on its internal community standard policy public explaining the nature of the content it takes down. An email questionnaire to the company on its redressal system especially when posts are being falsely flagged for nudity went unanswered.

But is trolling a new phenomenon or restricted to just right-wing supporters? Manjul said the first time he faced this kind of censorship was in 2013 when Twitter took down one of his cartoons critical of the Congress.

His recent cartoon on Triple Talaq received much flak and a Muslim organisation called up the editor of the publication threatening to kill him.

“My cartoon of Lord Ganesha taking a taxi during the Surat Plague got me a barrage of hate mail in 1994. It’s an old disease, but the wound is now in the open and it is rotting. Right-wing trolls are more organised, tech savvy and nasty in their use of language,” he said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindu-kv-aditya-bharadwaj-march-15-2019-when-laugh-lines-turn-worry-lines

When Data Means Privacy, What Traces Are You Leaving Behind?

Noopur Raval — 2011-11-24T09:24:03Z

How do you know yourself to be different from others? What defines the daily life that you live and the knowledge you produce in the span of this life? Is all that information yours or are you a mere stakeholder on behalf of the State whose subject you are? What does privacy really mean? In a society that is increasingly relying on information to identify people, collecting and archiving ‘personal’ details of your lives, your name, age, passport details, ration card number, call records etc, how private is your tweet, status update, text message or simply, your restaurant bill?

The CIC (central information commission) that arbitrates decisions on RTI appeals in case of conflict of interest provides interesting notions of what the State thinks is privacy. Ironically, the cornerstones of RTI that is privacy and its invasion are yet to be defined in the context of the judiciary. Then, how does the CIC decide what is private enough and what can be revealed to anyone? Of course, it relies on the discretion of its judges who attempt to draw from a range of sources that include the principles of natural justice drawn from western jurisprudence to quotes by Gandhi and Aristotle to the UK Data Protection Act, 1998 and US Torts that define invasion of privacy. To begin with, let us examine who constitutes the private sphere. As ruled in case of Mr. Ajeet Kumar Khanna vs Punjab & Sind Bank on 29 July, 2008 and Mr. G. Atchaiah vs State Bank of India on 22 August, 2008, the appellant can seek information only for himself/herself. Anyone outside the self, commonly believed as the personal connection, sons, daughters, parents or even spouse is not allowed information of a relative. One needs a distinct power of attorney for right to information. The contradiction is that one does not need to state the purpose for asking information, thereby making unnecessary any connection with the person you want information about.

CIC has been increasingly relying on the UK Data Protection Act, 1998 to make a correlation between data and privacy. Hence, to map privacy and its invasion, the RTI act depends on the UK Data Protection Act that classifies the following as sensitive personal data:

We have no equivalent of UK's Data Protection Act, 1998, Sec 2 of which, titled Sensitive Personal Data, reads as follows: In this Act "sensitive personal data" means personal data consisting of information as to:

The racial or ethnic origin of the data subject
His political opinions
His religious beliefs or other beliefs of a similar nature
Whether he is a member of a Trade Union
His physical or mental health or condition
His sexual life
The commission or alleged commission by him of any offence
Any proceedings for any offence committed or alleged to have been committed by him, the disposal of such proceedings or the sentence of any court in such proceedings.

While this blanket reference to sensitive personal data does not account for nuances in the Indian context, it also does not capture the essence of public-private interaction. It is mostly at the intersection of the public domain and the individual that the demarcation occurs. While personal family photographs lying in my attic may constitute a beautiful memory that can be proudly displayed on my walls, it is when one acknowledges the dual nature of any information source, the potential of these photographs to contribute to larger politicized information narratives, that their access and usage comes to define the real crux of the privacy debate.

The US Restatement of the Law, Second, Torts, defines the Intrusion to Privacy more generally in the following manner: “One, who intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns, is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy, if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.” Of course, we don’t know whether a father paying for bills and wanting access to his daughter’s cell phone records can be seen as highly offensive to a reasonable person in the Indian context. In the context of the recent Padmanabhswamy Templetreasure trove found in Kerala, since under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act 1958, such sites qualify as sites of ‘national importance’ and imply a certain larger public interest, would one be able to access such 'nationally personal data' pertaining to a temple (public space) owned by a family trust registered with the government (publicly private), containing a national treasure lying locked on geographical territory (public) that is rightly shared by all citizens?

Here’s how the CIC defined the personal and the extent of personal in the context of state as illustrated in Mr. Kanhiya Lal vs MCD, GNCT, Delhi on 13 June, 2011.To qualify for this exemption the information must satisfy the following criteria:

It must be personal information

Words in a law should normally be given the meanings given in common language. In common language we would ascribe the adjective 'personal' to an attribute which applies to an individual and not to an institution or a corporate. From this it flows that 'personal' cannot be related to Institutions, organizations or corporate. (Hence, we could state that section 8 (1) (j) cannot be applied when the information concerns institutions, organizations or corporate). The phrase 'disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest' means that the information must have some relationship to a public activity. Various public authorities in performing their functions routinely ask for 'personal' information from Citizens, and this is clearly a public activity. When a person applies for a job, or gives information about himself to a public authority as an employee, or asks for a permission, licence or authorisation, all these are public activities. The information sought in this case by the appellant has certainly been obtained in the pursuit of a public activity. We can also look at this from another aspect. The State has no right to invade the privacy of an individual. There are some extraordinary situations where the State may be allowed to invade on the privacy of a Citizen. In those circumstances special provisos of the law apply, always with certain safeguards. Therefore it can be argued that where the State routinely obtains information from Citizens, this information is in relationship to a public activity and will not be an intrusion on privacy.

In that case, does data at several layers demand for us to relook privacy from the subject positions we acquire at different levels and hence, the larger private collectives that we partake of?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy/when-data-is-privacy

When #GOIBlocks, twitterati fly off their ‘handles’

praskrishna — 2012-08-26T05:56:19Z

Ever since the news broke mid-week that some genuine Twitter accounts and six spoof accounts were blocked, the social networking platform has been in a tizzy.

Published in the Hindustan Times on August 26, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Hashtags like #GOIblocks and variations on the same theme began “trending” and the twitterati, functioning like a virtual democracy, have been bombarding the world in real time with posts about the issue. 16 accounts of the 15 million twitter users in India, among them those of a few journalists, spoof accounts like @PM0India, a right-wing parody of @PMOIndia, the official twitter account of the Prime Minister’s office, and a few anonymous accounts like Barbarian Indian (@barbarindian) and Dosabandit (@dosabandit) were blocked.

While Narendra Modi turned his twitter display picture black in solidarity with the idea of freedom of speech (and was promptly termed a hypocrite with many like @JagPaws, who has 641 followers, tweeting, “Whoa!! Is he supporting Jihadi sites?”), Pankaj Pachauri, (49,827 followers) Communications Adviser to the Prime Minister’s office, has put up twitter rules and the National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon’s ominously pro-surveillance keynote address at the release of the IDSA report on “India’s Cyber Security Challenge”.

Many like Nitin Pai @acorn, with 16,988 followers, founder of Takshashila Institute, a public policy think tank, tweeted that “under extraordinary circumstances, the govt must do whatever it can under the constitution to prevent loss of life” and added that targeted and temporary blocks of sites, facebook pages and twitter handles that spewed hate were acceptable. Others like film maker Harini Calamur (@calamur) (11,277 followers) who says she is against censorship tweeted that “Blocking internet handles & sites is silly” and “the Govt’s job is to uphold the constitution & protect our fundamental rights. Not make value judgements.” Much of the debate has led to a genuine exchange, sometimes making comrades of people from opposing camps. Kanchan Gupta, a journalist known for his pro-Hindutva views, whose twitter handle @KanchanGupta (26,424 followers) was among those blocked, accepted on TV that scores of “people from all communities” many of whom “disagreed violently” with him had extended their support on twitter.

Others like writer Shivam Vij (@Dilidurast), who has 3,296 followers, whom Hindutvawadis has often branded ‘pseudo sickular’, surprised baiters by speaking against the ban.

Many were strident in their criticism of the arbitrary nature of the blocks and tweeted that it was indicative of authoritarianism. “Internet blocks in India have been increasing in frequency&intensity. I wouldn't put this down to knee-jerk/foolishness.There is *intent*,” tweeted Nikhil Pahwa (@nixxin), founder and editor of @medianama. Others like business journalist Samidha Sharma @samidhas worried that the government’s frequent attacks on freedom of expression shows that it is “following china in all the wrong things”.

While Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash) of the Centre for Internet and Society tweeted, “They've blocked sites from all parts of the spectrum: Muslim right-wing, Hindu right-wing, neutral news sites, etc. No politics”, many others saw the move as a “self-serving” one. “Dear GoI: why not be honest enough to say that this web censorship has NOTHING to do with security+ all to do with your own arrogance” tweeted Sunny Singh (@sunnysingh_nw3).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-hindustan-times-aug-26-2012-when-goi-blocks-twitterati-fly-off-their-handles

WhatsApps with fireworks, apps with diyas: Why Diwali needs to go beyond digital

nishant — 2015-11-23T13:27:37Z

The idea of a 'digital' Diwali reduces our social relationships to a ledger of give and take. The last fortnight, I have been bombarded with advertisements selling the idea of a “Digital Diwali”. We have become so used to the idea that everything that is digital is modern, better and more efficient.

The article was published in the Indian Express on November 22, 2015.

I have WhatsApp messages with exploding fireworks, singing greeting cards that chant mystic sounding messages, an app that turns my smartphone into a flickering diya, another app that remotely controls the imitation LED candles on my windows, an invitation to Skype in for a puja at a friend’s house 3,000 km away, and the surfeit of last minute shopping deals, each one offering a dhamaka of discounts.

However, to me, the digitality of Diwali is beyond the surface level of seductive screens and one-click shopping, or messages of love and apps of light. Think of Diwali as sharing the fundamental logic that governs the digital — the logic of counting. As we explode with joy this festive season, we count our blessings, our loved ones, the gifts and presents that we exchange. If we are on the new Fitbit trend, we count the calories we consume and burn as we make our way through parties where it is important to see and be seen, compare and contrast, connect with all the people who could be thought of as friends, followers, connectors, or connections.

While there is no denying that there is a sociality that the festival brings in, there is also a cruel algebra of counting that comes along with it. It is no surprise that as we celebrate the victory of good over evil and right over wrong, we also simultaneously bow our heads to the goddess of wealth in this season.

Look beyond the glossy surface of Diwali festivities, and you realise that it is exactly like the digital. Digital is about counting. It is right there in the name — digits refers to numbers. Or digits refer to fingers — these counting appendages which we can manipulate and flex in order to achieve desired results. At the core of digital systems is the logic of counting, and counting, as anybody will tell us, is not a benign process. What gets counted, gets accounted for, thus producing a ledger of give and take which often becomes the measure of our social relationships.

I remember, as a child, my mother meticulously making a note of every gift or envelope filled with money that ever came our way from the relatives, so that there would be precise and exact reciprocation. I am certain that there is now an app which can keep a track of these exchanges. I am not suggesting that these occasions of gifting are merely mercenary, but they are embodiments of finely calibrated values and worth of relationships defined by proximity, intimacy, hierarchy and distance. The digital produces and works on a similar algorithm, which is often as inscrutable and opaque as the unspoken codes of the Diwali ledger.

There is something else that happens with counting. The only things that can have value are things that have value. I don’t know which ledger counts the coming together of my very distributed family for an evening of chatting, talking, sharing lives and laughter. I don’t know how anybody would reciprocate that one late night when a cousin came to our home and spent hours with my younger brother making a rangoli to surprise the rest of us. I have no idea how they will ever reciprocate gifts that one of the younger kids made at school for all the members of the family.

Diwali is about the things, but like the digital system, these are things that cannot be counted. And within the digital system, things that cannot be counted are things that get discounted. They become unimportant. They become noise, or rubbish. Our social networks are counting systems that might notice the low frequency of my connections with my extended family but they cannot quantify the joy I hear in the voice of my grandmother when I call her from a different time-zone to catch up with her. Digital systems can only deal with things with value and not their worth.

I do want to remind myself that there is more to this occasion than merely counting. And for once, I want to go beyond the digital, where my memories of the past and the expectations of the future are not shaped by the digital systems of counting and quantifying. Instead, I want Diwali to be analogue. I shall still be mediating my collectivity with the promises of connectivity, but I want to think of this moment as beyond the logics and logistics of counting that codify our social transactions and take such a central location in our personal functioning. This Diwali, I am rooting for a post-digital Diwali, that accounts for all those things that cannot be counted, but are sometimes the only things that really count.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-indian-express-nishant-shah-november-22-2015-whatsapps-with-fireworks-apps-with-diyas-why-diwali-needs-to-go-beyond-digital

WhatsApp spy attack and after

Theres Sudeep — 2019-12-15T05:06:27Z

Bengaluru experts analyse the Pegasus snooping scandal, and provide advice on what you can do about the gaping holes in your mobile phone security.

The article by Theres Sudeep was published in Deccan Herald on November 6, 2019. Aayush Rathi was quoted.

Last week ended with a sensational piece of news: WhatsApp said spyware Pegasus was being used to hack into the phones of activists and journalists in India.

The software is the brainchild of the NSO Group, an Israeli company. WhatsApp has detected 1,400 instances of Pegasus being used in the latest wave of attacks between April 29 and May 10. WhatsApp has identified 100-plus cases targeting human rights defenders and journalists. About two dozen of these attacks were in India.

Among those whose security was reportedly compromised is Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi.The first question is who ordered this snooping. NSO claims they sell their technology only to government agencies for lawful investigation into crime and terrorism. Speculation is rife that there is government involvement in the snooping.

Vinay Srinivas, lawyer with Alternative Law Forum, Bengaluru, says,“The targets of the attack seem to be those who had critical things to say about the current government.”Referring to a tweet by journalist Arvind Gunasekar, Srinivas says there is clear proof that the government knew of the breach and its severity.The tweet includes a screenshot of a report from the CERT-IN (Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) website dated May 17.

It shows severity rating as “High”.WhatsApp says the vulnerability has now been patched and urged users to update the app. But a level of paranoia around smartphones and privacy has been created. Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, based in Delhi works towards internet freedom and privacy, says Pegasus,specially, is too expensive (it can cost up to eight million dollars a year to licence) to be used on ordinary citizens.

But not all spyware is expensive. “Multiple kinds are now commercially available and easy to procure. These can be used by an estranged lover or even a professional rival to find information about you,” he says. Jija Hari Singh, retired DGP and Karnataka’s first woman IPS officer, says Pegasus is one of the smaller players, and spyware akin to it has been around for three decades. “Monsters bigger than Pegasus are still snooping on us,” she says.

NOTHING TO HIDE?

Many people fall back on the narrative of ‘I have nothing to hide, so I’m not worried’.Aayush Rathi, Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, says that this is a flawed premise: “It is like saying free speech is not important for you because you have nothing useful to say.”Gupta breaks down this rationale: “If a person has ‘nothing to hide’ then they should just unlock their phone and hand it over to any person who asks for it. But the minute such a demand is made they would feel uncomfortable.”This discomfort, he says, doesn’t come because they are doing something illegal but because they fear social judgement.“There is a level of intimacy in their conversations that they’d rather not share with anyone else,” he says.Many people believe only illegal activity leads to surveillance, but that is not the case.“Even the most inconsequential actions are being logged on digital devices, and much of this information can be monetised,” he says.The most tangible risks are financial fraud and identity theft, and spyware is also commonly used for corporate espionage.

UPDATE SECURITY

So what must one do if one’s phone is spied on? In the case of Pegasus, Rathi says, “You would have received a communication from WhatsApp if you were targeted. Irrespective, you should update the application immediately as the latest update fixes the vulnerability.”Srinivas says legally the recourse available is the fundamental right to privacy. “Since the government doesn’t have any regulation in place to deal with this, the National Human Rights Commission will have to take it up,” he says.

Gupta advises precautions against preventable hacks. He advises a reading of online guides on surveillance self-defence, especially those by Electronic Frontier Foundation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/deccan-herald-november-6-2019-theres-sudeep-whatsapp-spy-attack-and-after

WhatsApp ruling: Experts seek privacy law

praskrishna — 2016-09-27T02:35:06Z

On August 25, Whatsapp updated its policy to share user content with social network; the decision opened new monetisation models for the messaging app.

The article by Apurva Venkat and Moulishree Srivastava quoted Sunil Abraham. It was published in the Business Standard on September 24, 2016.

The recent Delhi High Court ruling that messaging app Whatsapp cannot share user data highlights the need for legislation on privacy, according to experts.

On August 25, Whatsapp, a platform with 70 million users in India that was acquired by Facebook in 2014, updated its policy to share user content with the social network. The decision opened new monetisation models for the messaging app.

In response to a PIL, the court ordered WhatsApp to delete data of users who chose to opt out of its policy changes before September 25. It also orderedWhatsApp not to share data collected before September 25 with Facebook for users who had not opted out.

"The decision makes a strong statement on privacy," said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet Society. According to him, a user trusts a platform and provides access to his data. As another firm acquires the platform, it gains access to the data.

"Facebook owns Whatsapp. It has to look at ways of monetising it," said Nikhil Pahwa, co-founder of SavetheInternet.in.

"With so much digital data being generated, there is a need for a privacy law in the country," said Pahwa.

"Facebook's consent interface is confusing. It can make a person who wants to opt out let the company access his data," said Abraham, adding a law would take care of such intricacies. The government is working on a privacy bill.

Saroj Kumar Jha, partner, SRGR Law Offices, said there were few judgments on privacy in India based on constitutional rights.

"While the Information Technology Act enables courts to pass judgments on global companies on privacy, enforcing the orders is difficult," he said.

"What is required is a privacy law that can protect user data and uphold the individual's right to privacy," he added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-september-24-apurva-venkat-and-moulishree-srivastava-whasapp-ruling-experts-seek-privacy-law

WhatsApp races against time to fix fake news mess ahead of 2019 general elections

Admin — 2018-07-25T15:27:20Z

On Friday, when WhatsApp announced that it would pilot a ‘five media-based forwards limit’ in India, the government came up with an unequivocal reminder.

The article by Venkat Ananth was published in Economic Times on July 24, 2018. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

“When rumours and fake news get propagated by mischief mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability. If they remain mute spectators, they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face consequent legal action,” noted a ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) statement.

The statement also said there was a need for bringing in traceability and accountability, “when a provocative/inflammatory message is detected and a request is made by law enforcement agencies.”

Significantly, MeitY took aim at WhatsApp’s core end-to-end encryptionbased product feature and its oft-quoted and reiterated commitment to privacy. It was specific, going beyond the usual “do more” requests.

The stand also poses an interesting dilemma for the messenger service. How can it act while protecting its privacy commitment?

“It is practical ly impossible for WhatsApp to regulate content in the peer-to-peer encrypted environment it is set up in,” says Rahul Matthan, partner, Trilegal. “An encrypted platform is what we want. The government is trying to maintain a strict and difficult balance. The government tends to err on the side of violating civil liberties over offering privacy to innocent users. The WhatsApp case is going in that direction.”

No Longer Low-Key

In India, its largest market, WhatsApp has benefitted from quietly operating in the shadows of its more popular parent, Facebook, growing to a currently active user base of 200 million.

However, in the last six months, while it continues to be perceived as an asset by politicos for outreach and propaganda, WhatsApp is now increasingly being tapped by the bad guys to disseminate deliberate misinformation, rumour mongering and fake news. And not the Donald Trump kind either.

It is leading to loss of lives on the ground, through lynchings, kidnappings and related crimes.

WhatsApp spokesperson Carl Woog says, “The recent acts of violence in India have been heartbreaking and reinforce the need for government, civil society and technology companies to work together to keep people safe.”

“By focusing on solutions to fake news inside our smartphones, we are ignoring a tougher problem that requires several complementary solutions,” says Apar Gupta, a Delhi-based lawyer and cofounder of the Internet Freedom Foundation.

“Let us not forget that a platform is not responsible for policing.”

But the general public and government perception — and, to some extent, concern — remains that WhatsApp has been slow to react to these situations.

To Police or Not to Police

Interestingly, the government and ruling party realise WhatsApp could be pivotal to their fortunes in the next electoral cycle — in the run-up to Elections
2019.

“The government is coming under increased pressure to act on these lynchings, which is why it is taking a shootthe-messenger kind of an approach,” says Matthan. “An unsophisticated government would have advocated a blanket ban on the source. But here, the government, it appears, wants to regulate tech by having access to your device, through an app, in the case of the (telecom regulator) Trai DND app to battle spam.”

This is also why WhatsApp has intensified its outreach efforts. Over the past 10 days, a team of its US and India-based executives have been meeting key stakeholders in Delhi and Mumbai, including the Election Commission, political parties, the Reserve Bank of India, banks and civil society, as ET reported last week.

The team includes public policy manager Ben Supple, senior director, customer operations, Komal Lahiri and WhatsApp India communication manager Pragya Misra Mehrishi. They are now expected to meet key government officials from MeitY from Monday, sources say.

“The intense outreach efforts is essentially linked to WhatsApp wanting to protect its payments play in India,” says a Delhi-based public policy professional, who did not want to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media.

“It (WhatsApp) is really worried about Google’s efforts with Tez and the gap that will only widen if the government delays grant of permission.”

WhatsApp is stressing some key points while reinforcing the steps it is taking to counter challenges. One, the best practices of using the platform. Two, the need to work together to prevent abuse of WhatsApp, and three, most importantly, to educate people about the best ways of using the platform. WhatsApp was primarily designed for private, oneon-one messaging or group chats among acquaintances, not for mass broadcast, which parties resort to during elections.

WhatsApp says it is working on a warfooting to tackle the problems. It has introduced product changes to counter user behaviour. There’s more control, where a group ‘admin’ can restrict users who can send messages to the group, modify a group icon or edit description, a feature for which it has taken a leaf out of rival Telegram’s book. To counter fake news, it added a ‘forwarded’ label. And now, limited the forwarding to five in India, and 20 in the rest of the markets, a significant reduction from 250 prior to that.

While the impact of these product tweaks is yet to be seen at an individual user level, the larger concern for WhatsApp today is the potential misuse of its platform to manipulate elections, a very real possibility next year.

Tipping Point

The company’s noticeable change of tack comes after it noticed certain trends during the recent Karnataka elections, during which one of its executives spent a week in Bengaluru.

One of the political parties, which a person aware of the developments in WhatsApp declined to name, was using “dozens of accounts to create thousands of groups,” as part of its campaign.

The party, the source says, was adding random numbers (approximately 100) to the group during creation. By random numbers, he meant people who did not know each other, something WhatsApp can identify using the metadata it collects when a user gives it access to its phone book. WhatsApp deems this behaviour ‘organised spamming.’

“These were real people not necessarily known to each other,” says the person quoted above. “A specific account would be added to that group to be made the admin.”

Mostly, this admin was the number used to create these multiple groups or, in WhatsApp terms, the account that was not behaving the way private or group communication happens.

Also, the users would be a mix of fake accounts, which is a major red flag for WhatsApp. “The group starts with some bulk added users and then the real ones get bulk-added,” says the source. WhatsApp deems this practice a violation of its terms of service.

Company sources add that WhatsApp was able to detect these trends and proactively banned these users before they were able to add people. “In some cases, our systems didn’t catch this in time, but we were able to proactively prevent users from receiving such spam. That detection is now internalised and if someone tries to replicate that behaviour anywhere in the world, we will be able to detect them,” says another person familiar with developments at WhatsApp.

According to several media reports, the BJP and the Congress too created over 30,000 groups for campaigning and organising efforts. To counter organised political spamming, WhatsApp has now begun using machine learning tools. WhatsApp can trace the last few messages in a group and block it entirely from the platform. At the detection level, WhatsApp checks for familiarity. “Do the persons know each other, or have they interacted before?” through metadata it possesses through phone numbers.

The second person quoted in the story says the company now focuses its detection “upstream,” that is, catching the user at the registration stage. “When you register on WhatsApp and immediately create a group, questions asked are, ‘Does this behaviour look like what a regular user does? Or does it look like users who have misused it in the past?’” he says.

WhatsApp, sources tell ET, is also using machine learning to detect sequential numbers that could be used to create these groups. “If they go and buy a phone number, they go to one carrier and its mostly sequential. If we notice 100 numbers with the same prefix have signed up, nearly 80 get automatically banned. What we do is feed these sequences, permutations and combinations to detect good/bad users,” the person quoted above says. “It learns millions of these combination signals on behaviour and help us make a decision.”

Civil Society as a Key Layer

WhatsApp also sees an enabling role for civil society, especially for digital literacy. Its team has currently met seven non-governmental organisations, including digital literacy groups and others involved in the area of financial inclusion. This is part of its public policy efforts while also solidifying its payments play.

“The level of responsibility for a platform is to not consciously cause — and, in fact, to take active measures to prevent — social harm,” says Gupta of IFF. “It has to be done without injury to end-to-end encryption, which offers safety and privacy to users.

Many products and product strategies can be adopted — from increasing media diversity on the platform to promoting auditing features that rely on partnerships with fact-checking organisations. We must demand accountability but resist the rhetorical attraction of technophobia.”

As ET has reported, WhatsApp will adapt a fact-checking model, Verificado 2018, deployed during the recent Mexican presidential elections. Verificado proactively debunked fake news and misinformation on the platform. “The rumours were found to be very similar to India.

Verificado was specifically focused on misinformation from candidates,” says the first person quoted in the story. “Plus, it helped effectively tackle misinformation during an earthquake in Mexico.”

For WhatsApp, one of the key learnings from the Mexico elections was that it could look at the spam reports and categorise them as politics-related. The company, unsurprisingly, saw an increase in political spam in the buildup to election day.

“They realised Verificado assists users to get help within the app. But it also aids news organisations, political parties, the government and users,” adds the person. The company is undertaking a similar exercise in Brazil, where 24 media outlets have come together under the Comprova initiative to fact-check viral content and rumours on WhatsApp.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society believes WhatsApp can further tweak its product to enable real-time checks. “They can enable a ‘fact check this’ button for users to upload content to a fact-checking database. If the content has already been fact-checked, the score can be displayed immediately. Alternatively, the fact-checking service can return the score at a later date,” he explains.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-venkat-ananth-july-24-2018-whatsapp-races-against-time-to-fix-fake-news-mess-ahead-of-2019-general-elections

What’s up with WhatsApp?

Aayush Rathi and Sunil Abraham — 2018-04-23T16:45:51Z

In 2016, WhatsApp Inc announced it was rolling out end-to-end encryption, but is the company doing what it claims to be doing?

The article by Aayush Rathi and Sunil Abraham was published in Asia Times on April 20, 2018.

Back in April 2016, when WhatsApp Inc announced it was rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for its billion-plus strong user base as a default setting, the messaging behemoth signaled to its users it was at the forefront of providing technological solutions to protect privacy.

Emphasized in the security white paper explaining the implementation of the technology is the encryption of both forms of communication – one-to-one and group and also of all types of messages shared within such communications – text as well as media.

Simply put, all communication taking place over WhatsApp would be decipherable only to the sender and recipient – it would be virtual gibberish even to WhatsApp.

This announcement came in the backdrop of Apple locking horns with the FBI after being asked to provide a backdoor to unlock the San Bernardino mass shooter’s iPhone. This further reinforced WhatsApp Inc’s stand on the ensuing debate between the interplay of privacy and security in the digital age.

Kudos to WhatsApp, for there is growing discussion around how encryption and anonymity is central to enabling secure online communication which in turn is integral to essential human rights such as those of freedom of opinion and expression.

WhatsApp may have taken encryption to the masses, but here we outline why WhatsApp’s provisioning of privacy and security measures needs a more granular analysis – is the company doing what it claims to be doing? Security issues with WhatsApp’s messaging protocol certainly are not new.

Man-in-the-middle attacks

A study published by a group of German researchers from Ruhr University highlighted issues with WhatsApp’s implementation of its E2EE protocol to group communications. Another paper points out how WhatsApp’s session establishment strategy itself could be problematic and potentially be targeted for what are called man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks.

An MITM attack takes the form of a malicious actor, as the term suggests, placing itself between the communicating parties to eavesdrop or impersonate. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also highlighted other security vulnerabilities, or trade-offs, depending upon ideological inclinations, with respect to WhatsApp allowing for storage of unencrypted backups, issues with WhatsApp’s web client and also with its approach to cryptographic key change notifications.

Much has been written questioning WhatsApp’s shifting approach to ensuring privacy too. Quoting straight from WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy: “We joined the Facebook family of companies in 2014. As part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies.” Speaking of Facebook …

Culling out larger issues with WhatsApp’s privacy policies is not the intention here. What we specifically seek to explore is right at the nexus of WhatsApp’s security and privacy provisioning clashing with its marketing strategy: the storage of data on WhatsApp’s servers, or ‘blobs,’ as they are referred to in the technical paper. Facebook’s rather. In WhatsApp’s words: “Once your messages (including your chats, photos, videos, voice messages, files and share location information) are delivered, they are deleted from our servers. Your messages are stored on your own device.”

In fact, this non-storage of data on their ‘blobs’ is emphasizes at several other points on the official website. Let us call this the deletion-upon-delivery model.

A simple experiment

While drawing up a rigorous proof of concept, made near-impossible thanks to WhatsApp being a closed source messaging protocol, a simple experiment is enough to raise some very pertinent questions about WhatsApp’s outlined deletion-upon-delivery model. It should, however, be mentioned that the Signal Protocol developed by Open Whisper Systems and pivotal in WhatsApp’s rolling out of E2EE is open source. Here is how the experiment proceeds:

Rick sends Morty an attachment.

Morty then switches off the data on her mobile device.

Rick downloads the attachment, an image.

Subsequently, Rick deletes the image from his mobile device’s internal storage.

Rick then logs into a WhatsApp’s web client on his browser. (Prior to this experiment, both Rick and Morty had logged out from all instances of the web client)

Upon a fresh log-in to the web client and opening the chat with Morty, the option to download the image is available to Rick.

The experiment concludes with bewilderment at WhatsApp’s claim of deletion-upon-delivery as outlined earlier. The only place from which Morty could have downloaded the image would be from Facebook’s ‘blobs.’ The attachment could not have been retrieved from Morty’s mobile device as it had no way of sending data and neither from Rick’s mobile device as it no longer existed in the device’s storage.

As per the Privacy Policy, the data is stored on the ‘blobs’ for a period of 30 days after transmission of a message only when it can’t be delivered to the recipient. Upon delivery, the deletion-upon-delivery model is supposed to kick in.

Another straightforward experiment that leads to a similar conclusion is seeing the difference in time taken for a large attachment to be forwarded as opposed to when the same large attachment is uploaded. Forwarding is palpably quicker than uploading afresh: non-storage of attachments on the ‘blob’ would entail that the same amount should be taken for both.

The plot thickens. WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy goes on to state: “To improve performance and deliver media messages more efficiently, such as when many people are sharing a popular photo or video, we may retain that content on our servers for a longer period of time.” The technical paper offers no help in understanding how WhatsApp systems assess frequently shared encrypted media messages without decrypting it at its end.

A possible explanation could be the usage of metadata by WhatsApp, which it discloses in its Privacy Policy while simultaneously being sufficiently vague about the specifics of it. That WhatsApp may be capable of reading encrypted communication through the inclusion of a backdoor bodes well for law enforcement, but not so much for unsuspecting users.

The weakest link in the chain

Concerns about backdoors in WhatsApp’s product have led the French government to start developing their own encrypted messaging service. This will be built using Matrix – an open protocol designed for real-time communication. Indeed, the Privacy Policy lays out that the company “may collect, use, preserve, and share your information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to respond pursuant to applicable law or regulations, to legal process, or to government requests.”

The Signal Protocol is the undisputed gold standard of E2EE implementations. It is the integration with the surrounding functionality that WhatsApp offers which leads to vulnerabilities. After all, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Assuming that the attachments stored on the ‘blobs’ are in encrypted form, indecipherable to all but the intended recipients, this does not pose a privacy risk for the users from a technological point of view.

However, it is easy lose sight of the fact that the Privacy Policy is a legally binding document and it specifically states that messages are not stored on the ‘blobs’ as a matter of routine. As a side note, WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are refreshing in their readability and lack of legalese.

As we were putting the final touches to this piece, news from WABetaInfo, a well-reputed source of information on WhatsApp features, has broken that newer updates of WhatsApp for Android are permitting users to re-download media deleted up to three months back. WhatsApp cannot possibly achieve this without storing the media in the ‘blobs,’ or in other words, in violation of its Privacy Policy.

As the aphorism goes: “When the service is free, you are the product.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/asia-times-april-20-2018-aayush-rathi-sunil-abraham-what-s-up-with-whatsapp