We are anonymous, we are legion

India may not be guilty of opposing UN move to save internet rights

praskrishna — 2016-07-09T02:58:53Z

India is a democratic country, but the standards for freedom of expression promised to us—online and offline—are highly questionable, especially with online content being censured and comedians being threatened to be arrested for sedition.

This was published by Ciol on July 7, 2016.

So the media criticism came as no surprise when India supported the amendments proposed by countries like China and Russia last week when the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) passed a resolution on the “promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet”.

According to some media reports, countries like Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia, as well as democracies like South Africa and India, called for the UN to delete a passage in the resolution that ‘condemns unequivocally measures to intentionally prevent or disrupt access to our dissemination of information online’.”

India has also been struggling to draft a comprehensive privacy bill, and most recently came out with a geospatial information regulation bill that would establish ownership over all forms of location data.

However, the fact that the resolution was adopted without a vote (with oral revision)—as noted by the UNHRC—puts these news reports on a faulty ground. So technically, India did not ‘vote against’ the resolution. Moreover, none of the four amendments supported by India called for the deletion of a passage that condemned the prevention or disruption of Internet access and online information dissemination, as noted by the Centre for Internet and Society. Although, India flouts the said clause in spirit, back at home.

Out of the four amendments—L85-88 in the UNHRC resolution–the first amendment (L85) sought to include a reference to fighting against the exploitation of children online. This was withdrawn by Russia before it was considered by member states. L86 can truly be described as diluting language regarding freedom of expression online. L88 includes reference to hate speech, asks to introduce a new paragraph that states “Expresses its concern at the use of the Internet and information and communications technology to disseminate ideas based on racial superiority or hatred, and incitement to racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance.” This amendment was proposed by Belarus, China, Iran and the Russian Federation.

Considering that the Internet and other online media technologies are increasingly used for incitement and as a means of propagating intolerance and xenophobia in India and other Asian countries, the resolution does touch on an important issue. But it doesn’t seek to limit internet freedom particularly.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ciol-july-7-2016-india-may-not-be-guilty-of-opposing-un-move-to-save-internet-rights

India limits social media after civil unrest

praskrishna — 2012-09-04T11:59:01Z

Indian officials have gone too far in limiting text messages and pressuring local Internet firms as well as Twitter and others to block accounts, critics say.

This article by Mark Magnier was published in Los Angeles Times on August 23, 2012 and re-posted in Channel 6 News on August 24, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Has the Indian government lost its sense of humor?

That's what some in India were asking as word spread that authorities had pressured Twitter into blocking several accounts parodying the prime minister after civil unrest that saw dozens of people from northeastern India killed and thousands flee in panic.

This week, the government also imposed a two-week limit of five text messages a day — raised Thursday to 20 — potentially affecting hundreds of millions of people, and pressured local Internet companies as well as Facebook, Twitter and Google to block hundreds of websites and user accounts.

Although journalists, free speech advocates and bloggers said the effort to squelch rumors may be justified, several criticized the actions as excessive.

"You cannot burn the entire house to kill one mischievous mouse," said Gyana Ranjan Swain, a senior editor at Voice & Data, a networking trade magazine. "You're in the 21st century. Their thinking is still 50 years old. It's just 'kill the messenger.'"

Comedians said Indian political humor is evolving and there's more leeway to make fun of politicians than a decade ago, but the nation's mores still call for greater respect than in the West.

"If I tried something like South Park, I'd be put behind bars tomorrow," said Rahul Roushan, founder of Faking News website, which satirizes Indian current events.

Faking News has lampooned the recent corruption scandals, including specious stories about theme restaurants (where customers must bribe waiters or go hungry); and a tongue-in-cheek report that India has banned the zero because too many of them appear nowadays in auditors' reports, after recent coal and telecommunications scandals each allegedly involving more than $30 billion.

Roushan, whose site isn't blocked, said he hopes low-level officials misinterpreted government directives.

"I'm still in a state of disbelief," he said. "I don't think the government is so stupid that it can ask that parody accounts get taken down. If they did, God help this country."

A spokesman for the prime minister's office said the blocking of six fake Twitter accounts attributed to the prime minister has been in the works for months and wasn't related to the recent crisis. He said the move was in response to tweets containing hate language and caste insults that readers could easily mistake as the Indian leader's. A dozen Twitter accounts and about 300 websites were blocked, according to news reports.

"We have not lost our sense of humor," said Pankaj Pachauri, the prime minister's spokesman. "We started a procedure to take action against people misrepresenting themselves."

But some Twitter users whose accounts are frozen, including media consultant Kanchan Gupta, counter that the government may be using the crisis to muzzle critics.

"I'm very clear in my mind this is a political decision," said Gupta, who has been critical of corruption and the government's policy drift. "If they were openly confrontational of me, they'd go nowhere, so they're trying this."

Attempts to access his Twitter page Thursday were met with the message: "This website/URL has been blocked until further notice either pursuant to Court orders or on the Directions issued by the Department of Telecommunications."

Even Britain's Queen Elizabeth II has numerous parody accounts so India needs to lighten up, consultant Gupta said.

He's received several messages from worried Pakistani friends since the news broke. "They ask if I'm all right, say they hope they haven't frog-marched you to jail," he said. "What irony."

The restrictions are the latest chapter of a crisis that started in July when Muslims and members of the Bodo tribal community in northeastern India clashed over land, jobs and politics. The result: 75 people killed and 300,000 displaced.

Muslims in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, staged a sympathy demonstration last week; two more people were killed and dozens injured.

Rumors, hate messages and altered photos of supposed atrocities against Muslims soon spread on social media sites, and several people from northeastern India were beaten in Bangalore and other cities, prompting the crackdown.

New Delhi has accused Pakistani websites of fanning the online rumors. (Islamabad said it would investigate if there's any proof.) But Indian news media also reported that 20% of the websites blocked contained inflammatory material uploaded by Hindu nationalist groups in India that were apparently trying to stir up sectarian trouble.

The Twitter community has responded with derision and humor to limits on text messages on prepaid cellphones.

"Feeling deeply insulted that I still have not been blocked," tweeted user @abhijitmajumder. "Victim of govt apathy."

Sunil Abraham, head of the Bangalore civic group Center for Internet and Society, said this week's restrictions are the latest in a series of regulations and recommendations aimed at tightening Internet control.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/articles-latimes-com-mark-magnier-aug-23-2012-india-limits-social-media-after-civil-unrest

India limits social media after civil unrest

praskrishna — 2012-08-24T12:33:21Z

Has the Indian government lost its sense of humour? That’s what some in India were asking as word spread that authorities had pressured Twitter into blocking several accounts parodying the prime minister after civil unrest that saw dozens of people from northeastern India killed and thousands flee in panic.

Published in the Australian Financial Review. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

This week, the government also imposed a two-week limit of five text messages a day – raised Thursday to 20 – potentially affecting hundreds of millions of people, and pressured local internet companies as well as Facebook, Twitter and Google to block hundreds of websites and user accounts.

Although journalists, free speech advocates and bloggers said the effort to squelch rumours may be justified, several criticised the actions as excessive.

“You cannot burn the entire house to kill one mischievous mouse,” said Gyana Ranjan Swain, a senior editor at Voice & Data, a networking trade magazine. “You’re in the 21st century. Their thinking is still 50 years old. It’s just ‘kill the messenger’. ”

Comedians said Indian political humour is evolving and there’s more leeway to make fun of politicians than a decade ago, but the nation’s mores still call for greater respect than in the West.

“If I tried something like South Park, I’d be put behind bars tomorrow,” said Rahul Roushan, founder of Faking News website, which satirises Indian current events.

Faking News has lampooned the recent corruption scandals, including specious stories about theme restaurants (where customers must bribe waiters or go hungry); and a tongue-in-cheek report that India has banned the zero because too many of them appear nowadays in auditors’ reports, after recent coal and telecommunications scandals each allegedly involving more than $US30 billion.

Roushan, whose site isn’t blocked, said he hopes low-level officials misinterpreted government directives.

“I’m still in a state of disbelief,” he said. “I don’t think the government is so stupid that it can ask that parody accounts get taken down. If they did, God help this country.”

A spokesman for the prime minister’s office said the blocking of six fake Twitter accounts attributed to the prime minister has been in the works for months and wasn’t related to the recent crisis. He said the move was in response to tweets containing hate language and caste insults that readers could easily mistake as the Indian leader’s. A dozen Twitter accounts and about 300 websites were blocked, according to news reports.

“We have not lost our sense of humour,” said Pankaj Pachauri, the prime minister’s spokesman. “We started a procedure to take action against people misrepresenting themselves.”

Muslims in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, staged a sympathy demonstration last week; two more people were killed and dozens injured.

Rumours, hate messages and altered photos of supposed atrocities against Muslims soon spread on social media sites, and several people from northeastern India were beaten in Bangalore and other cities, prompting the crackdown.

New Delhi has accused Pakistani websites of fanning the online rumours. (Islamabad said it would investigate if there’s any proof.) But Indian news media also reported that 20 per cent of the websites blocked contained inflammatory material uploaded by Hindu nationalist groups in India that were apparently trying to stir up sectarian trouble.

The Twitter community has responded with derision and humour to limits on text messages on prepaid mobile phones.

“Feeling deeply insulted that I still have not been blocked,” tweeted user @abhijitmajumder. “Victim of govt apathy.”

Sunil Abraham, head of the Bangalore civic group Centre for Internet and Society, said this week’s restrictions are the latest in a series of regulations and recommendations aimed at tightening internet control.

“Before, the government’s had no grounds for censorship, it was only acting on the bruised egos of bureaucrats and officials,” he said. “This time, it’s got a legitimate right given the disruption of public order. But it hasn’t done so very effectively.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/afr-com-aug-24-2012-mark-magnier-india-limits-social-media-after-civil-unrest

India launches crackdown on online porn

pranesh — 2015-08-05T01:21:12Z

India has launched a crackdown on internet pornography, banning access to more than 800 adult websites, including Playboy and Pornhub.

The article by James Crabtree published in Financial Times on August 3, 2015 quotes Pranesh Prakash.

The restrictions followed a ruling from India’s telecoms ministry ordering internet service providers, including international telecoms groups operating in the country such as the UK’s Vodafone, to block 857 such sites.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government provided no public justification for the unexpected ban when it came into effect at the weekend. However, on Monday India’s telecoms ministry said that the order, issued under India’s Information Technology Act, had been prompted by comments made by a supreme court judge during a hearing in July.

The ministry said that the restrictions were temporary and did not amount to a “blanket” ban, arguing that internet users running virtual private networks, which can be used to access blocked sites, could still view the material. “It isn’t that they are being banned lock, stock and barrel,” the ministry said. “The justice noted that free and open access to these websites.... should be controlled, but these sites will continue to be available through the mechanism of a VPN.”

The crackdown is set to raise fresh concerns about sudden and sweeping legal restrictions in India, after the introduction of a ban on the sale of beef earlier this year in the western state of Maharashtra, a move that was supported by Mr Modi’s government. The ruling also drew criticism from legal experts following broader concerns about a recent rise in poorly-targeted internet rules, including some restrictions on global social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Pranesh Prakash of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society think-tank questioned the basis of the ruling, describing it as a further example of a “clumsy” approach to online regulation.

“There is no proper justification that they have given for banning all porn, rather than child porn or revenge porn or something like that,” he said. “The reaction is heavy handed, and has been done under the cloak of secrecy.” The remarks by a judge cited by India’s government as a rationale for the ban were a comment made in court rather than a legal ruling, Mr Prakash added, casting further doubt on the basis for the restrictions.

India’s mix of strict regulation and conservative public morals mean explicit sexual content is almost unheard of in mainstream media, where Bollywood films seldom featuring more than a chaste on-screen embrace.However India’s fast-growing internet population of about 300m is now both the world’s second largest after China, and an increasingly important sources for traffic for global pornographic websites.

Pornhub, which is the world’s 66th most visited website according to ranking service Alexa, said Indians were the fourth largest national users of its content during 2014.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/financial-times-james-crabtree-august-3-2015-india-launches-crackdown-on-online-porn

India is building a biometric database for 1.3 billion people — and enrollment is mandatory

praskrishna — 2017-05-12T16:22:35Z

Inside the buzzing enrollment agency, young professionals wearing slim-fitting jeans and lanyards around their necks tapped away at keyboards and fiddled with fingerprint scanning devices as they helped build the biggest and most ambitious biometric database ever conceived.

The article by Shashank Bengali was published in the Los Angeles Times on May 12, 2017.

Into the office stepped Vimal Gawde, an impoverished 75-year-old widow dressed in a floral print sari. She had come to secure her ticket to India’s digital future — to enroll in the identity program, called Aadhaar, or “foundation,” that aims to record the fingerprints and irises of all 1.3 billion Indian residents.

Nearly 9 out of 10 Indians have registered, each assigned a unique 12-digit number that serves as a digital identity that can be verified with the scan of a thumb or an eye. But Gawde came to the enrollment office less out of excitement than desperation: If she didn’t get a number, she worried that she wouldn’t be able to eat.

Designed as a showcase of India’s technological prowess — offering identity proof to the poor and reducing waste in welfare programs — Aadhaar’s grand promises have been muddied by controversy as the government makes enrollment mandatory for a growing number of essential services.

Indians now need an Aadhaar number to pay taxes, collect pensions and obtain certain welfare benefits. The rapid expansion of a program that was originally described as voluntary has sparked criticism that India is vacuuming up citizens’ personal information with few privacy safeguards and creating hardship for the very people the initiative was supposed to help.

Like many Indians living in poverty, Gawde uses a ration card to purchase her monthly allotment of subsidized rice and cooking gas. But the shopkeeper told her that starting next month, he would sell to her only if she produced an Aadhaar number.

She had visited the enrollment agency three times but had yet to be approved, for reasons she did not understand. (Enrollment agents would not comment on individual cases.)

Reaching into her canvas bag, Gawde pulled out the familiar panoply of documents — ration card, voter card, electricity bill, income tax ID — that Indians use to navigate a dizzying bureaucracy. Aadhaar, she was told, would supplant all these papers.

But she had to get the number first.

“I’m nervous,” Gawde said outside the enrollment office on a sweltering morning. “I first applied three years ago and submitted all my documents, but didn’t follow up. Now that it’s becoming compulsory, I’m doing everything I can to get it.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had criticized Aadhaar as a “political gimmick” before he took office, has embraced the futuristic idea of an all-in-one digital identity. His party pushed through a law last year that paved the way for a dramatic expansion of Aadhaar, allowing government entities and private businesses wide latitude to access the database, which collects not just people’s names and birth dates but also phone numbers, email addresses and other information.

Soon, as more private companies use the database, it could become difficult to open a bank account, get a new cellphone number or buy plane or train tickets without being enrolled.

Supporters say the program, which has cost about $1 billion to implement, will save multiples of that by curbing tax evasion and ensuring that welfare subsidies are not stolen by middlemen.

“Aadhaar was always meant to be an instrument of inclusion,” Nandan Nilekani, a tech billionaire and the program’s first chairman, said in an interview. “I’m really happy that the current government is completely endorsing Aadhaar and using it for a wide variety of services that will transform governance.”

Nilekani calls Aadhaar “hugely empowering” for the poor, but not long ago even he argued that enrollment should remain optional so that no Indians were prevented from accessing essential services. India’s Supreme Court agreed, ruling in 2015 that the government could not require Aadhaar for any benefit to which a person was otherwise entitled, as long as they could prove their identity by some other means.

Yet the court has stayed silent as Aadhaar creeps into every facet of Indian life, even for children.

A 12-year-old girl named Saiba is a case in point. After the girl’s grandmother passed away in their family’s ancestral village in northern India, Saiba’s mother moved her and her four siblings to a crowded neighborhood on the rough fringes of New Delhi, near a car parts market thick with the smell of grease.

When Saiba’s mother, Rani, went to the local school in April to register her for the sixth grade, administrators turned her down, saying every student must have an Aadhaar number.

But to get a number, a child usually needs a birth certificate — and like one-quarter of children born in this country, Saiba and her siblings did not have them because their village did not routinely register births.

Sitting with her mother in the cramped offices of the local advocacy group Pardarshita, above a noisy street lined with vegetable sellers, the girl puffed her round cheeks in an expression of helplessness.

“I don’t know anything about this,” said Saiba, who, like many Indians, has only one name. “I just want to go to school.”

Rakesh Thakur, a board member of Pardarshita, is trying to obtain Aadhaar numbers for dozens of children barred from Delhi schools. He called the policy “a clear violation” by the municipal government of both the Supreme Court order and India’s Right to Education Act, which guarantees every child younger than 14 free schooling.

A Twitter account called “Rethink Aadhaar” logs new instances almost daily of Indians who have suffered because scanners couldn’t read their fingerprints or because of errors in the database.

In Jawhar, a forested zone about 60 miles north of Mumbai, administrators have told local tribal communities that they will soon use Aadhaar to distribute welfare rations and school lunches. But the area lies outside cellphone range, leading residents to wonder how scanners will connect to the Internet to verify their identities.

“The idea of Aadhaar and the technology may be good, but do we have the infrastructure to make it mandatory?” said Vivek Pandit, a former lawmaker who runs a nonprofit group in the area. “The law is city-centric, and it would only lead to the social exclusion of rural India.”

This month lawyers opposing Aadhaar argued before the Supreme Court that the government could not force Indians to share their biometric data. Atty. Gen. Mukul Rohatgi countered that Indians had no constitutional right to privacy and could not claim an “absolute right” over their bodies.

Without privacy protections, activists worry that as Aadhaar numbers are linked to more and more services, intelligence agencies could use the database to more easily track Indians’ calls, travels and purchases.

“It’s become very clear that this is not a project about the poor,” said Usha Ramanathan, a lawyer and anti-Aadhaar activist. “The government’s ambitions have gotten greater over time.”

This month, the Center for Internet and Society, a New Delhi think tank, reported that federal and state agencies had published up to 135 million Aadhaar numbers — some including sensitive information such as a person’s caste and religion, or details of pension payments — on unsecured websites accessible through just a few clicks.

It’s become very clear that this is not a project about the poor. — Usha Ramanathan, a lawyer and anti-Aadhaar activist

Pranesh Prakash, the center’s policy director, said that when Indian authorities can’t even keep Aadhaar numbers private, as the law requires, it suggests the entire database is vulnerable — particularly after sensitive information involving 22 million Americans was exposed when federal databases were hacked in 2015.

“When these kinds of leaks are happening, it’s rather foolhardy to maintain a database of 1.2 billion people’s biometrics, because once this gets breached, it becomes completely unusable,” Prakash said.

“If your PIN number or password leaks, you can change it. You can’t change your fingerprints.”

Praveen Chakravarty, a former investment banker who worked with Nilekani to launch Aadhaar, believes the lack of safeguards undermines the project’s ideals of efficiency and empowerment. He said many Indians were right to worry that Modi’s government, which has cracked down on political activists and nonprofit groups it opposes, could use Aadhaar to snoop on citizens.

“Maybe Aadhaar didn’t need to be this big,” Chakravarty said, adding that the government could simply have worked to fix inefficiencies in individual welfare programs.

“People could ask, ‘Did we need this at all?’” he said. “It’s a good question.”

For Gawde, the widow, Aadhaar remained an idea of the future. She left the enrollment agency that day empty-handed, told by a young employee that her number had not been assigned. But she retained hope that the new ID would make life easier.

“We are just poor people,” she said. “We have to trust what the government tells us.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/los-angeles-times-shashank-bengali-may-12-2017-india-is-building-a-biometric-database-for-1.3-billion-people-and-enrollment-is-mandatory

India internet: clean-up or censorship?

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T11:17:11Z

Is India going the way of China? Not when it comes to development indicators. Or enhanced infrastructure. Or economic power. But in another category at which Beijing excels: web censorship.

That was the implication of a ruling on Thursday from Justice Suresh Kait, of the Delhi High Court, who told lawyers for Facebook India and Google India that unless they develop mechanisms to regulate “offensive and objectionable” material on their web sites, India is prepared to take drastic measures, according to the Hindustan Times. “Like China, we will block all such websites,” Kalit declared.

According to the IBN news channel, the government seems to be moving to make good on those threats:

Government sources said on Friday that the Delhi High Court was likely to issue sanctions to prosecute social networking sites Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo India in the ongoing spat between the companies and the Government of India over content regulation.

“Prosecution for some of the non-bailable offences requires prior sanction of the government, which has been sought and it is likely to be granted,” the sources said.

[…]

Summons are to be sent to the companies through the Ministry of External Affairs directing their heads to appear before court on March 13, which is when the next hearing will take place. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology will file its affidavit by this evening.

Clearly there’s trouble in “the world’s largest democracy”.

Kalit’s pronouncement is the latest turn in a story that broke last month, when the New York Times reported that telecoms minister Kapil Sibal had met with executives from Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft to discuss the pre-emptive removal of “offensive material” – including, it seems, web pages that had criticized the leader of his party, Sonia Gandhi.

As beyondbrics reported, Sibal then gave a combative press conference where he said: “I believe that no reasonable person aware of the sensibilities of large sections of communities in this country and aware of community standards as they are applicable in India would wish to see this content in the public domain,” referring to “offensive material” he had shown some reporters prior to the conference.

He added, repeatedly, that the government did not believe in censorship.

Apparently, Kalit didn’t get the memo.

Lawyers for the internet giants appeared before the judge to request the dismissal of a criminal complaint filed by a private citizen in a lower court under sections of the Indian law that cover “sale of obscene books etc”, “sale of obscene objects to young person etc” and “criminal conspiracy”. The judge declined.

“The magistrate of the trial court had observed that the material submitted by the complainant contained obscene pictures and derogatory articles pertaining to various Hindu gods, Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ”, IBN reported.

According to the Hindustan Times:

On behalf of Google India, senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi said it was humanly not possible to filter or monitor the postings of obscene, objectionable and defamatory material. “Billions of people across the globe, post their articles on the website. Yes, they may be defamatory, obscene but cannot be checked,” he said.

A Google spokesperson issued a statement last night, saying, “We did file a petition before the Delhi High Court. The Court has now issued a notice to the petitioner. We can’t comment at this stage.”

Today, the company issued a clarification:

Today the Court has merely directed the petitioner to serve the Court order to the overseas entities at their respective addresses and has adjourned the matter to March 13th.

Last month, a lower court had ordered the sites to remove all “anti-social” or “anti-relgious” content by February 6.

As Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, told beyondbrics last month, it’s difficult to establish exactly what is anti-religious: for example, the Hindu profession of belief in multiple gods is blasphemous to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

A lower court had directed the central government to take “immediate appropriate steps” and file a report by January 13.

It has not been released yet, but later on Friday you can Google it. Take the opportunity – if India goes the way of China, it might prove more difficult in future.

This blog post by Neil Munshi was published in beyondbrics on 13 January 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/clean-up-or-censorship

India High Court: No Takedown Requests On Social Sites Without Court, Gov't Order

praskrishna — 2015-04-03T06:18:52Z

Indian police will no longer be able to threaten Internet users and online intermediaries with jail merely on the basis of a complaint that they have posted “offensive” posts online.

The blog post by Madhur Singh was published in Bloomberg BNA on March 25, 2015. Geetha Hariharan gave her inputs.

Following a landmark judgment by the Supreme Court of India March 24, law enforcement agencies will be able to take action in such cases only after an order has been obtained from a court or the government (Singhal v.Union of India, India Sup. Ct., 3/24/15).

The court struck down in its entirety Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which authorized criminal penalties for sending “offensive” messages through electronic communication services. Opponents of the measure said the section defined “offensive” very vaguely and broadly, and that cases of arrest under the section frequently made headlines.

Freedom of speech activists and Internet-based businesses welcomed the judgment as a boost for civil liberties, freedom of speech and a conducive business environment for an entire gamut of online businesses.

The judgment is good news for intermediaries such as Facebook Inc. and the India-based review site MouthShut.com, both of which have been repeatedly inundated with takedown notices based on complaints against “offensive” posts.

Offensive Posts Were Actionable Under Section 66A

Section 66A, added to the Information Technology Act of 2000 through an amendment in February 2009, prescribed imprisonment of up to three years and a fine for anyone who sends via a computer resource or communication device:

(a) any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character;
(b) any information which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will, persistently by making use of such computer resource or a communication device; or
(c) any electronic mail or electronic mail message for the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience or to deceive or to mislead the addressee or recipient about the origin of such messages.

A supporting Section 79(3)(b) stated that “upon receiving actual knowledge, or on being notified by the appropriate government or its agency that any information, data or communication link residing in or connected to a computer resource controlled by the intermediary is being used to commit the unlawful act,” the intermediary would have to “expeditiously remove or disable access to that material or that resource.”

Together, these sections put ordinary Internet users at risk for arrest for simply posting online and obligated intermediaries such as Twitter Inc., Facebook, MouthShut.com and others to take down content simply pursuant to a complaint.

Earlier this month, Facebook revealed statistics indicating that India is second on its global list of governments demanding takedowns.

Court Removes Intermediaries' Discretion

Shwetasree Majumder, partner at Fidus Law Chambers, told Bloomberg BNA March 25 that after this decision, any blocking of content can now only take place via a reasoned order after complying with several procedural safeguards, including a hearing to the originator and intermediary either by the designated
officer or pursuant to an order passed by a competent court.

“So intermediaries like Google, Facebook etc. are no longer required to judge as to whether the take down notices received by them contain legitimate requests or not,” she wrote in an e-mail. “As an acknowledgement that a true intermediary should not concern itself with the merits of the content posted by third parties, the court takes away the intermediary's discretion as to what content must remain and what must go.”

Geetha Hariharan, program officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, told Bloomberg BNA that after “reading down” Section 79, the Supreme Court “has relieved the intermediary of its responsibility to judge the lawfulness of content. Now, the intermediary will lose immunity under Section 79(3)(b) (and be liable
to prosecution or penalty) only if it does not take content down after receiving ‘actual knowledge of a court order or government notification' requiring takedown of content.”

Prior to the judgment, an intermediary was required to judge whether a takedown notice concerned unlawful content on its website, which would constitute “actual knowledge” under the section. If the intermediary made an affirmative determination, it was required to take the content down or lose immunity under Section 79(3)(b).

Supreme Court Strikes Down 66A

Momentum against Section 66A built up over the last three years, particularly after law student Shreya Singhal filed a challenge in the Supreme Court after two Mumbai women were arrested and put in jail for 10 days in 2012 for Facebook posts against a shutdown of Mumbai city following a politician's death.

A Supreme Court bench comprising Justices Jasti Chelameswar and Rohinton F. Nariman heard ten such cases together, and ruled March 24 that Section 66A was unconstitutional as it directly affected the right of the public to know. Holding that Section 66A was “open ended, undefined, and vague” so that “virtually any opinion on any subject would be covered by it, as any serious opinion dissenting with the mores of the day would be caught within its net,” the court struck it down in its entirety.

The court said that Rule 3(4) of the Intermediaries (Guidelines) Rules, 2011, which pertains to an intermediary disabling access to material that is “known” to be violative of Rule 3(2), needed to be read down in the same manner as Section 79(3)(b).

The court, however, upheld Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, which gives the government the power to block web content if doing so is in the interest of the sovereignty, integrity or security of India.

Impact on Intermediary Liability

Overall, Majumder said that intermediary liability now stands significantly watered down. One particular case this might impact is the currently pending Super Cassettes India Ltd. v MySpace Inc. case before the Division Bench of the Delhi High Court, which is considering the validity of the high threshold of intermediary liability prescribed by a single judge in copyright infringement cases.

Hariharan wrote in an e-mail that while intermediaries such as Internet service providers (ISPs) or content hosts may “choose” to take down content when they receive a private takedown notice, they don't “need” to do so to remain immune under Section 79(3)(b) or Rule 3(4) of the Intermediaries Guidelines.

“This reduces uncertainty in intermediary liability in India. It will also hopefully keep intermediaries from taking down content in an overbroad manner to escape liability,” Hariharan said, adding that the government nevertheless continues to have the ability to criminalize online acts. For instance, Sections 66B
to 67B of the IT Act define and criminalize different online conduct. Additionally, sections of the Indian Penal Code that criminalize speech acts (e.g., Sections 295A and 153A for incitement; Section 292 for obscenity) have also been applied to online acts in the past.

The Internet & Mobile Association of India said in a statement on its website March 24 that the judgment will mark a new phase for the growth and evolution of the Internet in India. While Internet users will no longer fear illegal censorship or harassment, it said that “online businesses, ranging from established international companies to small Indian startups, will be able to take advantage of a more conducive business environment.”

The IAMAI added that the judgment will be especially helpful to smaller companies such as Mouthshut.com that will “now not be harassed by the frivolous and mal-intentioned notices of take down.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bloomberg-bna-march-25-2015-madhur-singh-india-high-court-no-takedown-requests-on-social-sites-without-court-govt-order

India for UN body to resolve internet governance issues

praskrishna — 2013-12-26T08:51:05Z

Multi-stakeholder or multi-lateral - two words encapsulating diametrically opposite views on internet governance stands at the heart of a raging debate across the globe.

The article by Kim Arora was published in the Times of India on December 5, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

At the Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation (WGEC) meeting in Geneva last month, India suggested forming a multi-lateral UN body to co-ordinate on internet governance issues. And several activists feel that is not the right way forward.

Multi-stakeholder control over the world wide web means parties other than governments, which include the tech community, academia, businesses and civil society. In a multi-lateral arrangement, only the governments will be the decision-makers and every other stakeholder barring the state, is relegated to a purely advisory role. Simply put, the choice is between total state control over the internet or a more democratic set-up where other sections of society are also represented.

Civil society and businesses are concerned that being relegated to an advisory role rather than a decision-making one could lead to disregarding or dumping their inputs.

"Everyone must have a seat at the table," says Rajan Mathews, director general of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI). "If you are designing a new model, it is important that it is as inclusive as possible. That will create better decisions. It will also discourage back-door bargaining between governments," says Anja Kovacs of the Internet Democracy Project.

The internet architecture has always been controlled by the US. The demand for a more democratised set-up, where other countries also have a voice, started in early 2000s. In 2005, a consensus document, Tunis Agenda, had been signed under the aegis of the UN. It laid out much of the terms of the debate around internet governance, including the focus on enhanced cooperation and the need for a multi-stakeholder model.

In 2011, India put forward a detailed proposal for a multi-lateral UN body that was widely criticised by activists and business bodies at home. In Geneva this November, India's answer to a question on implementing "enhanced cooperation" in a WGEC questionnaire, went like this: "A suitable multilateral, transparent and democratic mechanism must be created where governments, on an equal footing, may carry out their roles and responsibilities in international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet and public policy issues pertaining to coordination and management of critical Internet resources, in consultation with all other stakeholders."

Ajay Kumar of the Department of Electronics and Communication Technology (DeitY), was a part of the delegation representing India at Geneva. The DeitY falls under the union ministry of communication and information technology. Kumar told TOI, that while there is a relook at the 2011 proposal, India has been following the Tunis Agenda when it comes to enhanced cooperation between different countries and other stakeholders.

Nonetheless, Parminder Jeet Singh of the NGO IT for Change has supported the government position at the WGEC meeting. The two other civil society bodies from India at Geneva wanted a multi-stakeholder model. Singh feels that the proposal may have an important role to play at a later stage when "real political talk shapes up". "We don't agree that a Google or an IT for Change should vote in the decision-making about actual public policies. We understand the fear (behind such an arrangement) but we prefer that public policy decisions at global level remain with governments as they are legitimate representatives of the people," he says.

However, Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society, warns against the governmental tendency to centralize and for being opaque. He also feels that a single model, whether multilateral or multi-stakeholder, will not work. Every model must change with every issue being brought to the table, he says. "For instance, something like controlling child pornography, will need one kind of model to deal with. The same won't work when dealing with hate speech," Abraham points out.

Activists are hoping that the Brazil global multi-stakeholder meeting in April next year will take the issue of democratised internet governance forward.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-december-5-2013-kim-arora-india-for-un-body-to-resolve-internet-governance-issues

India for inclusive internet governance

praskrishna — 2014-05-05T10:36:52Z

India wants "core internet infrastructure" to be part of an international legal system that would accommodate governments, civil society and other stakeholders. In typical Indian diplomatic style, its position can be interpreted to mean everything and nothing.

The article by Indrani Bagchi published in the Times of India on April 25, 2014 quotes Sunil Abraham.

An MEA team, led by joint secretary Vinay Kwatra, told Net Mundial (forum for internet governance) in Brazil on Thursday, "The elements of India's approach on internet governance respond to its growing complexity and rests in supporting the dynamism, security and openness of a single and unfragmented cyberspace. We also support innovation and robust private sector investment to augment internet's continuing growth and evolution."

The Indian position is essentially an MEA position, because there has been little prior inter-agency consultation in the government. In fact, while the MEA had decided upon its team almost a month ago, the department of information technology woke up only last week. It was on Friday that the nodal ministry for IT-related issues even agreed to send a team to Brazil on Monday- the same team that the MEA was sending. If nothing else, sources said, this only highlighted the lack of seriousness within the Indian system.

Kwatra said internet should have a democratic governing system involving everyone, which would essentially mean creating a parallel international system. While India does not want the status quo to continue, there is no clarity whether it favours a multilateral or a multi-stakeholder system. India, like China, wants a strong state presence in the decision-making process of internet governance because "it is used for transactions of core economic, civil and defence assets at national level and in the process, countries are placing their core national security interests in this medium". On the other hand, it wants unfettered access to knowledge and technology as a nation-building and governance tool.

Additionally, India wants non-governmental stakeholders to be properly audited and a "clear delineation of principles governing their participation, including their accountability, representativeness, transparency and inclusiveness". There is a crying need for India to clearly define the future it expects to thrive in.

Sunil Abhraham of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society says India should take the lead in defining new internet rules, keeping its future in mind. "We could use patent pools and compulsory licensing to provide affordable and innovative digital hardware to the developing world. This would ensure that rights-holders, innovators, manufactures, consumers and government would all benefit ... We could explore flat-fee licensing models like a broadband copyright cess or levy to ensure that users get content at affordable rates and rights-holders get some royalty from all internet users in India. This will go a long way in undermining the copyright enforcement-based censorship regime that has been established by the US. We could enact a world-class privacy law and establish an independent, autonomous and proactive privacy commissioner who will keep both private and state actors on a short lease. We need a scientific, targeted surveillance regime that is in compliance with human rights principles. This will make India simultaneously an IP and privacy haven and thereby attract huge investment from the private sector, and also earn the goodwill of the global civil society and independent media."

This is more than the Indian government has thought of.

While no binding decisions are expected from Brazil this week, the high profile event is expected to trigger a high-level debate on possible reforms. India, say officials, needs to come up with concrete proposals. This is imperative after the US made two crucial decisions on internet governance this year. In March the US announced that by September 2015 it would give up oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based non-profit group, that assigns domain names. But the US is clear it will not hand over the levers to any organization that can be controlled by any other country. This week, the US' FCC dealt a body blow to the concept of "net neutrality" (which essentially functions on the premise that access to the internet is the same for everyone) by allowing companies like Disney and Google to pay for premium internet speeds.

Countries like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia (may be even Iran) seek to control net access for their citizens as a measure of political control. Second, cyber offensive by countries which are ramping up capacity in these fields could take over internet governance structures if they are not crafted carefully enough. If the US is relinquishing control over ICANN, the next global battle is likely to be over who takes over that mantle. This makes it important to get net governance right. At least China has a plan: It wants the UN to take control. India wants a bit of everything, without actually giving it a shape, making it virtually impossible to shape the debate.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-april-25-indrani-bagchi-india-for-inclusive-internet-governance

INDIA Fears of Privacy Loss Pursue Ambitious ID Project

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:00:44Z

Fears about loss of privacy are being voiced as India gears up to launch an ambitious scheme to biometrically identify and number each of its 1.2 billion inhabitants.

In September, officials from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), armed with fingerprinting machines, iris scanners and cameras hooked to laptops, will fan out across the towns and villages of southern Andhra Pradesh state in the first phase of the project whose aim is to give every Indian a lifelong Unique ID (UID) number.

"The UID is soft infrastructure, much like mobile telephony, important to connect individuals to the broader economy," explains Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the UIDAI and listed in 2009 by Time magazine as among the world's 100 most influential people.

Nilekani is a co-founder of the influential National Association of Software and Services Companies and, before this assignment, chief of Infosys Technologies, flagship of India's information technology (IT) sector.

According to Nilekani, the UID will most benefit India's poor who, because they lack identity documentation, are ignored by service providers.

"The UID number, with its 'anytime, anywhere' biometric authentication, addresses the problem of trust," argues Nilekani.

But a group of prominent civil society organisations are running a Campaign For No-UID, explaining that it is a "deeply undemocratic and expensive exercise" that is "fraught with unforeseen consequences."

Participants in the campaign include well-known human rights organisations such as the Alternative Law Forum, Citizen Action Forum, People's Union for Civil Liberties, Indian Social Action Forum, and the Centre for Internet and Society.

A meeting was organised by the campaigners in New Delhi on Aug. 25 where speakers ridiculed the idea of a 12-digit number, and said it is unlikely to rectify, for example, the massive corruption in the public distribution system that is supposed to provide food to poor families.

J.T. D'Souza, an IT expert, asserted at the meeting that the use of biometrics on such a massive scale has never been attempted before and is bound to be riddled with costly glitches.

Other speakers raised issues of security and the possibility of hackers getting at databases and passing on information to commercial outfits, intelligence agencies or even criminal gangs.

In talks and television interviews, Nilekani has maintained that the benefits of the UID project far outweigh its risks. "It's worth taking on the project and trying to mitigate the risks so that we get the outcomes we want," he told the CNN-IBN television channel in an interview.

But the possibility of religious profiling by state governments or misuse by caste lobbies is real. This is because the central government has decided to include caste as a category in the UID questionnaire to be filled out by applicants.

Because identity is already a potent issue and the trigger for frequent identity-related conflict – such as the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat that left 2,000 people dead – any exercise that enhances identification is fraught.

Usha Ramanathan, a prominent legal expert who is attached to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in the national capital, does not buy the UIDAI's assurances.

At the Aug. 25 meeting, Ramanthan said that while enrolling with the UIDAI may be voluntary, other agencies and service providers might require a UID number in order to transact business. Indeed, the UIDAI has already signed agreements with banks, state governments and hospital chains which will allow them to ask customers for UIDs.

Ramanathan said that, taken to its logical limit, the UID project will make it impossible, in a couple of years, for an ordinary citizen to undertake a simple task such as travelling within the country without a UID number.

The UIDAI will work with the National Population Register (NPR) which draws its powers from the Citizenship Rules of 2003 and provides for penalties if information is withheld.

And as a government website says: "Certain information collected under the NPR will be published in the local areas for public scrutiny and invitation of objections." Seeking to allay privacy fears, the website goes on to explain that this is merely "in the nature of the electoral roll or the telephone directory."

But things begin to look ominous when seen in the context of the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), the setting up of which home minister P. Chidambaram announced in February as part of his response to a major terrorist attack.

Chidambaram said NATGRID would tap into 21 sets of databases that will be networked to achieve "quick, seamless and secure access to desired information for intelligence and enforcement agencies."

He added that NATGRID will "identify those who must be watched, investigated, disabled and neutralised."

"Internationally only a few countries have provided national ID cards because of the unsettled debate on privacy and civil liberties," says Prof. R. Ramakumar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. He added that several countries have had to withdraw ID card schemes or drop biometric aspects because of public opposition.

Nilekani maintains that the main purpose of the UID project is to empower the vast numbers of excluded Indians. "For the poor this is a huge benefit because they have no identities, no birth certificates, degree certificates, driver's licences, passports or even addresses." (END/2010)

Read the original news in IPS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-fears-of-privacy-loss

India facial recognition: How effective will it be?

Admin — 2019-11-15T00:42:35Z

India is trying to build what could be the world's largest facial recognition system.

New Delhi says the system could help fight crime and find missing children.

The technology has already been launched at a few Indian airports.

Police in New Delhi says it has identified nearly 3,000 missing children during a trial period last year.

But not everyone is convinced.

Internet freedom advocates say there is little information about where and what the system will be used for and how data will be stored.

The use of facial recognition software is already common in places like China.

But there are questions about how effective it is, with one British study revealing that the technology could be highly inaccurate.

Pranesh Prakash joins Al Jazeera from Bengaluru in India. He is a fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society but is talking to us in a personal capacity

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/al-jazeera-video-november-8-2019-india-facial-recognition

India faces Twitter backlash over Internet clampdown

praskrishna — 2012-08-28T09:56:11Z

The government faced an angry backlash from Twitter users on Thursday after ordering Internet service providers to block about 20 accounts that officials said had spread scare-mongering material that threatened national security.

Post published in INDOlink, Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The backlash came as New Delhi turned up the heat on Twitter, threatening "appropriate and suitable action" if it failed to remove the accounts as soon as possible. Several newspapers said this could mean a total ban on access to Twitter in India but government officials would not confirm to Reuters that such a drastic step was being considered.

There was no immediate response from Twitter, which does not have an office in India. There are about 16 million Twitter users in the country.

The government has found itself on the defensive this week over what critics see as a clumsy clampdown on social media websites - including Google, YouTube and Facebook - that has raised questions about freedom of information in the world's largest democracy.

"Dear GOI (Government of India), Keep your Hands Off My Internet. Else face protest" tweeted one user, @Old_Monk60.

India blocked access to more than 300 Web pages after threatening mobile phone text messages and doctored website images fuelled rumours that Muslims, a large minority in the predominantly Hindu country, were planning revenge attacks for violence in Assam, where 80 people have been killed and 300,000 have been displaced since July.

Fearing for their lives, tens of thousands of migrants fled Mumbai, Bangalore and other cities last week. The exodus highlighted underlying tensions in a country with a history of ethnic and religious violence.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, the government has targeted Indian journalists, Britain's Daily Telegraph, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera television in its clampdown on Internet postings it says could inflame communal tensions.

The directives to Internet service providers listed dozens of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter pages. A random sampling of the YouTube postings revealed genuine news footage spliced together with fear-mongering propaganda.

INDIAN JOURNALISTS TARGETED

The government says Google and Facebook have largely cooperated while Twitter has been much slower to respond.

"Every company, whether it's an entertainment company, or a construction company, or a social media company, has to operate within the laws of the given country," said Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the Ministry of Communications.

Twitter has been instructed to remove 28 pages containing "objectionable content", an interior ministry official said.

"If they do not remove the pages, the Indian government will take appropriate and suitable action," he added.

The government has ordered Internet service providers to block the Twitter accounts of veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta and television anchor Shiv Aroor. Some appeared to have begun complying with the order on Thursday as Twitter users reported difficulties in accessing their pages.

"It is a political decision, because of my criticism of the government," said Gupta, who was an official in the previous government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The government's actions triggered a storm of criticism from Twitter users, with the hashtags #Emergency2012 and #GOIBlocks among the top trending topics on Twitter in India on Thursday. Some compared the situation with the state of emergency imposed by the government in 1975, when some journalists were jailed.

The Centre for Internet and Society, which analysed the 300 banning orders, found that they contained "numerous mistakes and inconsistencies". Some of the banned websites belonged to people trying to debunk the rumours, for example, it said.

"This isn't about political censorship. This is about the government not knowing how to do online regulation properly," said CIS programme manager Pranesh Prakash.

The parliament last year passed a law that obliges Internet companies to remove a range of objectionable content when requested to do so, a move criticised at the time by rights groups and social media companies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-indolink-com-india-faces-twitter-backlash

India faces Twitter backlash over Internet clampdown

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T06:56:37Z

The Indian government faced an angry backlash from Twitter users on Thursday after ordering Internet service providers to block about 20 accounts that officials said had spread scare-mongering material that threatened national security.

Written by Devidutta Tripathy and Satarupa Bhattacharjya, this post was published in Reuters on August 24, 2012. (Additional reporting by Ross Colvin, Annie Banerji and David Lalmalsawma and Andrew Quinn in Washington; Writing by Ross Colvin; Editing by John Chalmers, Andrew Osborn, Gary Hill). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The backlash came as New Delhi turned up the heat on Twitter, threatening "appropriate and suitable action" if it failed to remove the accounts as soon as possible. Several Indian newspapers said this could mean a total ban on access to Twitter in India but government officials would not confirm to Reuters that such a drastic step was being considered.

Twitter, which does not have an office in India, declined to comment. There are about 16 million Twitter users in the South Asian country.

"Dear GOI (Government of India), Keep your Hands Off My Internet. Else face protest" tweeted one user, @Old_Monk60.

India blocked access to more than 300 Web pages after threatening mobile phone text messages and doctored website images fuelled rumors that Muslims, a large minority in the predominantly Hindu country, were planning revenge attacks for violence in the northeastern state of Assam, where 80 people have been killed and 300,000 have been displaced since July.

In Washington, the State Department urged New Delhi to balance its security push with respect for basic rights including freedom of speech.

"As the Indian government seeks to preserve security we are urging them also to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

Nuland said Washington stood ready to consult with U.S. companies as they discuss the issue with the Indian government, although it was not now directly involved.

"The unique characteristics of the online environment need to be respected even as they work through whether there are things these companies can do to help calm the environment," she said.

Indian Journalists Targeted

The government says Google and Facebook have largely cooperated while Twitter has been much slower to respond.

Twitter has been instructed to remove 28 pages containing "objectionable content," an interior ministry official said.

"If they do not remove the pages, the Indian government will take appropriate and suitable action," he added.

"It is a political decision, because of my criticism of the government," said Gupta, who was an official in the previous government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Centre for Internet and Society, which analyzed the 300 banning orders, found that they contained "numerous mistakes and inconsistencies." Some of the banned websites belonged to people trying to debunk the rumors, for example, it said.

"This isn't about political censorship. This is about the government not knowing how to do online regulation properly," said CIS program manager Pranesh Prakash.

India's parliament last year passed a law that obliges Internet companies to remove a range of objectionable content when requested to do so, a move criticized at the time by rights groups and social media companies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/in-reuters-com-devidutta-tripathy-satarupa-bhattacharjya-aug-24-2012-india-faces-twitter-backlash

India entering the Minority Report age?

praskrishna — 2011-12-10T06:40:57Z

Indian government efforts to block offensive material from the Internet have prompted a storm of online ridicule along with warnings of the risk to India's image as a bastion of free speech.

Communications Minister Kapil Sibal pledged a crackdown on “unacceptable” online content, saying Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo! and Facebook had ignored India's demands to screen images and data before they are uploaded.

“We will evolve guidelines and mechanisms to deal with the issue,” Sibal told reporters this week, without detailing what steps might be taken.

His comments provoked anger and derision among Indian Internet users, while experts raised doubts about the practicalities of enforcing any directive and others questioned the government's motives.

Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, said it would be “impractical on the level of scale and on the level of the objective test”.

“What's offensive for someone might be completely banal to somebody else,” he told AFP.

Any ham-fisted government crackdown would “have a high impact on our credibility as a democracy” and risk alienating India's growing online community, Abraham said.

“We should be doing almost everything to promote the take-up of the Internet. It's almost tragic that we're pushing in the opposite direction,” he added.

India, the world's largest democracy, has more than 110 million Internet users out of a population of 1.2 billion, with predictions that 600 million people will be online in the next five years.

#KapilSibal has this week become one of the most trending topics among Indian users of the micro-blogging site Twitter, with many resorting to humour to mock the minister.

Some likened his comments to attempts by Pakistan's telecoms regulator last month to ban text messages containing nearly 1,700 words it deemed “obscene”, which was shelved after outrage from users and campaigners.

The satirical Indian web site fakingnews.com compared Sibal's plans to the futuristic Hollywood film “Minority Report”, in which criminals are arrested before committing their crimes.

It also carried a spoof news article headlined: “All Facebook posts to have 'Kapil Sibal likes this' by default”.

The mainstream media has been generally critical of Sibal as well, warning the government that it could not be seen to over-step the boundaries protecting India's treasured democratic values.

“Pre-screening of content amounts to unacceptable censorship,” the Business Standard said in an editorial.

There was even a mild expression of concern from Washington where US State Department spokesman Mark Toner was asked about the Indian government's stance.

“We are concerned about any effort to curtail freedom of expression on the Internet,” Toner said, while carefully avoiding any direct criticism of Sibal's proposals.

Sibal rejected any suggestion of an assault on free speech, saying the government had pleaded for self-regulation by companies such as Google to filter out deeply “insulting” material.

He highlighted examples of faked pictures of naked politicians, including Congress Party head Sonia Gandhi, and other images and social network pages that he said could inflame religious tensions.

India has in the past moved to block the publication of books and other material seen as disrespectful to Gandhi, or other members of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has dominated India's political life since independence.

Vijay Mukhi, a Mumbai-based freelance consultant who writes on Internet security, said Sibal had shown a fundamental lack of understanding about technology and was badly-advised.

He also saw in the reaction to the proposals a sign of how the Internet is undermining traditional unquestioning respect and deference towards elders and authority figures.

“Most of us in India are very sensitive about what people say. The problem also is that whilst the Internet is there, you have to have a thick hide,” said Mukhi.

“Politicians have got to create a second, third or fourth skin to be immune to the criticism that they get.”

New Delhi has been accused before of censorship after demanding that BlackBerry makers Research In Motion give Indian security services access to encrypted messaging and email services.

Analysts agreed that under certain circumstances, particularly national security, pre- or post-censorship was acceptable, as India was the frequent target of extremists.

Abraham, though, said any ban on data and images on decency grounds without a prior complaint was doomed to fail and likely to be contrary to the constitutional right of freedom of expression if challenged in court. - Sapa-AFP

The blog post by Phil Hazlewood was published in ioL scitech. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this. Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/minority-report-age

India encryption policy draft faces backlash

praskrishna — 2015-09-22T01:59:44Z

The department of information technology is facing a backlash from industry experts, Internet watchers and netizens on its draft of the National Encryption Policy that it recently made public.

The article by Moulishree Srivastava was published in Livemint on September 22, 2015. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

While the draft policy aims to enable a secure environment for both information and transactions in cyberspace for individuals, businesses and government, experts are concerned over privacy and outdated standards prescribed in the policy, among other things.

The policy puts the onus to produce encrypted information when demanded by government agencies on Indian citizens as well as on all the online service providers including instant messaging and e-commerce services that use encryption technology (to convert plain information to an unreadable format).

The department put the policy online late last week and it came on the radar of industry watchers and experts over the weekend. The policy is open for comments from the public till 16 October.

The policy, in its current form, is poorly drafted and the measures listed in it make Indian information systems vulnerable to cyber attacks, experts say.

For instance, the policy has mandated the use of specific standards and algorithms for encryption.

Encryption can be compared to the process of translating information in one language into a foreign language.

“Specifying certain algorithms to be used for encryption, and restricting the key sizes is same as saying that you are only allowed to communicate using a language from a given set of government-specified languages and no other language can be used,” said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society.

However, the ones mentioned in the draft policy are outdated and unsafe to use, experts say. Another thing that weakens the security considerably is the req-uirement for businesses and citizens to keep the information (that was encrypted and sent over) for 90 days, in case law en-forcement agencies demand it. But that also means that for those 90 days, cyber criminals, too, can access it, warn experts.

Another big gap in the policy is that it leaves out “sensitive departments/agencies of the government designated for performing sensitive and strategic roles”, said Prakash.

“When the policy states its mission to be the enhancing of confidentiality of information and of security of critical networks by laying out information security best practices, how does it make any sense to keep sensitive or strategic government department and agencies outside its purview?” he asked. “After all, these are the organizations that most need to be kept secure to enhance national cybersecurity.”

The draft is also ambiguous on which online services—be it shopping online or accessing email—people can use (in compliance with the law) and which online service providers will have to be registered with the government.

The policy states that “service providers located within and outside India, using encryption technology for providing any type of services in India, must enter into an agreement with the government for providing such services in India”. Users can only use the services that are registered with the government.

“This is the first time when users are actually being told what are the things they can and cannot do,” said Prakash.

“The government must take note that the knowledge and expertise of common citizens may be inadequate to understand the nuances of encryption,” said cyber law expert Na Vijayashankar on his blog. “For example, if a citizen uses a service available on the Internet which uses, say, a higher level of encryption than what is appro-ved, then this policy may make him liable for the violation.”

The problem is enhanced because all online services use some encryption technology. This means that practically all online activity will fall under this new policy.

For instance, companies like Apple or Microsoft use encryption technologies at various levels of their operating systems; e-commerce services like Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal; web browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and mail services like Gmail, Yahoo and Rediff may be required to register with the government. The only way they may escape this requirement is if there is an exemption for products that are in use at a large scale. Network security service providers like Cisco Inc. will also need to comply. (Cisco declined to respond to a query.) Snapdeal said it is still examining the draft policy, while Amazon, Google, Microsoft did not reply to emails sent by Mint. Yahoo said its spokesperson was unavailable.

One clause that is drawing a lot of ire from industry veterans and technology enthusiasts requires individual users and businesses to store all information that was sent in an encrypted form for 90 days from the date of transaction. The users would also be required to reproduce the plain text and the encrypted text, if demanded by law enforcement agencies.

The draft policy also overlooks the privacy concerns of citizens and businesses. “It is clearly a violation of freedom of speech. A large part of the policy states how the government can interfere with users, like, by demanding their private messages. The policy is anti-privacy law,” said Prakash. “Privacy and security go hand in hand. So, as this policy weakens the security of the information, it puts the privacy at greater risk.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-moulishree-srivastava-september-22-2015-india-encryption-policy-draft-faces-backlash