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India Can Restrict 'Objectionable' Web Content under New Rules

praskrishna — 2011-05-23T09:48:17Z

Internet sites and service providers in India now have the authority to order the quick deletion of offensive online content – in a move that is causing great concern among free speech proponents. This article by Ed Silverstein was featured in TMCnet Legal on April 27, 2011.

The new rules are called "the Information Technology (Intermediaries guidelines) Rules, 2011" and allow for rejecting content that is found to be objectionable.

"The list of objectionable content is sweeping and includes anything that ‘threatens the unity, integrity, defense, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states or public order," reports The New York Times.

The new rules are also more restrictive than prior laws, Sunil Abraham, the executive director for the Centre for Internet and Society, told The New York Times.

The rules require that intermediaries, who include websites like YouTube and Facebook (News - Alert) and companies that host Web sites, remove offensive content within 36 hours, The Times said. There apparently is no appeal process, The Times adds.

"These rules overly favor those who want to clamp down on freedom of expression," Abraham told The Times. "Whenever there are limits of freedom of expression, in order for those limits to be considered constitutionally valid, those limits have to be clear and not be very vague. Many of these rules that seek to place limits are very, very vague."

The Times of India also complained that, "While most of the restrictions in the rules are based on the criminal law (stuff that is blasphemous, obscene, defamatory, paedophilic, etc.), some are so loosely worded that they could easily be misused against netizens accustomed to speaking their mind freely, whether on politics or otherwise."

For example, one prohibition is saying something that would be "insulting" to "any other nation," The Times of India said.

"Since this expression has been mentioned without any qualifications, it could be invoked against anybody who talks disparagingly about other countries," The Times of India explains.

In addition, India’s MediaNama, adds, "These rules give the Indian government the ability to gag free speech, and block any website it deems fit, without publicly disclosing why sites have been blocked, who took the decision to block it, and just as importantly, providing adequate recourse to blogs, sites and online and mobile businesses, for getting the block removed."

Free speech advocates may try to challenge in the new rules in Indian courts.

In addition, the Indian government has issued new regulations on data security and Internet cafes, The New York Times reports.

The New York Times also reported that an India-based spokeswoman for Google (News - Alert) declined to immediately comment on the new rules.

But a Google spokesperson told The Times of India the guidelines may be "particularly damaging to the abilities of Indians who are increasingly using the internet in order to communicate, and the many businesses that depend upon online collaboration to prosper."

The Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society has also published a list of 11 Web sites banned by the India’s Department of Information Technology.

In a related matter, TMCnet reports that Freedom House has ranked India 14th among 37 countries on "free and unrestricted access to the web."

The number of Indians with Internet access is increasing, with many users in the nation favoring mobile devices. Over 700 million cellphone accounts now exist in India, The New York Times said.

Read the original here

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India Blocks News Website Pages for 'Spreading Fear' over Assam Violence

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T04:53:08Z

Access to more than 300 internet web pages including some published by Telegraph, Times of India and Al-Jazeera blocked.

This article by Gianluca Mezzofiore was published in International Business Times on August 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The Indian government has blocked more than 300 internet web pages including ones published by the Daily Telegraph, Australia's ABC and Al-Jazeera claiming they contained "incendiary" material likely to spread panic.

Internet experts said the move might be illegal as the Indian government interfered with hundreds of website, including some Twitter accounts, blogs and links to certain stories.

Internet posts, phone text messages and fake video clips have allegedly spread rumours that Muslims were poised to attack the Assamese population in Chennai, Mumbai and Pune. More than 10,000 Assamese workers fled to their native state in northeastern India.

The content, bound to fuel tension between Muslim migrants and Assamese workers, included images that falsely portrayed the relief effort for the 2010 Tibetan earthquake disaster as Burmese Buddhists walking among their Muslim victims.

The mass exodus from southern cities followed clashes in Assam between the Bodo tribe and Muslims. At least 80 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were displaced.

The Telegraph reported that India blocked its pages including a photo-gallery of Reuters and AFP news pictures that documented "attacks by Burma's Buddhist Rakhine community on villages which had been occupied by Rohingya Muslims, who had migrated from Bangladesh several decades earlier".

Among other news outlets blocked were The Times of India, the Dainik Bhaskar and FirstPost.

"The government has gone overboard and many of its efforts are legally questionable," Pranesh Prakash, who studies internet governance and freedom of speech at the Centre for Internet and Society, said.

"The government's highest priority should have been to counter the rumours and it did a really bad job of that."

Victoria Nuland, spokeswoman for the US State Department, said it was urging the Indian government "to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world" while addressing its security concerns.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-ibi-times-co-uk-gianluca-mezzofiore-aug-24-2012-india-blocks-news-website-pages-for-spreading-fear-over-assam-violence

India blocks more than 250 Web sites for inciting hate, panic

praskrishna — 2012-08-22T04:38:26Z

Nearly 80 people have been killed and 400,000 displaced in fighting between Muslims and India’s Hindu Bodo tribespeople in Assam, a northeastern state of India, in recent weeks. The violence has prompted many northeasterners living in major cities to flee, fearing reprisals.

The article by Rama Lakshmi was published in the Washington Post on August 20, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in it.

India blocked about 250 Web sites and social networking sites Monday, accusing them of spreading inflammatory content that triggered panic among thousands of workers and students from the country’s eight northeastern states last week.

The government’s blame list ranged from Facebook to fundamentalist Pakistani sites, Twitter to text messages, and Google to YouTube videos. Authorities also barred the sending of text messages to more than five people at a time for two weeks.

Thousands of people from northeastern India fled several cities in the south and west of the country last week after text messages circulated warning that they faced reprisal attacks from Muslims over recent ethnic clashes in the northeastern state of Assam.

The government said a number of Web sites had deliberately tried to inflame passions, hosting morphed videos of violence against Muslims in Burma and asserting that they were filmed in Assam. The images went viral and provoked riots by Muslim residents of Mumbai just over a week ago.

"We have blocked a number of sites. We have also identified a number of sites which were uploaded from Pakistan," Home Secretary R. K. Singh told reporters in New Delhi on Monday.

Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik has asked India for evidence about the alleged Pakistani Web sites, which Singh said he would share.

Although some analysts said the curbs were justified because the sites posed a threat to public order, others said the actions were a knee-jerk response from a weak government unable to effectively assuage the concerns of its frightened citizens.

"This is a government that is trying to hide its incompetence by blaming everybody but unwilling to look at itself for failure to protect its citizens," said a government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media.

Others said that by cracking down on Web sites and social media, the government was dodging the deeper issue of the racism and alienation felt by many people from the northeastern states, who are routinely denigrated by their fellow Indians for supposedly being more Chinese or Southeast Asian in appearance.

But India’s relationship with Internet freedom has become increasingly troubled.

In the past year, the government has locked horns with Google, Yahoo and Facebook, as well as with local activists and bloggers, over censorship and content screening. Analysts then accused the government of trying to silence middle-class critics at the height of a national anti-corruption movement.

The government has been holding public meetings on proposed rules to prohibit Web sites and service providers from hosting information that could be regarded as “harmful,” “blasphemous” or “insulting.”

Last year, India topped the list of countries that routinely ask Internet companies to remove content, according to the Google Transparency Report.

Although Internet penetration is still low in India, the country has the third-largest number of Web users in the world, with more than 100 million people accessing the Internet. A new report says that Indians spend one in every four minutes online visiting social networking sites.

Some free-speech activists fear the events of last week may have provided the government the justification it was seeking to increase Web censorship.

“I have fears that the present situation should not cause a disproportionate response which affects freedom of speech online,” said Apar Gupta, a lawyer and advocate for free speech online. “Historically, a national security argument is very tough to dislodge the competing interests of freedom of speech.”

Other advocates of Internet freedom say the government is justified in the crackdown but could have opted for a more nuanced approach.

“A blanket ban does not necessarily lead to a reduction in the circulation of rumors because people become more vulnerable in a communication vacuum,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society, an advocacy group based in the southern city of Bangalore, which experienced a mass exodus of frightened northeasterners last week.

Abraham said the government sent out broad instructions to Web sites to block all hate speech, without giving specific definitions or examples. “The government could have done this in a more sophisticated manner, like putting up banner notices on Facebook and Twitter; blocking text messages that had certain key words; or warning the sites to proactively dismantle some content.”

The Indian Department of Electronics and Information Technology said in a statement Monday that it had been working with international social networking sites on the issue but that “a lot more and quicker action is expected from them to address such a sensitive issue.”

A Google India official said that “content intended to incite violence is prohibited on YouTube, and we act quickly to remove such material flagged by our users.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-washington-post-rama-lakshmi-august-20-2012-india-blocks-more-than-250-web-sites-for-inciting-hate-panic

India Blocks Facebook, Twitter, Mass Texts in Response to Unrest

praskrishna — 2012-09-03T02:46:42Z

The Indian government has gone on the offensive against Internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, demanding hundreds of pages be removed or blocked after political unrest erupted in various parts of the country.

This post by Simon Roughneen was posted in Media Shift on August 28, 2012. Nishant Shah is quoted.

On August 15, India's independence day, Indian northeasterners began fleeing Bangalore, the country's southern IT hub and 5th largest city, after text messages said to threaten Assamese people and other northeasterners were sent around.

Authorities restricted text messages so they could be sent to only five recipients to stop bulk sending, which was followed by a government backlash against social media and news sites; more than 300 pages have been blocked in recent days.

Exodus

The scene during the exodus was reminiscent of an old newsreel from World War II Europe, or, more aptly, from the separation of India and Pakistan in the late 1940s when around 25 million people took flight amid chaos and bloodshed as the contours of the new states were drawn up after British withdrawal.

On the platform at a Bangalore train station were hundreds of people from Assam state and other areas of India's northeast, a remote part of the country almost 2,000 miles away. The region is mostly surrounded by Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Burma and is linked to the rest of India only by a narrow strip of land nicknamed the chicken-neck.

In July, fighting in the northeast's Assam state between local ethnic groups and Muslims -- which some Indians say are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh -- killed 80 people and forced 400,000 more from their homes, most of them Muslims. On August 11, a march in Mumbai , India's financial capital, ended up in a riot, with two killed and dozens injured, when Muslims there protested attacks on Muslims in the northeast and on Muslim Rohingya in Burma.

The SMS scare in Bangalore came next, but who sent what and why has never been clearly established, though three men were subsequently arrested in Bangalore on suspicion of mass-forwarding threatening text messages.

Nonetheless, the scare, real or hyped, was enough to prompt panic among the 300,000 or so northeasterners who study and work in Bangalore. Interviewees at the city's rail station, waiting for a train to Guwahati in Assam state, a two-and-a-half-day journey, said they hadn't received or even seen any messages, but the rumor mill went into overdrive and their parents in the northeast urged them to come home, temporarily at least.

A lack of confidence in police, perceived racism against northeasterners -- some of whom appear east or southeast Asian and are sometimes called "chinki" by other Indians -- as well as political discord ahead of elections next year all contributed to the exodus.

Government Reacts

The Indian government urged the northeasterners to stay put, as the exodus spread to Pune, Chennai and other large cities in the south and west where northeasterners work. Text messages were limited to five recipients to stop bulk messages spreading fear, a bar later raised to 20 recipients. India has around 750 million cell phone subscribers, the world's second biggest market after China, and the government's nationwide restriction seemed an over-reaction given that the exodus was confined to a few cities.

In a country of 1.2 billion people -- the world's fourth biggest economy measured in purchasing power parity terms -- the government is worried about a recent economic slowdown. Growth is at its lowest since 2003, and foreign investors are complaining out loud about hazy rules and red tape. India feels it needs to nip any political unrest in the bud with foreign investment dropping by 78 percent year-on-year, according to June figures.

Apparently with public order in mind, the Indian government began blocking websites and pages said to contain inflammatory content, even as the exodus slowed.

Nishant Shah of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society said that the government is trying to figure out how best to react to the transition from an era when news and information was carried via broadcast and print.

"In the older forms of governance, which were imagined through a broadcast model, the government was at the center of the information wheel, managing and mediating what information reached different parts of the country. In the [peer-to-peer] world, where the government no longer has that control, it is now trying different ways by which it can reinforce its authority and centrality to the information ecosystem. Which means that there is going to be a series of failures and models that don't work," Shah told PBS MediaShift in an email.

Overdoing It?

However, for a country that has long styled itself as the world's biggest democracy, and is home to some of the world's biggest selling English language newspapers, the last few days have seen the government take a forceful line against Internet giants such as Google and Facebook that some feel threatens freedom of speech.

The text messages were said to be from some of India's 170 million or so Muslim population, the world's third largest after Indonesia and Pakistan -- and the Indian government at first sought to blame Pakistan for fomenting the exodus by whipping up anger among India's Muslims.

Following the text restrictions, Indian authorities blocked what they describe as "incendiary" and "hate-mongering" content on websites in Pakistan and Bangladesh that they say spurred the northeast fighting -- including images of the 2010 Tibet earthquake passed off as images of Burmese Buddhists after attacking Burmese Muslims -- and asked Google and Facebook to remove the content.

However, news reports on the exodus, as well as other coverage of Muslim-Buddhist clashes in Burma, were blocked. Among those affected were Doha-based news agency Al-Jazeera and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). And stories on sectarian fighting in Arakan in western Burma -- where Buddhist Arakanese have clashed with Muslim Rohingya, with the flare-up catching the attention of Islamist groups elsewhere, including India -- were blocked in India.

ABC said on Friday content that "in relation to the particular blocked ABC, we are surprised by the action and we stand by the reporting."

An April 2011 law says that the government must give 48 hours before blocking pages, as well as an explanation for the block in each individual case, though this can be sidestepped in an emergency. "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, speaking about the recent restrictions.

There's more to the back-story than just the 2011 IT law, however. Prior to the recent exodus from Bangalore and the government reaction, Google and Facebook were facing charges for allegedly hosting offensive material.

A Google spokesman, speaking by telephone from Singapore about the Indian government's recent blocks, said that the company abides by the law of the land, in India and elsewhere. "We also comply with valid legal requests from authorities wherever possible, consistent with our longstanding policy," he said.

All told, 80 million to 100 million Indians are online, and India has the world's third biggest number of Facebook users, at 53 million. But, that just makes up just 4.5 percent of the country's population.

Some commentators see the government as oversensitive. For example, using the pushback to put a block on an account parodying the country's prime minister.

Twitter has 16 million accounts in the country. By Friday, a stand-off between New Delhi and Twitter saw around 20 Twitter handles blocked by Indian ISPs, on the orders of the government, with threats that the government could block Twitter completely.

The hashtag #GOIblocks gets about 10-12 tweets per minute -- going by a quick scroll-through -- from users protesting the government's measures. However, caught up in the dragnet so far are accounts with little apparently to do with the Bangalore exodus. The Indian opposition said the blacklist is partisan, while other commentators see the government as oversensitive, using the pushback to put a block on an account (@PM0India) parodying the country's prime minister, for example.

Adding to the irony, though it is not clear whether this was by accident or design -- the Twitter account of Milind Deora, the country's minister of state for communications and IT, and a vocal proponent of the recent blocks, was taken down by Twitter for 12 hours before being restored -- along with an apology by Twitter on Saturday.

This story has been altered to correct the date of India's independence day.

Simon Roughneen is an Irish journalist usually based in southeast Asia. He writes for the The Irrawaddy, Christian Science Monitor and others. He is on twitter @simonroughneen and you can Circle him on Google+.

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India blocks access to 857 porn sites

pranesh — 2015-08-05T01:31:32Z

India has blocked free access to 857 porn sites in what it says is a move to prevent children from accessing them.

The story was published by BBC on August 3, 2015. Pranesh Prakash gave his inputs.

Adults will still be able to access the sites using virtual private networks (VPNs) or proxy servers. In July, the Supreme Court expressed its unhappiness over the government's inability to block sites, especially those featuring child pornography.

Telecom companies have said they will not be able to enforce the "ban" immediately.

"We have to block each site one by one and it will take a few days for all service providers to block all the sites," an unnamed telecom company executive told The Times of India newspaper.

A senior official, who preferred to remained unnamed, told the BBC Hindi that India's department of telecommunications had "advised" telecom operators and Internet service providers to "control free and open access" to 857 porn sites.

"There is no total ban. This was done in the backdrop of Supreme Court's observation on children having free access to porn sites. The idea is also to protect India's cultural fabric. This will not prevent adults from visiting porn sites," the official said.

In July, the top court had observed that it was not for the court to order a ban on porn sites.

"It is an issue for the government to deal with. Can we pass an interim order directing blocking of all adult websites? And let us keep in mind the possible contention of a person who could ask what crime have I committed by browsing adult websites in private within the four walls of my house. Could he not argue about his right to freedom to do something within the four walls of his house without violating any law?," the court said.

According to statistics released by adult site Pornhub, India was its fourth largest source of traffic in 2014, behind the US, UK and Canada. Pranesh Prakash of the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society said the directive to block the 857 sites was "the largest single order of its kind" in India.

"The government's reasoning that it is not a ban because adults can still access the porn sites is ridiculous," he told the BBC. The move has caused a great deal of comment on Indian social media networks, with many prominent personalities coming forward to condemn it.

Popular author Chetan Bhagat, writer and commentator Nilanjana Roy, politician Milind Deora and director Ram Gopal Varma have all added their voices to the debate.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bbc-news-august-3-2015-india-blocks-access-to-857-porn-sites

India bid to censor Internet draws flak

praskrishna — 2011-12-09T10:36:30Z

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.

Phil Hazlewood spoke to Sunil Abraham and published this article for AFP. Read the original hosted by Google here

Related Media Coverage
Various newspapers and channels also published this news on their sites:

India bid to censor Internet draws flak [France 24, 9 December 2011]
Indian push to screen Internet content draws flak [Khaleej Times, 9 December 2011]
India bid to censor Internet draws flak [Physorg.com, 9 December 2011]
India censorship bid gets flak [TimesLive, 9 December 2011]
India bid to censor Internet draws flak [Bangkok Post, 9 December 2011]
India bid to censor Internet draws flak [Yahoo News, 9 December 2011]
India bid to censor Internet draws flak [MSN News, 9 December 2011]
Indian push to screen Internet content draws flak [Emirates 24/7, 9 December 2011]
Indian push to screen internet content draws flak [Business Live, 9 December 2011]
Indian Push to Screen Internet Content Draws Flak [Jakarta Globe, 9 December 2011]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-bid-to-censor-net-draws-flak

India believes in Complete Freedom of Cyber Space: Kapil Sibal

praskrishna — 2013-10-25T07:13:44Z

The site of the impact of a cyber crime should determine jurisdiction, says information technology minister Kapil Sibal.

This article by Elizabeth Roche was published in Livemint on October 14, 2013. Moulishree Srivastava also contributed to this story. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Minister for communications and information technology Kapil Sibal said on Monday that if a cyber crime had an impact on India or the subject matter was Indian, India should have the jurisdiction to investigate the crime and mete out justice.

India “believes in complete freedom of cyber space”, Sibal said, adding that the international community should arrive at a consensus on rules of jurisdiction and enforceability where cyber crimes are concerned. He was speaking at a conference on cyber security and cyber governance in New Delhi.

“Freedom of expression is central to our ideological stand on cyber space but at the same time there must be a de facto recognition of threats that are out there in cyber space and that we need to deal with those threats locally, nationally and globally and what we need is a consensus on those,” the minister said.

He was asked specifically about the need for changes in the global Internet governance structure following a US admission that its National Security Agency listened in on communications from the embassies of allies such as France, Italy and Greece, as well as Japan, Mexico, South Korea, India and Turkey.

The site of the impact of a cyber crime should determine jurisdiction, the minister said.

He gave an example: if anything happens in an Indian mission located in New York, it should be governed by Indian law because the mission would be considered Indian territory.

“So as long as the source of the data is Indian and the impact is on India then the jurisdiction must be Indian and that should apply across the world,” he said.

“If the harm has been caused to Indian citizens or Indian property then jurisdiction should be Indian,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director at Centre for Internet and Society. “This principle has already been developed by Justice Murlidhar in Banyan Tree case. So this principle already has legal precedent.”

But Abraham added that “even if Indian courts believe that it is their jurisdiction, foreign law enforcement agencies may not co-operate. This may be one of the biggest challenges in implementing this principle”.

“This move could be seen as one enhancing cyber security, but since there is no universally accepted definition to cyber security and some government include speech regulation, surveillance, cyber crime and hacktivism a part of cyber security—there can be damaging consequences for human rights online,” Abraham said.

The minister’s statement assumes significance against the backdrop of a number of countries including India protesting the spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) on their missions in Washington and New York.

According to many news reports, India was among the top five countries whose missions in the US were targeted by the NSA as part of a clandestine effort to mine electronic data. Reports of the US snooping has caused unease world wide.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel raised the issue with US President Barack Obama in June while Brazil’s President Dilma Rouseff reportedly cancelled a summit with the US President in protest last month.

According to the ministry of external affairs in New Delhi, India raised the issue with the US embassy in New Delhi besides taking up the issue with the US state department in Washington. Both sides agreed to discuss the subject during their cyber security dialogue.

“That’s the law in the country...if anything happens there (in Indian embassies) that is part of Indian jurisdiction and similarly if you apply the same example and establish jurisdiction then anything that relates to Indian data and the impact on Indian data, it’s the courts in India that should have jurisdiction,” Sibal added later.

“We are talking about a principle and the principle is wherever there is Indian data wherever anything is done to impact on Indian data, the source of which is Indian then the jurisdiction must be of Indian courts,” the minister said adding that he was putting this view out as something the cyber security seminar should discuss.

India’s national security adviser Shiv Shankar Menon added that what the minister had voiced was India’s view but it was not a settled matter and that it had to be discussed at global forums.

With around 40% of the 120 million smartphone users in India accessing the Internet through mobile phones, network protection was an imperative. “The consequences of manipulation or distortion...can be potentially disastrous.” Menon said recalling how morphed pictures of violence seemingly targeting a particular ethnic group, circulated on the Internet and via cell phones, had resulted in thousands of people fleeing home from their places of work last year.

On certification of hardware security, Menon said: “India has recently received authorizing nation status for IT products and testing labs in the country will now gain global recognition,” adding that this was an opportunity for Indian industry.

Sibal, in his address, said the Internet had become a means of empowerment of people and most of this was due to the enormous freedom provided by the Internet. But “there can be no concept of sovereignty in cyber space because there are no territorial issues involved”, he said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/livemint-october-14-2013-elizabeth-roche-moulishree-srivastava-india-believes-in-complete-freedom-of-cyber-space

India bans social media in Kashmir for one month

praskrishna — 2017-04-27T16:09:56Z

Authorities in Indian-controlled Kashmir have banned 22 social media sites including Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter in an effort to calm tensions in the disputed region.

The article was published in the Telegraph on April 27, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

The government said Wednesday that the one-month ban was necessary for public safety because social media were being "misused by anti-national and anti-social elements." Videos depicting the alleged abuse of Kashmiris by Indian forces fueled protests have been shown on social media in recent days.

"It's being felt that continued misuse of social networking sites and instant messaging services is likely to be detrimental to the interests of peace and tranquility in the state," the public order said.

The sites remained online Thursday as the local telecom company struggled to block them.

Pranesh Prakash, policy director for the Indian advocacy group the Center for Internet and Society, called the ban a "blow to freedom of speech" and "legally unprecedented in India."

An official with Kashmir's state-owned telecom company, Bharat Sanchar Nigam, said engineers were still working on shutting down the 22 sites, including Facebook and Twitter, but so far had been unable to do so without freezing the internet across the Himalayan region. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to give technical details of the effort to the media.

Meanwhile, 3G and 4G cellphone service has been suspended for more than a week, but slower 2G service is still available.

Residents of Srinagar, the region's main city, were busily downloading documents, software and applications onto their smartphones which would likely be able to circumvent the social media block once it goes into effect. Many expressed relief to still have internet access Thursday morning.

"It was a welcome surprise," said Tariq Ahmed, a 24-year-old university student. "It appears they've hit a technical glitch to block social media en mass."

While the government has halted internet service in Kashmir in previous attempts to prevent anti-India demonstrations, this is the first time they have done so in response to the circulation of videos and photos showing alleged military abuse.

Others mocked the government. A Facebook post by Kashmiri writer Arif Ayaz Parrey said the ban showed "the Indian government has decided to take on the collective subversive wisdom of cyberspace humanity."

Indian police and paramilitary officials accuse agitators of using social media to instigate violence.

An international journalists' rights group urged Indian authorities to immediately revoke the "sweeping censorship of social media," saying it "will bring neither peace nor order" in the region.

"Such broad censorship clearly violates the democratic ideals and human rights India purports to uphold," said Steven Butler, Asia Program coordinator at the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Kashmiris have been uploading videos and photos of alleged abuse for some years, but several recently posted clips, captured in the days surrounding a violence-plagued local election on April 9, have proven to be especially powerful and have helped to intensify anti-India protests.

One video shows a stone-throwing teenage boy being shot by a soldier from a few meters (yards) away. Another shows soldiers making a group of young men, held inside an armored vehicle, shout profanities against Pakistan while a soldier kicks and slaps them with a stick.

The video pans to a young boy's bleeding face as he cries. Yet another clip shows three soldiers holding a teenage boy down with their boots and beating him on his back.

The video that drew the most outrage was of young shawl weaver Farooq Ahmed Dar tied to the hood of an army jeep as it patrolled villages on voting day. A soldier can be heard saying in Hindi over a loudspeaker, "Stone throwers will meet a similar fate," as residents look on aghast.

Protests and clashes are an almost daily occurrence in Indian-administered Kashmir, where anti-India sentiment runs deep among the mostly Muslim population after decades of military crackdowns. Disputes over control of the Kashmir region, claimed by both India and Pakistan, have sparked two wars between the nations since 1947.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-telegraph-april-27-2017-india-bans-social-media-in-kashmir-for-one-month

India Bans Mass SMS to Counter Panic

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T07:29:59Z

Last year social networking was credited with helping to organize revolutions across the Middle East and with getting normally apathetic middle-class Indians onto the streets to protest corruption.

This article by Shreya Shah was published in the Wall Street Journal on August 17, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

But in recent days, India has seen a darker side of social networking, as doctored videos of Muslims being attacked and text messages warning of retaliation by Muslims went viral in the wake of riots in the northeastern state of Assam.

The messages have caused panic among thousands of Indians and spurred attacks and clashes in two cities. In an attempt to calm the situation, India banned the ability to send mass text messages on Friday afternoon, the home ministry press office confirmed. The ban will stay in effect for two weeks.

In remarks to Parliament on Friday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, “The unity and integrity of our country is being threatened by certain elements.”

The riots in Assam saw clashes between Bodo tribals and Muslim immigrants, beginning in late July, which led to dozens of deaths and displaced tens of thousands of people. On Friday, Abdul Khaleque, press secretary to the chief minister of Assam, told India Real Time that the death toll had risen to 78 as sporadic clashes continued. Of the 400,000 people that had fled their homes, approximately 115,000 had returned home.

As India has struggled this month to bring calm to Assam, flare-ups started taking place in the western city of Pune, while in Bangalore, thousands of northeastern workers began fleeing the city.

Mobile phone messages saying that northeasterners had been killed in Bangalore have been circulating since Sunday, said Dilip Kanti, a 24-year-old law student from Mizoram who has lived in the city in the southern state of Karnataka for six years.

“The messages warned that we should leave the city before the day of Eid,” he added. Monday, Aug. 20, is an official holiday for Eid, the festival that marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting.

The Karnataka state government and the police have said that this is a hoax message and that they are investigating the source of these messages.

The messages appear to be intended to panic northeasterners, send large numbers of them back to their home state, and foster fear of Muslims. Those developments could set the stage for sectarian riots, always a concern in a country that has seen such clashes break out frequently.

The home minister has said an inquiry is underway. But so far officials have not shared information about the source of these messages.

Presently, Indian companies that send mass text messages need to register to do so. But there’s no bar on individual users sending mass messages. A limit of 100 messagesper user per day was imposed last year in an attempt to reduce spam and later increased to 200, but this was overturned by the courts in July.

Text messages are the “most potent weapon of rumor,” said Shiv Visvanathan, a professor at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy in Haryana. “They can multiply a few thousand times in a minute.”

India has been aware of the danger of high-tech rumor-mongering. When the verdict on the contested religious site of the Babri Masjid in Uttar Pradesh state was due in 2010, the Indian government temporarily banned the ability to send mass text messages.

But this time, with a new home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, who has only been in the job for a little more than two weeks, India was slower to act. It wasn’t till Friday afternoon – after the messages had been circulating for nearly a week – that India banned mass text messaging.

But by Wednesday, students and workers from the northeast who were living in Bangalore, where these messages circulated, were rushing to the train station to head home. On Thursday alone, two special trains were scheduled to take 6,000 people back to Guwahati, the capital of Assam.

Some of them had already experienced personal run-ins with Muslims upset about the riots in Assam. A 21-year-old student from the state of Nagaland, who didn’t want his name used, said that he is “sick of receiving these messages with rumors.” Apart from the messages, he said that he had been threatened twice in Bangalore by Muslims in the last five days but did not want to return to Nagaland and miss classes. His mother, on the other hand, is fearful for his safety and is forcing him to come back. His roommates have already left. “I will stay till Ramadan and if the situation doesn’t get better I will have no option but to leave,” he said.

The messages have gained potency from the fact that there have been some attacks on northeasterners in parts of India; these attacks too seem to have been intentionally instigated online.

Videos were doctored to show Muslims being tortured purportedly by ethnic Assamese, Pune police inspector Prasad Hasabnis told India Real Time.

“These incited the youth,” he added.

	Four students from the northeastern state of Manipur were attacked in Pune by young Muslim men in three separate incidents in the last week as a result, he said. In Mumbai, meanwhile, two people were killed and 65 injured after a protest over the suffering of Muslims in Assam turned violent. A group called the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena (Bhagat Singh’s Revolution Army) has been spreading some of the rumors, said Laurence Liang, a researcher with the Alternate Law Forum, a Bangalore-based human rights group that also advocates free speech.

Four students from the northeastern state of Manipur were attacked in Pune by young Muslim men in three separate incidents in the last week as a result, he said. In Mumbai, meanwhile, two people were killed and 65 injured after a protest over the suffering of Muslims in Assam turned violent.

A group called the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena (Bhagat Singh’s Revolution Army) has been spreading some of the rumors, said Laurence Liang, a researcher with the Alternate Law Forum, a Bangalore-based human rights group that also advocates free speech.

Mr. Liang said the group put up a post on Facebook that remained up until Wednesday. It said that a fatwa has been issued by the Muslims against people from the northeast and provided telephone numbers that didn’t work, he added. The Alternate Law Forum complained about the post to Facebook and it has since been taken down, he said.

“Technology is a double-edged sword,” says Mr. Liang. A few people use it to “rip up a frenzy of emotion by spreading rumors,” he says. He added that it didn’t help that “people in the United States and the United Kingdom, sitting in the safety of their homes, reply provocatively on social media, unaware of the consequences they unleash.”

Of course, some people are trying to use Twitter and Facebook to counter the rumors.

American Enterprise Institute resident fellow Sadanand Dhume tweeted on Friday that a video purporting to show violence in Assam was actually footage from Indonesia.

“I lived in Indonesia so recognized the policeman’s uniform, batik sarong & writing on baseball cap. Must be many more fake videos out there,” he said. (Mr. Dhume is an opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal in India.)

And in a message on Facebook, Walter Fernandes, head of the North-Eastern Social Research Centre, said northeastern and Muslim associations were meeting in Bangalore to figure out how to quell the rumors, and that people shouldn’t give in to panic. Muslim leaders have promised to speak about the situation and the need to protect people from the northeast in their sermons, Mr. Fernandes wrote.

The Indian government last year attempted to censor social networking site like Facebook, arguing inflammatory content on the site could lead to violence in India. Facebook, Google and several other Internet firms are presently on trial in India for failing to remove offensive material from their sites in response to complaints. This month’s developments could help the government make a stronger case for censoring these sites.

But Pranesh Prakash, of the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society, says that greater regulation will not solve the problem. What he says is needed are proactive statements by the government and rigorous fact-checking by the media, especially regional news channels.

The only way of “countering rumors is by fact,” he said.

– Preetika Rana contributed to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/blogs-wsj-com-aug-17-2012-shreya-shah-india-bans-mass-sms-to-counter-public

India bans Facebook’s ‘free’ Internet for the poor

praskrishna — 2016-02-10T02:53:49Z

India’s telecom regulator said Monday that service providers cannot charge discriminatory prices for Internet services, a blow to Facebook’s global effort to provide low-cost Internet to developing countries.

The article by Annie Gowen was published in Washington Post on February 8, 2016. Sunil Abraham gave inputs. The article was also mirrored by NDTV.

Facebook’s “Free Basics” program provides a pared-down version of Facebook and weather and job listings to some 15 million mobile-phone users in 37 countries around the world.

When it debuted in India in April, however, Free Basics immediately ran afoul of Internet activists who said it violated the principle of “net neutrality,” which holds that consumers should be able to access the entire Internet unfettered by price or speed.

On Monday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India agreed, prohibiting data service providers from offering or charging different prices for data — even if it’s free. The Free Basics program has run into trouble elsewhere in the world recently — with Egypt banning it and Google clarifying that it pulled out of the application during a testing phase in Zambia.

In a statement, Facebook said that while the company was “disappointed with the outcome, we will continue our efforts to eliminate barriers and give the unconnected an easier path to the Internet.”

In an interview before the ruling, Chris Daniels, Facebook’s vice president for Internet.org — the umbrella organization of the global effort — said India’s negative reaction has been “unique versus other markets we’ve seen. We’ve been welcomed with open arms in many countries.”

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg launched the program to great fanfare in 2013, partnering with other international tech firms on a mission to connect the 4 billion people in the world without Internet access — which he says is a basic human right.

India has 300 million mobile Internet users but still has close to 1 billion people without proper Internet access. But it is second only to the United States in number of Facebook users, with 130 million, with vast expansion potential as Facebook works to increase its user base beyond the developed world.

Yet the Free Basics program was controversial from the start in India, where critics accused Facebook of creating a “walled garden” for poor users that allowed them access to only a portion of the web that Facebook controlled.

Dozens of well-known tech entrepreneurs, university professors and tech industry groups spoke out against it, saying that the curated app, with its handpicked weather, job and other listings, put India’s scrappy start-ups and software developers at a disadvantage.

On Monday, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder and creator of India’s payment application PayTM, applauded the regulator’s move.

He had been among the program’s fiercest critics, dubbing Free Basics “poor Internet for poor people” and comparing Facebook’s actions to that of British colonialists and their East India Co.

“India, Do u buy into this baby internet?” Sharma tweeted in December. “The East India company came with similar ‘charity’ to Indians a few years back!”

“In a country like India that’s just taking off, it’s important that there is an equal playground for every app developer,” he said in an interview.

In December, India’s regulator put out a position paper on differential pricing and asked for public comment on whether such programs were fair.

In response, Facebook launched a public relations blitz, with television and newspaper advertisements, billboards and an opinion piece by Zuckerberg in the Times of India in which he argued against criticism that the social-media giant was providing the service simply to expand its user base.

Facebook also engineered a prompt to users that sent “robo” letters of support for Free Basics to India’s telecommunications regulator. The regulator, flooded with form letters, was not amused.

Facebook’s behavior may not have helped its cause, some analysts said.

“Facebook went overboard with its propaganda [and] convinced ‘the powers that be’ that it cannot be trusted with mature stewardship of our information society,” said Sunil Abraham of the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

Yet David Kirkpatrick, the author of “The Facebook Effect,” says that Zuckerberg is determined to see the program succeed.

“Facebook is relentless,” he said. “Zuckerberg has said from the beginning his goal is to make the world more open and connected. And that’s a phrase he continues to repeat 10 years later.”

The regulator had asked Facebook, and its local telecom partner, Reliance Communications, to suspend Free Basics’ operations during the public comment period. But the social-media giant and its partner appeared to flout the suspension order, with the program continuing to be operational on Reliance SIM cards.

A spokesman for Reliance earlier said that the applications was in “testing mode” and that it was not commercially promoting the product.

The regulatory body said Monday that anybody violating the order in the future will be subject to a fine of about $735 a day. It will return to review the policy in two years to see if it is effective.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/washington-post-annie-gowen-february-8-2016-india-bans-facebooks-free-internet-for-the-poor

India arrests professor over political cartoon

praskrishna — 2012-04-25T10:27:48Z

Sharing funny, satirical cartoons over the Internet can land you in court and even in jail these days in the world’s largest democracy. The article by Rama Lakshmi was published in Washington Post on April 13, 2012.

A chemistry professor, Ambikesh Mahapatra, from the Jadavpur University in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, forwarded a cheeky cartoon strip to his friends that made fun of the state’s mercurial chief minister Mamata Banerjee. Late Thursday, the professor was beaten up by angry political workers of Banerjee’s party, Trinamool Congress, and later arrested by the state police.

Indian politicians appear to have become very touchy recently. In the past few months, the government clamped down on Web sites and social networking sites, such as Facebook and Google, for carrying defamatory cartoons and morphed images of senior politicians.

Banerjee, who ended a Communist party’s three-decades reign in West Bengal at the elections a year ago, has become the queen of controversies in the past month.

She first wanted the state’s school history textbooks to reduce the number of pages glorifying Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Then, she instructed 2,500 public libraries to buy only newspapers her government approved of.

Banerjee is also a partner in India’s national coalition government. She recently forced her party member Dinesh Trivedi, a national railway minister, to resign because he dared to raise rail passenger fares without consulting her. Mahapatra forwarded a cartoon that made fun of Banerjee sacking Trivedi.

On Friday, the professor’s arrest triggered outrage. Angry students in West Bengal’s capital Kolkata protested by pasting copies of the cartoon all over university walls. One TV commentator said that Banerjee had not only lost her sense of humor but had herself become a laughing stock.

The state’s “new-found aversion to non-believers has gone a bit too far,” said Pranesh Prakash, an Internet freedom activist at the Center for Internet and Society, of the response to the cartoon.

“[Banerjee’s] government wants to decide what people will read in public libraries, and tomorrow she will tell us what we should think,” said Brinda Karat, a lawmaker from the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

West Bengal’s transport minister Madan Mitra said “those who call themselves professors, if they do such ugly things, will never be forgiven.”

The chemistry professor was later released on bail, but not before he was charged with three crimes: humiliating and insulting the modesty of a woman, defamation and sending offensive messages through a computer.

Click to read the original

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-arrests-professor-over-cartoon

India ‘tea parties’ enable politicians to woo urban youth with technology

praskrishna — 2014-03-06T12:13:36Z

Babalal Patel’s tiny tea stall in southern Mumbai is a long way from Silicon Valley. It is not even that close to Bangalore, the Indian equivalent.

The article by Avantika Chilkoti was published in the Financial Times on February 26, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

But one night this month this ramshackle shop became the venue for a social media experiment that highlights the high-tech face of electioneering in India, the world’s largest democracy. A crowd gathered outside to watch two television screens showing a live broadcast with Narendra Modi, prime ministerial candidate for the opposition Bharatiya Janata party, as he answered questions the audience submitted by text message.

Similar “tea parties” were held across the country, designed to ram home Mr Modi’s humble background as a tea seller and his technological credentials. But the nationwide event, organised using mobile technology more commonly seen in US presidential campaigns, also signals a shift in Indian politics.

For decades, political campaigns in India have centred around colossal rallies and billboard advertising. But a growing population of young people, rising internet use and the ubiquity of mobile phones mean the 2014 battle is playing out equally fiercely online.

“We are moving far ahead of saying that we are building ‘likes’ on social media,” says Arvind Gupta, head of IT and social media for the BJP. “Organisation is being done using digital. So if I’m going to tell everybody there’s an event tomorrow, it can be posted on Facebook, websites, on SMS, on WhatsApp, though the real meeting is happening on the ground.”

These techniques, which became familiar during the Arab uprisings of northern Africa, are an increasingly important part of communication strategy ahead of a national election, which must be held in the next three months, and which many believe will be close.

Mr Gupta believes parties are fighting what he calls a “postmodern election” for up to 160 - largely urban - seats of the total 543. More than half the 50-strong team working on communication for the BJP are dedicated to digital campaigning.

India’s internet user base reached a point of inflection last year, passing 200m. While that is a fraction of the 1.3bn population, prompting many to question the power of social media, use is far greater among urban and young voters, millions of whom will be eligible to vote for the first time this year.

“Social media is suddenly becoming important, not for all constituencies but for urban constituencies because for the first time the urban youth and the educated class is very much glued into the election and showing interest,” says Rajeeva Karandikar, a statistician and election analyst.

Mr Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, has adapted particularly quickly to the changing environment. He captured the public imagination by using holograms to address rallies and Google Hangouts to interact with the diaspora. He has 3.4m Twitter followers and more than 10.6m “likes” on his Facebook page, thanks in part to a slick social media team led by high-profile technology entrepreneurs. Meanwhile Rahul Gandhi, the reticent, undeclared candidate for the incumbent Congress party, does not even have a verified Twitter account.

Some were disappointed by low attendance at the national “tea parties”, but the events were lauded for being interactive and, perhaps most importantly in a country where newspaper readership remains high, grabbed column inches in local media. The audience could speak directly to Mr Modi at venues with a two-way video link and the footage was immediately available on YouTube.

“While answering each question Mr Modi has a point of view,” says Pratik Patel, 28, a chartered accountant who organised the event at his grand- father’s tea shop. “He doesn’t have two ways of looking at the same thing - this helps him to be more decisive and forward thinking.”

Social media also provides swaths of information to India’s political parties, as they copy the sophisticated data analytics used by US president Barack Obama’s campaigns.

From its offices in suburban Mumbai, the digital marketing group Pinstorm tracks what social media users are discussing at the constituency level and identifies significant supporters or critics. It describes the service as an early warning system or “social radar”, which allows parties to mobilise workers rapidly to oppose or support a point of view.
Sceptics argue, however, that social media has insufficient traction in India to affect results of the forthcoming poll. But the size of the user base does not reflect its full power. It is educated influential Indians who use these digital networks and the online debate shapes views in traditional media that reach a wider audience.

“The theory is that since the elites are connected and have more time to spare on social media, let us use social media and the internet more generally to influence discourse through these elites,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. “It’s an indirect route to the vote.”

An adviser to the Obama campaign warns, however, that, given differences in funding and the local environment, India’s politicians should be wary of using the US presidential race as a model. This year a simpler technology may prove the best tool for campaigns in India: the mobile phone.

“Folks look to the Obama campaign for this sort of stuff,” says Ethan Roeder, who worked on data for the 2008 and 2012 US presidential campaigns. “But a lot of these international campaigns would do best looking elsewhere for a model . . . No campaign in the history of the world has ever spent that much money to elect a single individual to a single office.”

India’s version is, of course, markedly cheaper, thanks to the roadside chai-wallahs and armies of volunteers, pulling in the new breed of voters.

“I have never attended a political rally in my entire life,” says Mr Patel, who helped organise Mr Modi’s nationwide “tea party”.

“If people want to connect with me they need to connect with me on social media or via email.”

Modi’s digital army

The team building the digital campaign for India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata party mixes entrepreneurs and veterans from the technology industry, rather than individuals with experience of electioneering alone.

Rajesh Jain, working on electoral technology, is well known in the industry since setting up successful businesses in online news and digital marketing. These include IndiaWorld Communications, a collection of websites which was bought in 1999 by Satyam Infoway, then India’s largest internet service provider.

He has the archetypal curriculum vitae, with a degree from one of the eminent Indian institutes of technology followed by a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York.

Arvind Gupta, who heads the BJP’s IT and social media cell, has a remarkably similar educational background - with an added stint in Silicon Valley to his name.

At the last count, the party had recruited more than 2m volunteers, who are organised online and will provide support in different ways. But there is also a younger generation of advocates who have given up good jobs to join the digital effort. Citizens for Accountable Governance is a non-profit youth organisation co-ordinating nationwide “tea parties” ahead of this year’s national election, where Narendra Modi, the party’s prime ministerial candidate, interacts with audiences at tea stalls via video link.

About 100 young professionals lead the operation and all come with impressive credentials, including jobs at prominent global consulting groups such as McKinsey, and banks such as JPMorgan.

Beyond that, Mr Modi has had a team working for him personally since he took over as chief minister of Gujarat more than a decade ago.

It is a discreet IT set-up that still functions independently of the party’s operations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/financial-times-february-26-2014-india-tea-parties-enable-politicians-to-woo-urban-youth-with-technology

India 'jihadi' web blocking causes anger

praskrishna — 2015-01-03T02:48:48Z

A government block on more than 30 high-profile websites has caused anger across India.

The story was published in BBC on January 2, 2015. It was also mirrored in the Puffington Post the same day. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

India's Department of Telecoms ordered the blocking of the sites in order to prevent the publicising of "jihadi activities".

After considerable pressure, four of the sites - Weebly, Vimeo, Daily Motion and Github - were unblocked.

Officials said the other sites would have their blocks lifted if they complied with the "law of the land".

The Indian Ministry for Communication and Information Technology said in a statement: "It was stated that Anti National group are using social media for mentoring Indian youths to join the Jihadi activities."

It went on to say that the primary concern was that users posting material on the sites did not require any authentication, and that identities could be hidden.

The four websites that have been unblocked were said to have worked with the Indian government to address concerns - although it is unclear what changes, if any, have been made.

Some users were reporting that they were still unable to reach the apparently unblocked sites.

Pranesh Prakash, from the India-based Centre for Internet and Society, said: "Any intelligent person can see these sites don't incite terrorism."

'Many complaints'

Ahead of the ban lifting, a Vimeo spokeswoman said: "It is Vimeo's longstanding policy not to allow videos that promote terrorism, and we remove such videos whenever we become aware of them.

"We have not received notice from the Indian government concerning such videos and have contacted them requesting the blocking order to identify, and evaluate the video in question."

Many internet users in the country are angry that other sites remain blocked, in particular Pastebin - a site used for "dumping" text online anonymously - and The Internet Archive, a US organisation that offers a database of old websites.

The Internet Archive said on Twitter that it had received "many complaints" from users who were unable to access the service.

India has a history of sporadically blocking websites, or issuing warnings about online content.

In August 2012, 245 sites were blocked by the government in an attempt, it said, to quell violence.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bbc-january-2-2015-india-jihadi-web-blocking-causes-anger

Indecent Proposals

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T06:13:22Z

If Kapil Sibal’s attempts to police net content fructify, it may even lead to a reversal of some of the forward-looking provisions of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000. The new proposal, for instance, will reverse Section 79 which protects intermediaries (websites and carriers) from being prosecuted or made liable for any objectionable content published. Says Pranesh Prakash, programme manager, Centre for Internet and Society: “Unfortunately, what Sibal says turns this upside down as they would now be held responsible for e-content.” Sibal wants to monitor content prior to publication.

The article by Arindam Mukherjee was published in Outlook Magazine on December 19, 2011. Pranesh Prakash was quoted in it.

While there are privacy concerns, any attempt to do real-time monitoring could pose serious legal complications. Says cyber law expert Pavan Duggal: “This proposition could be ultra vires of the Constitution which guarantees fundamental rights under Article 19, which is about freedom of speech and expression subject to reasonable restrictions.” And the reasonable restrictions for monitoring, blocking and interception of internet content are already built into the IT Act.

Says Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrasekhar: “If Sibal was really serious about protecting people, he should have read the IT Act that has a section which allows a victim to legally pursue his/her claim of defamation. If Sibal has his way, DoT bureaucrats will decide what content is ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’.”

“If Sibal was really serious, he should have read the IT Act...it has a section on how victims can pursue defamation claims.”

Moreover, the IT Intermediary Guideline Rules, 2011, though still provisional, mandate that once service providers receive instructions, they have to remove objectionable content within 36 hours. The Act also has other specific provisions like Section 69, which provides safeguards for interception, monitoring/decryption of information; Section 69A which gives procedures and safeguards for blocking access of information by the public; Section 69B for monitoring and collecting traffic data or information. There are also provisions for obscenity and defamation, with steep fines prescribed. Following these, the state has blocked 11 websites since ’09

However, what Sibal and his men would have seen is the Act’s inability to act on the content freely flowing in social media sites. Says Duggal: “The IT Act, 2000, was amended in ’08, but doesn’t talk about social media which came up only around that time. There is a need to bring social media within the ambit of the Act. What Sibal is suggesting doesn’t exist anywhere in the world.” Monitoring social media websites would also be a huge challenge as crores of messages and tweets are generated from India everyday.

And privacy? Experts say since India does not have dedicated legislation on privacy, the government could escape any attack on that front. Although some privacy elements were added to the IT Act in 2008, its scope is limited and the concept of data privacy is missing. In fact, the law doesn’t even recognise a person’s right to data privacy!.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/indecent-proposals

Inde: la tentative de contrôler l'internet est "illégale"

praskrishna — 2012-08-26T10:50:54Z

Des spécialistes de l'internet ont qualifié vendredi de "complètement illégale" la tentative du gouvernement indien de bloquer des messages et des vidéos soupçonnés d'avoir contribué à attiser de récentes tensions interethniques.

Published by AFP. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

"Les responsables qui ont été chargés de cela ne connaissent pas suffisamment bien la loi et la technologie moderne", a tancé Pranesh Prakash, un gestionnaire de programmes au sein du Centre de recherche sur l'internet (Centre for Internet and Society), dont le siège est à Bangalore (sud).

"C'est contre-productif. Je les accuse d'incompétence monumentale, le principal problème étant qu'ils sont très mal conseillés", a-t-il ajouté, interrogé par l'AFP.

Le gouvernement a demandé aux fournisseurs indiens de services internet de bloquer 309 pages, images et liens présentant un caractère "malfaisant", postés sur des sites tels que Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, la chaîne de télévision du Qatar, Al-Jazeera ou la chaîne australienne, ABC.

Des dizaines de milliers de personnes ont récemment fui les villes de Bangalore et de Bombay pour rentrer dans l'Etat de l'Assam (nord-est).

Cet exode a été déclenché par l'envoi de menaces sur les téléphones portables et l'internet affirmant que les Assamais seraient attaqués par des musulmans après la fin du ramadan, en représailles à de récentes violences interethniques qui ont opposé les deux communautés dans cet Etat reculé de l'Inde.

Dans un communiqué, la chaîne de télévision ABC s'est dit "surprise" des mesures gouvernementales après la demande de retrait d'un de ses reportages sur les violences entre musulmans et bouddhistes en Birmanie.

Vivek Sood, avocat auprès de la Cour suprême et auteur d'une loi sur l'internet, a pour sa part jugé que la démarche du gouvernement était illégale.

"C'est complètement illégal en vertu de de la loi indienne sur les hautes technologies. C'est un abus de pouvoir", a-t-il dit au quotidien The Economic Times.

Le gouvernement a toutefois assuré vendredi que son but n'était pas de restreindre les échanges sur internet.

"C'est un succès. Ces pages étaient une menace à la sécurité nationale de l'Inde et nous avons demandé leur suppression immédiate", a commenté auprès de l'AFP un porte-parole du ministère de l'Intérieur, Kuldeep Singh Dhatwalia.

"La propagation de rumeurs encourageant la violence ou provoquant des tensions ne sera pas tolérée. L'idée n'est pas de restreindre la communication", a-t-il assuré.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/http-www-google-com-hostednews-afp-inde-la-tentative-de-controler-i-internet-est-illegale