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Grooming the geek

praskrishna — 2012-02-28T09:16:29Z

Generation 2.0, the iPad child, is enriched by technology, and many parents are embracing it wholeheartedly. But can technology transform the way a child’s abilities develop?

The article by Gopal Sathe was published in Livemint on 24 February 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in it.

Gauri Uttam, 11, loves reading books. Her room houses a huge number of books that her parents have collected for her over the years. But her favourite books are not in these piles. They are on her iPad. Ask her what her favourite book is, and pat comes the reply: The Pedlar Lady, downloaded on the family iPad 2.

The Pedlar Lady app, by Moving Tales Inc., is a beautifully animated story for children. Background images move, the text flows in and out, and the app reads the text aloud as well. “The book looks beautiful, and whenever you turn the page, it reads the words,” says Gauri. “You can carry it around anywhere, it’s not like sitting on the computer, but it’s much more fun than reading a book. There are pictures and if you get bored and want to draw something, you can, right there.”

Gauri’s father Sachin Uttam, 44, a director (consulting) with the Gurgaon-based technology start-up Enabling Dimensions, has also introduced her to software such as FaceTime on their iMac to teleconference with her cousins for homework. “Computers are a part of everything now,” Sachin says. “When children grow up, we try and teach them to sing, paint, write stories... In the same way, we need to teach them to be able to use computers. I’m a techie, so is my wife. We both have iPads and iPhones, and so it wasn’t surprising that Gauri started to use them too.”

Technology is revolutionizing the way children grow up. Parents put the Internet and technology to a variety of uses. It is not uncommon to see toddlers gurgling to a touch screen that tiny fingers don’t find daunting. In December, the Podar International School in Mumbai announced that from its next term, lessons for classes VI to XII would be on iPads.

The shake-up

For some parents, it is a way to help their children hone their creativity. Bangalore-based Viswanath Poosala, 41, head of Bell Labs Research India, has two children, a daughter (9) and a son (7) (names withheld on request), and he has been teaching them programming for the last year and a half. Poosala wanted to show his children how computers can be fun. “The key is to find ways to relate your children’s interests to computers. If you make a computer a tool that helps them do what they want, then they will learn enthusiastically,” he says.

Poosala’s son uses a tool called Scratch, a free MIT software for children, to make simple games that he can share with friends; his daughter uses Scratch to make animated, interactive versions of the stories she writes.

To teach his children programming, Poosala first introduced them to a free online game called Light-Bot. “In the game, you have to click on a set of commands, and once you are done, the robot will follow your choices to try and clear an obstacle course. It’s a fun game so children are keen to play it, and it shows them how a computer follows inputs.”

But in Light-Bot, commands are limited, and it is not possible to add custom elements. So Poosala downloaded Scratch. “It’s a visual programming language. You can add images and sounds, but it’s still completely visual, with no actual programming. You just click and choose from different icons,” he adds.

By engaging children with their own creations around their interests, they become more involved in what they are doing, and are keen to share their work with friends. They are more likely to finish projects and start new ones. Using such tools also helps them understand logic as a concept, which can then be applied to any field.

Sachin believes the iPad, especially, is a powerful reading resource that can make books far more attractive to children. He says, “Ever since Gauri discovered iBooks, she’s reading so much more than before. When she gets stuck on a difficult word, she just needs to tap it with her finger to get a definition.”

One such book is the Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland app. The book is presented with big, interactive illustrations on every page. Give Alice different bottles when she falls down the rabbit hole, and she will become bigger or smaller, depending on the bottle. Tilt your iPad on another screen, she will fall down and stand up.

New avenues

Enhanced books, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Pedlar Lady, are more advanced, redefining our expectations of children’s books. Take, for instance, Khoya, an iPad app illustrated by Shilo Shiv Suleman and written by Avijit Michael. The app has been showcased at TEDGlobal 2011 in Scotland, the Wired conference in the UK in 2011, and launched at the INK conference in Jaipur in 2011. Khoya has artwork, animated pages, quests that have to be completed in the real world, that require children to help the two protagonists navigate various worlds.

Bangalore-based Suleman says, “People are so excited about how technology is functional and useable that they forget how technology is also magical. Sure, it’s useful to be able to fly to London in 10 hours, but the idea that we are actually floating in the clouds, flying around the world is forgotten.”

Khoya uses technology to get children to explore the natural world along with a screen. While the protagonists of the story undertake their quests, readers are given their own quests such as collecting flower seeds and making photo collections of these seeds. “It’s a real problem that children in the last 10 years have been glued to computers, but now with mobile technology we can get them outside their houses. Photo quests, augmented reality in the garden, are just two examples of how we’re trying to find the links between the earth, magic and technology,” Suleman says.

Technology can also help children find their passions, and guide them through life. Aveek, the son of Bangalore-based media expert Arun Katiyar (56), found his passion through technology. Lego blocks helped Aveek, now 23, develop an interest in mechanical engineering.

Katiyar says Aveek, now studying industrial design at the National University of Singapore, was a fan of Legos since he was 6. When Aveek turned 15, he was gifted Lego Technic, a programmable Lego set. Katiyar says, “The Technic was exceedingly advanced for its time. You take a programmable microchip, and connect it to a computer. You can then program commands in the remote to control the chip. Then you remove the chip, and put it in your Lego creation that is a lot more advanced than the coloured bricks most will be familiar with, as a Technic set includes moving parts, pistons, engines and much more.”

The Technic is not available any more, but Lego now sells the more advanced Mindstorm. Legos are particularly useful as learning tools because of how versatile they are. Children can fit the pieces together to make almost anything they can imagine. By fitting joints and gears, they can create a small machine, entirely by themselves.

Rajesh S. (full name not given on request), runs an environmental NGO in Bangalore, and has worked in the US with several leading IT firms. His two sons, Parthiv, 14, and Tarang, 11, have picked up their parents’ interest in technology and gone with it in different ways. Parthiv learnt about film-making thanks to a discarded video camera, Tarang experiments with circuits around the house, and knows his way around capacitors and resistors.

Rajesh says, “When my elder son was 8, I had an old video camera that no one was using any more. Instead of throwing it away, I gave it to my son. It was an expensive gift, but it didn’t matter even if he broke it.”

Parthiv became fascinated by the camera, and would find new ways to keep using it. Rajesh says Parthiv would write short poems and then make small videos for them. Since he didn’t have a track or a dolly, he mounted the camera on an old toy truck and made his younger brother pull it to take panned shots.

“As he experimented with it, we also encouraged him. He was quickly teaching himself how to make the best use of it. Using their computers, the boys learnt to edit their footage, and put it up themselves as well. Parthiv is interested in the media, and is determined to either direct, or write, or act, undoubtedly because he had access to the right technology in his childhood.”

Tarang used the Internet and a lot of trial and error to find his way around a circuit board—a skill many adults lack. Rajesh says, “I don’t know what got him started. He’s fascinated by circuits, always experimenting and we are happy to buy circuits and capacitors too.”

At the same time, as an environmentalist, Rajesh also wants the boys to experience the outdoors. “My role has actually not been to support them but to discourage them. I want them to spend more time outdoors, and find more interests. Play sports and explore the world as well as their hobbies,” he says.

The points of debate

Expert opinion on the use of technology is divided. Chennai-based child psychologist Lakshmi Rajaram says parents need to monitor how their children are using technology and moderate the amount of time they spend with it. “While it can look harmless, these Internet-connected devices can be a gateway to pornography, violence and all kinds of disturbing and harmful content,” she says.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, also feels that it’s important that younger children at least be given limited access to technology. He says children have to learn fine motor and social skills; tablets and other technology hinder the development of these skills. “For young children, this is counter-productive—if your two-year-old can scroll and zoom on an iPad, that’s nothing to be proud of. You’re underestimating your child, who should be capable of much greater dexterity. New technology is too simple, and doesn’t give the child enough feedback to develop their skills.”

Ramya Somashekhar and her husband, both doctors, live in the UK, but grew up in India. They have a two-year-old son, whom they have kept away from new technology. Somashekhar says, “There’s an information overload in the world today. We want our son to grow up at his own pace, and let him stay a kid for as long as we can. Just because he thinks an iPad is pretty doesn’t mean we want our two-year-old playing with something that expensive. He thinks that a teddy bear and a singing toy truck are equally fascinating. A gadget doesn’t begin to compare to the real world, and we want to keep it that way, so he grows up the way we did.”

At Podar International School in Mumbai, though, students have started using iPads, and Vandana Lulla, director of the school, says only around 10% of the parents have not opted for it. While the school is not providing the iPads, they are offering a financing scheme for them.

She says, “Moving to iPads was a natural step because they are easier for students to use than laptops. We had observed how tech-savvy and comfortable they were, and had gone through studies that show the use of computers makes the learning of science more effective. We can also block access to games on the iPads, so the devices would allow students to work more effectively.”

Mumbai-based writer and freelance journalist Manisha Lakhe almost bought an iPad last year, but her then 13-year-old son Agni Murthy was able to talk her out of it. She says, "Agni told me to buy the Acer Iconia instead, because it was better. I was sure I needed a 3G tablet. He convinced me to get the Wi-Fi one, then sat with it, entered its programming and was able to change it so that it worked using my old 3G dongle, saving me a lot of money."

By looking up a lot of different methods, Agni was able to find the best way to change the installed operating system on the Iconia, and instead run a routed version which would support the function his mother needed, without buying the more expensive 3G model. He says, “I use my laptop to study, to work with my friends on chat, to do homework and Photoshop. I used to draw but now I do a lot of that on Photoshop. I look up a lot of tech stories on the Net, because that’s really interesting. I read about how to make the Iconia work on 3G so I could give my mother advice.”

This positive view is also supported by a study carried out by the US department of education. The 2010 study, Young Children, Apps and iPad, concluded that touch-screen technology allows younger children to play productively with a sophisticated media technology platform. The study found that “the use of touch-screen devices improved tacit and explicit learning, and was easy to pick up for children.”

It continues, “Children are fascinated and engaged by touch-screen devices, and the engagement goes up over time. Using such devices, children learn ‘motor skills, exploration, game concepts and generalization of skills’, where the learning from one app can transfer to another app.” The study also says, “Well-designed apps give children the opportunity to play/learn independently, and to participate in activities that would be messy in the real world, for example, finger painting.”

As Gauri says, “You can do everything with the iPad. You don’t need to carry anything else. I have books, cartoons, and games and we can take them in the car, or outside, or in any room, all the time.”

CHILD-FRIENDLY APPS

The App Store has a lot of child-friendly apps available—some are meant to entertain, while others have an educational component. We hand-picked five of the best apps that have launched this year, for different age groups. We have focused only on iOS apps that offer something over and above real-world analogues.

ALPHATOTS: $0.99(around Rs. 48)

Learning the alphabet is a slow process that involves a lot of repetition and trial and error. The AlphaTots app uses funny sounds and cute animations to make this more fun, and also demonstrates things that a

standard “A is for Apple” style book can’t. For example, F is for Flower is accompanied by a picture of a flower, and turning the page shows G is for Grow, and the flower gets bigger.

GRIMM’S RAPUNZEL POP-UP BOOK: $3.99
This version of Rapunzel’s story is simple, beautifully animated, and from time to time, the angle changes from a 2D view to a 3D angle, where parts of the book pop out of the page and can be played with.

SPARKY THE SHARK: $3.99

This funny e-book is meant

for children above six years of age, and tries to impart lessons of self-confidence, and the importance of being yourself through the adventures of ‘Sparky the Shark’. There’s clever animation work mixed with text and read-aloud sections as well.
FREDDI FISH AND THE STOLEN SHELL: $2.99
Somewhere between a game and an interactive book, ‘Freddi Fish and the Stolen Shell’ tasks children with solving a mystery. There are various touchable elements on each screen and by following the clues, it’s easy to go through the story. Unlike similar games, the app follows consistent logic, so it’s a fun way of teaching children critical thinking.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/grooming-the-geek

GeekUp with Erica Hagen

praskrishna — 2012-02-29T03:00:14Z

HasGeek is organizing a GeekUp with Erica Hagen of the GroundTruth Initiative on 1 March 2012 at 5 p.m. Erica will speak on the theme: "From Information to Empowerment: Unpacking the Equation".

From Information to Empowerment to Unpacking the Equation

In 2010, Erica Hagen and Mikel Maron started GroundTruth Initiative to work towards empowering communities through open data, open information and participatory processes. Erica's and Mikel's work at GroundTruth is informed by their earlier experience of working with the Map Kibera project where they helped the youth and the communities in Kibera to map their geographies and represent information about themselves to the world through citizen media. In the process, Erica and Mikel uncovered several complex dynamics about self-representation by communities, what open data really means to communities and how they apply it to their circumstances, the dynamics between participatory development and participatory technologies, and the process of using community media tools and online methods for talking about issues that matter to them.

In this lecture, Erica Hagen will talk about her work with communities in Kenya, Jerusalem, Nigeria and other parts of the world through GroundTruth Initiative. Specifically, Erica will unpack the relationship between empowerment, information, and storytelling, and what both these elements mean to communities in different parts of the world. How are communities applying the information and data that they collect about their governments and themselves? What are the challenges involved in the process of working with open data, participatory processes and technologies? How can communities apply new media and data gathering tools to achieve local goals? What does empowerment mean in the face of the delicate lines and precariousness that communities and the interveners/practitioners have to tread in the process of data gathering, representation, communication and outputs?

Interested persons need to confirm attendance by registering at http://geekup.in/2012/erica-hagen

Erica Hagen

Erica Hagen is a journalist and international development practitioner working for democracy of information and citizen participation in both online and traditional media. She is the co-founder of Map Kibera and GroundTruth Initiative. Erica has worked in four countries on development communication and evaluation, and in the United States on refugee and immigrant issues, for organizations such as United Nations Population Fund, Concern Worldwide, and Unicef. She holds a Masters Degree in International Affairs from Columbia University, New York.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/geek-up-with-erica

Climate Change and Controversy Mapping

praskrishna — 2012-02-27T04:10:30Z

A three-day workshop with Professor Bruno Latour, Dean for Research at Sciences Po, Paris. The workshop is being organised in collaboration with the Devechia Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore from March 19 to March 21, 9.30 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.

The development of ecological crisis creates problems for political representation. Because of the scale of the phenomena to be considered, the esoteric character of the scientific knowledge necessary to apprehend them, the intensity of the conflicts of values that they generate, there is no assembly to handle those crises. The workshop will explore digital tools that might allow citizens to get a grasp of ecological crisis by drawing ''cartographies of scientific and technical controversies'' a necessary preliminary for political assemblies.

The workshop is opened to PhD students from all academic fields doing empirical work in various types of ecological crisis. The participants will experiment some of the digital tools and methods developed within the "mapping controversies" consortium (MACOSPOL, demoscience and other sources of "science studies"). It requires students to devote three full days to the study. A background in Science and Technology
Studies and some grasp of digital data analysis are preferable.

Eligibility criteria:

To be a doctoral student or at the post doctoral level
To have a general interest or research connexion with ecological/climate change issues
Familiarity with digital data analysis

Candidates must send their CV and a short synopsis of their doctoral or postdoctoral research before Sunday March 4, 2012, to:
jayes@caos.iisc.ernet.in & gilles.verniers@sciences-‐po.fr

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/climate-change-and-controversy-mapping

FUEL Kannada - Workshop on Kannada Computing Terminology

praskrishna — 2012-02-23T10:32:59Z

A two days workshop on the standardization of Kannada computing terminologies was organized on January 28th and 29th 2012 at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore under the FUEL project. This FUEL Kannada workshop aimed at the community review and standardization of frequently encountered computing terminologies in Kannada. FUEL Kannada Evaluation meet aimed at solving the problem of inconsistency and lack of standardization in computer software translations in Kannada language. This workshop was hosted by CIS, sponsored by Red Hat and organized by Sanchaya (sanchaya.net).

Along with well know television actress Jayalaxmi Patil. members from Banavasi Balaga, Translators, Kanaja Content writer, Linguistics, Journalists participated in this workshop. Shankar Prasad welcomed every one and explained the importance and need of standardization of Kannada Computing Terminologies. KaGaPa's Secretary Narasimha Murthy shed light on the past work on computing terminologies.

This workshop discussed on 578 commonly appearing entries people use. FUEL Kannada Evaluation meet was a concrete move towards solving the problem and after the meet, FUEL Kannada came with the standard translation of entries in Kannada language for the first time that are frequently being used by a normal user.

Localization is the process of transforming a product into different languages and adapting it for a specific locale. As the localization process becomes more complex and involves more players and tools, problems related to consistency of translations and terminology are faced. Henceforth, in this context the need of such type of meet is significant and important. Except few languages, this type effort is generally the first effort for most of Indic languages for computing terminologies.

FUEL tries to provide a standardized and consistent computer interface for users. Before Kannada language, FUEL already completed evaluation phase for 9 other Indian languages.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/fuel-kannada-workshop-on-kannada-computing-terminology

All India Privacy Symposium

Natasha Vaz — 2012-03-01T06:16:53Z

Are we citizens or subjects? Experts gather in Delhi for public symposium on privacy, transparency, e-governance and national security in India.

Following 18 months of research by Privacy India, the Centre for Internet and Society and the Society in Action Group, with support from London-based Privacy International, the groups today held an All India Privacy Symposium at the India International Centre in New Delhi. Speakers included Supreme Court Advocate Menaka Guruswamy, Microsoft Director of Corporate Affairs Deepak Maheshwari, social researcher and activist Usha Ramanathan, journalist Saikat Datta and former Chief of RAW Hormis Thorakan.

A few themes recurred across all five panels (Privacy and Transparency, Privacy and E-Governance Initiatives, Privacy and National Security, Privacy and Banking, and Privacy and Health). Perhaps the most prominent was the repeated allegation that the Indian government' technological illiteracy is putting its citizens at risk. One panelist described how an RTI request had recently revealed that the government had no idea how many of its own computers had been hacked or how much data had been stolen – even though this information has been in the public domain since the Wikileaks diplomatic cable releases.

The increased use of public-private partnerships and outsourcing was also a major cause for concern. Public money is being funneled into privately-held commercial enterprises – which, unlike public bodies, are not subject to RTI requests – and spent on e-governance initiatives like UID. Social researcher Anant Maringati spoke of a "hybrid world" in which government projects were fulfilled by completely unaccountable private actors. Advocate Malavika Jayaram remarked that, while private companies tend to have far greater technological expertise than government officials, they are ultimately motivated by profit rather than public benefit; we should therefore ask ourselves whether they can really be trusted with our information.

Government surveillance for the purposes of crime prevention also came under scrutiny, when Saikat Datta described how he himself had been put under illegal surveillance by an unauthorized intelligence agency. He warned of the dangers of excessive wiretapping, a practice that currently generates such a “mountain” of information that anything with real intelligence value tends to be ignored until it is too late, as happened with the Mumbai bombings in 2008. It is clear that the Indian government’s surveillance and interception programmes far exceed what is necessary for legitimate law enforcement.

Overall, panelists at the conference painted a vivid picture of India as a state that has made a habit of invading the privacy of individuals on a massive scale in the name of public benefit and law enforcement. Yet there is a clear sense that the benefits to society are not outweighing the costs to the individual. As Usha Ramanathan commented: “The question is, do we think of ourselves as citizens – or as subjects?”

See the webcast of the event here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/all-india-privacy-symposium

The High Level Privacy Conclave

Natasha Vaz — 2012-03-01T06:09:21Z

India in dire need of privacy law; experts say government is ironically creating huge national security risks in attempts to prevent crime and terrorism.

Privacy India, the Centre for Internet and Society and the Society in Action Group, with support from Privacy International, have spent 18 months studying the state of privacy across India, conducting consultations in Kolkata, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Guwahati, Chennai and Mumbai. Today, the results of their research were discussed by representatives from government, industry, media and civil society at a high-level conclave in Delhi. In attendance were Manish Tewari MP, Microsoft Director of Corporate Affairs Deepak Maheshwari and P.K.H. Tharakan former Chief of the Research and Analysis Wing. A privacy symposium open to the general public will be held tomorrow afternoon at the Indian International Centre.

The 130-page long Country report details how government bodies like the National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) engage in pervasive and frequently unauthorized wiretapping, listening in on the private conversations of politicians and ordinary citizens alike. The Cabinet Secretary himself, in a report last year, noted that a body like the Central Board of Direct Taxes should never have been authorized to conduct telephone tapping, as the Supreme Court had long ago made clear. Privacy problems are arising from UID, NPR, and other e-governance projects that involve the creation of databases and the collection of personal information. Indian citizens are losing the ability to control who has access to their information, what that information says about them and how that information is used.

Overall, the study paints a picture of a dysfunctional system, with multiple pieces of legislation dealing with sectoral privacy-related issues like health, banking, phone tapping etc and no overarching legal guarantee of privacy. As Manish Tewari observed today, there is a nationwide lack of understanding about new technologies and judges are very rarely technologically literate. This has created a situation in which the government's efforts to fight crime and terrorism by intercepting communications has horribly backfired. By building backdoors into communications systems to allow lawful access, and by restricting cryptography to a 40-bit limit, the authorities have created serious vulnerabilities in India's communications system that can be easily exploited by any malicious third party or foreign government.

Gus Hosein, Executive Director of Privacy International: "In their efforts to preserve and defend democratic society, India has undermined the very thing it wanted to protect. Both citizens and state are now at serious risk of being spied upon by anyone with a small amount of technological know-how and a computer."

Usha Ramanathan, social and political activist, said: "In the name of state transparency, government projects are in fact rendering citizens transparent to the State, rather than the other way round. A comprehensive privacy law for India cannot come soon enough."

Privacy India

Privacy India was established in 2010 with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around privacy challenges and violations in India. One of our goals is to build consensus towards the promulgation of comprehensive privacy legislation in India through consultations with the public, policymakers, legislators and the legal and academic community.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/the-high-level-privacy-conclave

OurSay: how India’s technology is cutting into corruption

praskrishna — 2012-02-17T02:40:43Z

In the world’s largest democracy, corruption has long been part of the system of governance. However, transformative new technologies are playing an exciting and powerful role in citizen engagement, good governance and in the mobilisation of the masses for social action.

The blog post by by Gautam Raju, co-founder and creative director, OurSay Australia was published in Crikey on 17 February 2012. Nishant Shah has been quoted in it.

Since the beginnings of the Indian independence movement, technology has been a central element to citizen engagement. According to Nishant Shah, from the Centre of Internet and Society, print and cinema reflected the views of citizens and informed them of the visions and changes that the country was going through. Today, India has one of the largest young and connected populations in the world.

Fifty per cent of the population is under the age of 25 and there are about 880 million mobile phone subscribers. New technologies are shifting the way that citizens interact with government and mobilise around issues they care about.

Based in a cramped office in New Delhi, the group Gram Vaani community media are developing tools to make governments more accountable. This group of young people with impressive resumes and big dreams form part of the new generation of Indian social entrepreneurs calling for change.

One of their most revolutionary products is a citizen news telephone hotline. The initiative is having a huge impact with recorded reports of government officials being fined for corruption, school teachers being paid overdue salaries and medical resources being sent to remote areas to fight malaria outbreaks. It allows callers to report incidents or problems from their regions, which are then transcribed and made available through a website for the media, government and general public.

This technology is particularly effective in remote areas, where Gram Vaani partners with local NGOs who empower local communities to use the tool. The service, which is expanding across the Indian state of Jharkhand, clocked 40,000 calls during the first month. Roshan Nair, from Gram Vaani, said: “NGOs have taken up the entire responsibility of informing local residents about our hotline, verifying information, and training new users. We have supported them, but they continue to do good work at great personal risk.” The technology is also currently deployed in Afghanistan with plans to expand to Pakistan and Iraq.

During my most recent visit in January, 74-year-old anti-corruption campaigner Anna Hazare and the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement dominated the media. The movement has been fighting for the introduction of the Lokpal Bill, which would create an independent ombudsman with the power to investigate corruption allegations from citizens. The movement launched a successful social media campaign, which built an image of Hazare as the 21st century Gandhi.

Social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter were used as organising tools for protests and when Hazare was arrested, his team released YouTube videos of him in jail to rally supporters. Their campaign was incredibly successful, mobilising thousands to support passing of the legislation.

According to a 2011 report released by Facebook, Anna Hazare and the Lokpal Bill were the most mentioned topics in Indian status updates, a sign that Indians are increasingly using the internet to share and debate political events.

Online movements such as the IAC are spreading through Indian urban areas with online campaigns on issues of violence, the environment and the protection of women are gaining momentum and political leverage. Increasing tension from the government around internet censorship and with more organisations and citizens harnessing the power of the internet and mobile phones for social action creates a very interesting space to watch in 2012.

Another powerful governance project Ipaidabribe.com is the world’s largest crowd-sourced database on corruption, with more than 18,000 acts of corruption registered. Developed by NGO Janaagraha, the website aims to tackle corruption by allowing citizens to log corrupt acts that are then used to lobby for better governance systems, law enforcement and regulation. A reporting tool on the website allows the public to view detailed analytics on where bribes are made, to which government department and their total costs to the public.

The Transport Department of Karnataka was frequently reported for bribes on the website, which led to the Public Transport Commissioner inviting Janaagraha to identify procedures that would help foster transparency and accountability in their bureaucratic processes. The Karnataka state government has since agreed to put posters promoting the website in all government offices. The technology is currently deployed in Kenya with Janaagraha stating that they are in talks with 15 countries.

India is booming; changing at a rate the country has never seen before. Despite the increasing use of technology by organisations and social movements, India still has a huge challenge in bridging the digital divide. Despite the powerful examples provided, social action and citizen engagement movements largely remain concentrated in urban, metropolitan settings, and often only engage the middle class. According to Mr Shah, from the Centre of Internet and Society, “there are innovations which are allowing people with cell phones in rural and remote India to be better connected, but there is no substantial data that actually proves that it fosters citizen engagement”.

As organisations such as Gram Vaani and Janaagraha begin to build more tools to foster citizen engagement and hold governments accountable, it is going to be incredibly fascinating to not only observe their future impact, but also see how technologies will be developed and spread to rural areas.

Gautam Raju travelled to India in January as part of an OurSay research trip.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/oursay-how-india2019s-technology-is-cutting-into-corruption

India won't censor social media: Telecom Minister

praskrishna — 2012-03-01T07:15:29Z

India does not intend to censor online social networks such as Facebook, a minister said Tuesday, but he demanded that they obey the same rules governing the press and other media. The article by AFP was published in the Tribune on February 14, 2012.

“I never wanted to censor social media and no government wants to do so. But like the print and electronic media, they have to obey the laws of the country.” He held a number of meetings with leading Internet companies late last year in which he asked about the possibility of checking content before it is posted online by users.

The minister was said to have shown Internet executives examples of obscene images found on the Internet that risked offending Muslims or defaming politicians, including the boss of the ruling Congress party, Sonia Gandhi. “The media reported I had said I wanted to pre-screen the content on social media. I have never even heard the word pre-screen,” he told the summit.

Since these meetings, 19 Internet firms including Google, Yahoo! and Facebook have been targeted in criminal and civil cases lodged in lower courts, holding them responsible for content posted by users of their platforms. The government has given its sanction for the firms to be tried for serious crimes such as fomenting religious hatred and spreading social discord — offences that could land company directors in prison.

“All I want is that they (social media) should follow the laws of the land. Social media must not consider itself to be above that,” Sibal said. But Internet privacy groups say social media sites may not have the resources to screen obscene material that violates local laws posted on the Internet. Local laws prohibit the sale or distribution of obscene material as well as those that can hurt religious sentiments in overwhelmingly-Hindu India.

“It is just not humanly possible to pre-censor content and Sibal knows that very well,” said Rajan Gandhi, founder of a New Delhi-based advocacy group Society in Action. Pranesh Prakash of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society said he was “glad Sibal does not believe in censorship and that companies operating in India should follow local laws.” “But on the other hand he has asked them to evolve new guidelines and actively monitor user content which is not legally sanctioned. This makes him look two-faced,” Prakash added.

Google and Facebook said earlier this month they had removed the allegedly offensive content used as evidence in the court cases.

The groups have appealed to the Delhi High Court asking for the cases against them to be quashed on the basis they cannot be held responsible for their clients’ actions. The comments of a judge hearing the case raised further fears that freedom of expression online could be restricted. “You must have a stringent check. Otherwise, like in China, we may pass orders banning all such websites,” the judge said at the January hearing. Facebook is banned in China and Google moved its operations out of the country in 2010 in protest at censorship laws there.

The debate about social networks mirrors a larger national dialogue about freedom of speech in the world’s biggest democracy following recent protests by religious groups. Indian-origin writer Salman Rushdie was prevented from speaking at a literature festival in Jaipur last month after Muslim groups protested against his presence over his allegedly blasphemous 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses.” A group led by author and journalist Nilanjana Roy organised public readings of banned literary works on Monday to protest against what it said were recent curbs on intellectual freedom.

The initiative, called “Flashreads for free speech”, was widely advertised on social networks including Twitter and Facebook.

Originally published by AFP and reproduced in the Tribune.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-wont-censor-social-media

Cartonama Workshop

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T10:21:16Z

HasGeek presents an intensive, hands-on training for managing and building location based services at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS), Bangalore on 2nd and 3rd March, 2012. CIS is a partner for this event.

About the Workshop

Around 95% smartphone users around the world - which translates to about 468 million people - are using Location Based Services to look for points of interests, ATMs, restaurants, hotels and many other services. They are checking traffic status, and sharing locations and check-ins with friends on various social networks. In the last four years, this industry has grown six times, to a whooping $6 billion.

Cartonama Workshop will provide developers, neo-geographers and entrepreneurs working on location based services with hands-on training on advanced tools to manage and represent their geographic data.

The trainers will help participants to learn use of tools such as databases, tile servers, tile studios, Geocoding APIs, search APIs and JavaScript libraries through an application building exercise. The learning process is interspersed with lectures and discussion sessions on issues such as quality of geographic data, commercialization, licensing and privacy. For more details about the workshop sessions, visit the HasGeek funnel.

Speakers

Schuyler Erle
Free Software developer and evangelist for over fifteen years. He was a co-author of 'Mapping Hacks' and 'Google Maps Hacks'. He was also a co-founder of the OpenLayers and TileCache projects, and is a charter member of the OSGeo Foundation. He also works in the fields of wireless networking, intelligent search engines and the Semantic Web and was the lead developer of NoCatAuth which is an open source wireless captive portal. He built geocoder.us, which is an open source United States. address geocoder. More recently, Schuyler helped found the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and serves on its Board of Directors. He currently resides in San Francisco.

Mikel Maron
Programmer and geographer working for impactful community and humanitarian uses of open source and open data. He is co-founder of Ground Truth Initiative, and of the Map Kibera project. He’s on the Board of the OpenStreetMap Foundation, and President of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, having helped to facilitate the OSM response to the Haiti earthquake. He’s travelled widely, organizing projects in India, Palestine, Egypt, Swaziland, and elsewhere. Previously, he co-founded Mapufacture and worked on collaborative platforms, and geoweb standards, with a wide spectrum of organizations from UN and government agencies to anarchist hacker collectives.

In 2008, Mikel Maron and Schuyler Erle conducted a series of workshops in India. From Delhi to Ludhiana, Pune, Mumbai, Kerala and Bangalore. The workshop series poked people like Arun Ganesh and inspired them to map and build applications. Arun and his friends mapped Chennai extensively and created beautiful maps. They also put the data together into busroutes.in

. BusRoutes.in remains as one of the best examples of using crowdsourced geographic information to create applications that are useful.

Sessions


Introduction to OpenStreetMap	GPS Surveying for OpenStreetMap	Downloading from GPS	Editing Data for OpenStreetMap

Tagging and Map Features	Geographic File Formats	Geo-enabled Databases	Processing OpenStreetMap Data

Data Swiss Army Knives	Creating Shapefiles	Tiles	Tilemill

Java Script Mapping APIs	Serving Tiles	Geocoding and Location queries	Putting it all together

Why You Should Attend the Workshop?

The workshop is only open to 30 participants. This is to ensure that the trainers can pay individual attention to each participant.

The workshop will train you with both back-end as well as front-end tools necessary for developing functional location based services and will enable you to build maps which can be used on devices ranging from phones to tablets to computers. It is aimed at teaching you the entire technology stack, right from managing the data to deploying the data on the server, and finally presenting it to your end user. During the hands-on sessions, you will develop web-based location services and learn how to manage your geographic data by creating interactive maps.

Mikel and Schuyler have extensive experience working with interactive maps, open data, Open Street Maps (OSM) and diverse communities on the ground. Participants will benefit immensely from the knowledge, experience and expertise of the trainers.

Registration

Tickets are priced at Rs. 10,000. Participants can register through the DoAttend portal. Or, you can pay offline through cheques and DD. Your ticket price covers workshop facilities and the facilitators' travel to India. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has sponsored part of the workshop expenses.

Participants are expected to bring their own GPS devices / mobile phones and computers for the application building exercises.

If you have any queries, write to Sajjad Anwar.

Buy Tickets Now

Venue

The workshop will be held at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore. The congenial atmosphere at CIS facilitates both formal and informal interactions, and peer-to-peer learning.

No. 194, 2nd C Cross, 4th Main
Opposite Domlur Club
Domlur 2nd Stage, Bangalore - 560 071

The Centre for Internet & Society

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a Bangalore-based independent, non-profit research organisation. CIS is primarily involved in research on the Internet and its relationship to society. Through its academic and research programmes, campaigns, and advocacy, CIS brings together scholars, academics, students, programmers and scientists to engage in a large variety of issues concerning the Internet: from histories of the Internet to enhancing accessibility for persons with disabilities, openness, telecom and Internet governance, among others.

CIS is supporting the Cartonama Workshop by providing the venue and hosting the workshop facilitators in Bangalore.

HasGeek

HasGeek was initiated in September 2010 to create discussion spaces for developers around emerging technologies. Our events are developer-focused. We began by organizing five editions of the DocType HTML5 conference in Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad.

In 2011, we organized a series of events in Bangalore starting with the Android Camp in April, PHP and Cloud Computing in June, JSFoo in October, and Droidcon India in November. Each of these events had an open talks submission and voting system, which made every event more participant-focused.

In 2012, we are attempting to reach out to a wider audience of developers, entrepreneurs and students, across large and small Indian cities, by addressing interesting technology problems such as UI Engineering, Data Science, SMS and email notifications, among others.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cartonama

Personal Data, Public Profile

nishant — 2012-02-14T06:19:52Z

Whether we like it or not, we live in a world that is rapidly being Googlised, writes Nishant Shah in an article published by the Financial Express on February 13, 2012.

Apart from its core functions like search and email, we consume Google services and products around the clock and around the click—YouTube, Calendar, Docs, Google+, Google Reader, Google Analytics et al. On March 1, 2012, our increasingly co-dependent relationship with Google will reach a new stage of commitment as Google consolidates its privacy policies for the entire Google universe. If you are logged into your Google account, all your information across Google’s different platforms will be clubbed together to form a comprehensive profile of what you do online.

Google has suggested this will personalise your interactions with Google platforms. The videos you watch on YouTube might influence your search results; the links that you click on will affect the advertisements displayed to you; the mails that you read will establish proximity with your friends on Google+ ... A comprehensive profile of who you are, what you do, what you like, what you share and what you hide will be created. Google has shown unmatched commitment to transparency on user data retention, storage and usage over the years. However, a centralised profile on users rings a few alarm bells for me. There are three use-cases that immediately crop up with apocalyptic implications.

Death of anonymity: One of the biggest strengths of the internet, as a space for both political dissent and freedom of expression, is that it has allowed people to talk through their avatars without putting themselves in conditions of bodily harm. So, it was good to have a scenario where my activities on YouTube did not get mapped onto my more identifiable profile on Google+ and did not get correlated with my personal interactions on Gmail. Mapping all the actions of a user who might want a more distributed identity might lead to precarious conditions for users living in critical times.

Negotiation with governments: While Google claims that it is committed to protecting the safety of its users, we know that it is eventually subject to the rules of the countries that it operates in. In the past, say in skirmishes with China, we have seen that despite its powerful status, it is not exempt from the demands of different governments. Given the current state of negotiations around censorship that are ongoing in India, it is a little scary to think how users’ data can be abused by authoritative government officials. A multi-tiered, distributed system offers users safety which a consolidated one doesn’t.

Inter-platform repercussions: If something I do on a platform gets flagged as objectionable, does it mean that all my rights to Google World get revoked?

Hidden data collection: One of the things that a lot of people don’t realise is that Google, in its attempts at enriching our user experience, collects more data than you disclose. So, apart from the personal data that you have more control over, there is a range of other data—pages you visit, the time you spend there, links you click on, comments that you write, information you share, etc—which form a part of Google’s algorithms for you. Consolidation of this data through services like Ad Sense and Double Click might also expose you to third party advertisers who might abuse this information that is about you but not under your control.

Google’s consolidation of its privacy policies across platforms signal a new wave of information management on the web, where the earlier free-form distributed information practice is getting mapped on to the physical bodies of the users. While it might lead to better web services, it also means that we need to be more aware of our information practices and start preparing for a web that is going to demand more accountability from its users than ever before.

The author is a digital humanities scholar and Director-Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

The original article was published in the Financial Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/personal-data-public-profile

Prometheus bound and gagged

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T04:47:46Z

Funny how a healthy person like me can collapse one day and end up in the hospital. The doctor who made me go through every lab test available, finally diagnosed the cause after a chat with me. Apparently, I collapsed because I’m getting angry, increasing my blood pressure. The only solution he said is to stop reading newspapers, as I’m getting agitated by headlines like ‘India can go the China way and block sites’, or by how the government says there’s no Internet censorship while all it’s actions point the other way.

The article by Adarsh Matham was published in the New Indian Express on 20 January 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in this article.

Censorship is a word that is particularly abhorrent for someone like me, who grew up listening to tales of how people like Ramnath Goenka fought the censors during the Emergency. And to say that we’ll start blocking websites in India like China is doing, the most heart wrenching moment I’ve ever heard. While researching for this piece, I came across some information that is out in the open on the Internet, but which is not generating the level of debate it deserves. We seem to be immersed in discussing Kolaveri, while slowly sliding into an Orwellian nightmare. As an example, I didn’t know there are rules called ‘Intermediary Guidelines’ and ‘Cyber cafe rules’, and I bet you didn’t either. As Pranesh Prakash of Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has pointed out in a blog post, these two rules alone, made up by the Department of IT in April 2011, give the government and citizens of India great powers at censoring the web by allowing them to get Internet firms to remove content that is ‘disparaging’, ‘doesn’t have rights to’, etc.

Killing freedom of speech is only the first crime of these rules as proved by the good people at CIS. To test these rules, they complained against some frivolous content to ISPs and Internet companies, which resulted in six out of seven listings being removed without informing posters or users. More alarmingly, of the 358 items the Government of India (and some states) has requested Google to remove, only eight were for hate speech, one for national security, and an astounding 255 for ‘government criticism’.

Since introducing these draconian rules, the tale only gets murkier. Not content with asking Internet firms to self-regulate, Kapil Sibal has introduced an amendment to the Copyright Act, which introduces section 52(1)(C ), that allows anyone to send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. While this sounds normal, the catch is that ‘the Internet company has to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious’. This amendment is before Rajya Sabha, and considering how our Parliament passes bills without a debate, it’ll become a law very soon.

Baleful rules and people behind them fail to realise that such efforts will lead to the Streisand effect, whereby attempts to hide any information will lead to it being publicised more widely. Yes more widely, because you can take out some content, but India’s youth will re-post it in a million places within minutes, like they do with pirated movies. We play a lot of cunning games just to live peacefully in India already. Please don’t let us play them online too.

The writer is a tech geek.
Email: articles@theadarsh.net

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/prometheus-bound-and-gagged

Internet Curbs

praskrishna — 2012-02-13T12:29:24Z

A Delhi high court judge threatens to go the China way. The IT act is closing in. The war on the web is a war on us, writes Rishi Majumder in an article that was published in Tehelka on 18 February 2012.

AT TIMES, the law becomes a smoke-screen for itself. How things seem to be shrouds the way they actually are. Here’s how things seem to be. Righteous Indian crusader Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi and journalist Vinay Rai have taken multinational giants Facebook, Google and 19 other websites to task. They have done so by filing a civil suit and a criminal complaint because of images they thought were offensive to Hindus, Muslims and Christians, as well as several political leaders.

Both cases lie in Delhi’s lower courts. The civil suit, filed by Qasmi, prays for the removal of this content and assurances that such content will not be hosted by the websites in the future. The criminal complaint calls for the prosecution of these companies under Sections 292 (“sale, etc. of obscene books, etc.”), 293 (“sale, etc., of obscene objects to a young person”) and 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code.

While judgment on these cases are pending, the efforts of Qasmi and Rai have begun to bear fruit. In the criminal case, the websites have been issued summons by a Delhi trial court. Facebook and Google India sought a stay on these from the Delhi High Court, which was not granted. Instead, Justice Suresh Kait warned that, “like China, we will block all these websites”, while asking the companies to develop a mechanism to keep a check on and remove “offensive and objectionable” material. With respect to the civil suit, the companies have been told by the court on 6 February to submit within 15 days reports of steps they have taken to block offensive content. Also on the same day, Facebook and Google removed content from the Indian domains of their websites.

Now for how things actually are. First, the least one would expect of such a criminal complaint is that it would mention the actual perpetrator of the crime. But, as Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society, wrote in TEHELKA (The Quixotic Fight to Clean Up the Web, 28 January): “It is curious that the complaint (of Rai) does not mention specific individuals or groups directly responsible for authoring the allegedly offensive material. Only intermediaries (the websites) have been explicitly named.”

Second, to hold these websites responsible for these crimes, one would have to prove that they had “actual knowledge” of this content (as stated in Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, that is being read along with the IPC to interpret the latter in the context of this case), and did nothing to prevent it.

Otherwise, as Congress MP Shashi Tharoor tweeted in the middle of this imbroglio, prosecuting Facebook and Google for this content would be like “phone companies being sued if someone sends a defamatory or obscene SMS”.

Third, what mechanism does the court expect Facebook and Google to develop to keep a check on and remove “offensive and objectionable” material? According to Oxblood Ruffin, a Canadian hacker who is a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc, the hackers group that coined the term ‘hacktivist’), it’s “impossible” for websites such as Facebook and Google to actually ensure that such content isn’t hosted in the future.

Facebook and Google are fast emerging as the biggest platforms for expression and exchange in a country that has the third largest number of Internet users in the world (175 million broadband connections by 2014, according to the Department of Telecommunications).

Instead of creating an authority to police the Web, the Internet rules outsource this job to intermediaries

“You will have to double the workforce to have content monitors, and even then it won’t be possible,” says Ruffin. “You aren’t going to filter the content (according to keywords) because that will raise censorship issues.”

Yet filtering content seems to be the only way Facebook and Google can deliver what Justice Kait asks of them. And blocking so many websites because they happen to contain “obscene” keywords like ‘sex’ or ‘virgin’ is a lot like banning lawful assembly because someone made a hate speech. The irony is this would make us “like China” anyway.

AT THE heart of this controversy is one of two new sets of Internet rules notified by the Centre last April, dealing with the liability of intermediaries, which is being used to give the provisions of criminal and civil law more specific effect in the courtrooms. For instance, Rai’s counsel argued that Google’s terms of service didn’t reflect these rules, as they were supposed to. This was refuted by his opposing counsel, who pointed out that the terms of service of the Department of Information Technology website didn’t contain them either.

Rightly so. This set of rules, like the two cases pegged on it, infringes upon our Constitution as well as our common sense. Instead of giving us a clear idea of what they wish to censor, the rules pretend to elucidate this with terms like “grossly harmful”, “harassing”, “disparaging” or “insulting any other nation”. And “blasphemous” — a frightening term. “Blasphemous is a word alien to Indian legal language,” says Internet freedom activist Anja Kovacs. “But now, with these rules, it could gradually be incorporated into mainstream law.”

Further, instead of appointing an authority to administer them, the Internet rules outsource this job to the intermediaries — making them liable to remove within 36 hours any information they store, host or publish, if a complainant claims that this contravenes the rules.

FINALLY, LET’S return to the law. These rules, adopted by the Centre under powers conferred to it by the IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, are a smokescreen that covers the infringement of a very basic Indian fundamental right. Article 21, which says: “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.”

In 1977, animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi was asked by the government to surrender her passport, and not given a reason for this. Not given a chance to be heard. A writ petition filed by her led the Supreme Court to deliver a landmark judgment that held that the right to “life or personal liberty” included Maneka’s right to travel because “a fundamental right is not an island in itself” and so Article 21 was to be understood in conjunction with other fundamental rights [such as the freedom of speech, enshrined in 19(1)(a)]. Justice VR Krishna Iyer, who was on the Bench that delivered the judgment, explained that “the spirit of man is at the root of Article 21”, “personal liberty makes for the worth of the human person” and “travel makes liberty worthwhile”.

But most significantly, the court held that the “procedure established by law” in Article 21 could not be a mere semblance of procedure but should fulfil the principles of natural justice — one of which is “the right to be heard”.

With the passing of these rules, millions of Indians have been denied this right — including the writer of this article. If, on going online, there is a complaint calling it “grossly harmful”, “harassing”, “disparaging”, or worse still, “blasphemous”, it will have to be taken down, in 36 hours, with his only recourse being to line up at the same courts that lawyers representing Facebook and Google and Qasmi and Rai have been visiting for months now. That’s where the smokescreen dissipates.

The original was published in Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 07, Dated 18 Feb 2012, Sunil Abraham is quoted in it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-curbs

World Narrow Web

pranesh — 2012-03-27T16:00:24Z

Censorship and how govt reacts to it may push us to country-specific networks, writes Pranesh Prakash in an article published in the Indian Express on 4 February 2012.

Twitter, a popular micro-blogging service, recently announced that “[today] we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world”. In a move a few weeks ago, Blogger, Google’s blogging service, in effect announced something similar, by saying that default they would redirect Blogger users trying to get to Blogspot.com addresses (like http://example.blogspot.com) to their respective country sites (like http://example.blogspot.in). Twitter’s announcement was greeted with much disapproval by many Twitter users, as a move towards censorship, with some talking (on Twitter) about a boycott. Blogger’s move was hidden away, deep within a help page, and is being noticed now, and is causing quite a stir as caving in to censorship. Are these concerns justified? Before answering that question, let’s look at what the platforms’ announcements really say.

Twitter has given itself the ability to withhold specific tweets and users in particular countries where that content is legally required to be removed (generally with a court order). Their earlier option, they inform us, was to block the offending tweets and users in all countries. Apart from this, they will publish a notice for each tweet/ user that is blocked in a country. They will also be proactively publishing every removal request they receive at ChillingEffects.org, which allows us to hold them to account and question their decision to remove tweets.

Google, by redirecting you to the country-specific Blogger, is allowing for country-level removal of both blogs and individual blog posts. However, they also note that you can circumvent this by using a special “no redirect” address. Google currently forwards all search-related removals, but does not do so for Blogger-related requests, and all copyright-related complaints to ChillingEffects.org. Google does publish aggregate data relating to censorship of Blogger, on which free-speech advocates have been asking them to provide more granular information.

There are three problems. First, while Twitter was just as open to repressive governments’ requests last week, by making this change, they are advertising this fact to such governments. Thailand has noted it, and has congratulated Twitter.

Second, as Rob Beschizza, managing editor of the website Boing Boing, pointed out, there have been no instances of political content having been removed by Twitter. Even British courts’ super-injunctions (injunctions on speech, that prevent you from mentioning the fact that there is an injunction) were defeated by Twitter users, which only showed that attempts to censor material results in even more attention being drawn to it (which is popularly known as the “Streisand Effect”). So, does this now mean that Twitter will start applying local laws to judge “valid and applicable legal requests”, instead of American laws? What if the law is as bad as that which exists in India, where they are required to remove content within 36 hours based on any affected person’s complaint — without a court order? Will they still act on it? If they don’t, will the government or courts order Twitter.com to be blocked in India, finding it liable for illegal omissions?

Third, this trend points increasingly to the fact that we are witnessing a Balkanisation of the Web as more countries start asserting their sovereignty online. As Chinese dissident journalist Michael Anti pointed out recently, it seems we now need visas (read “circumvention techniques”) to visit the international Web. But even then, there is no longer a singular “international” Web, but an Indian Web and a Guatemalan Web, and an Angolan Web. And the government’s recent proposal of requiring companies to locate their servers in India is a move towards this (apart from being a move towards killing cloud computing).

That having been said, the reality is that the CEOs of Google, Google India, and Microsoft have been summoned to appear in Indian courts for allowing their users to publish material which they don’t know about, which is in a sealed envelope (and most of the accused companies haven’t been shown yet), and which they weren’t even asked once to remove.

The Intermediary Guidelines Rules passed by the Department of Information Technology in April 2011 do not require the user, whose content it is, to be told that there is a complaint, nor to be given a chance to defend themselves. It does not even require public notice that the content has been removed.

The truth is, the transparency around censorship that Google and Twitter are providing is far better than what most other companies are providing. For instance, Big Rock, an Indian DNS provider, suspended the CartoonsAgainstCorruption.com web address on the basis of a seemingly not legal request by the Cyber Cell of the Mumbai Crime Branch, and did so without any public notice and without even informing the cartoonist whose web address it was. At least Google and Twitter are pushing back against non-legal requests, and refusing to remove content that doesn’t violate local laws. Single-mindedly criticising them will only put off other companies from following in their footsteps.

Instead of criticising those who are actually working towards transparency in censorship, we should encourage them and others, push intermediaries not to cave in to unreasonable censorship requests, prevent them from over-censoring on their own, and push hard for the government to incorporate their best practices as part of the Intermediary Guidelines Rules.

The original article was published in the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/world-narrow-web

Tweeple say it pithily with hash tags

praskrishna — 2012-02-13T05:06:10Z

Twitter best captures public irreverence to pomposity and the powers-that-be, writes Deepa Kurup in this article published in the Hindu on February 11, 2012. Nishant Shah is quoted in this article.

The Twitter world is divided into two kinds of people, those who are funny and those who try.

And nothing gets them going like a jolly controversy, particularly one that involves politicians — an easy target, always — and pornography. Of course, there's still them blogs and Facebook, but Twitter, with its sense of ‘right here, right now' (something that Facebook's Timeline tries to emulate) appears to be where every current event is made light of, ripped apart, hash-tagged and, of course, wildly re-tweeted.

Hash-Tag Bash

This week, for instance, it was all about the three Ministers from Karnataka who were caught watching porn on their phones in the Legislative Assembly when the House was in session. For at least two whole days, tweeple (people using Twitter) seemed to be gripped by what has been christened #PornGate (yes, every event these days is reduced to a single hash tag on Twitter).

So jokes ranged from the genuinely clever, funny and to the lame and obscene. Though many cannot be mentioned here in print, quite a few had to do with the ministers' state of mind and being, and even offered them advice on how to tide through these, ahem, hard times.

On Facebook, a space that doesn't stifle your creativity to 140 measly characters (for those who've been living under a rock for the past six years, that's the word limit for a single Tweet), there were more elaborate forms of humour such as morphed pictures, couplets and political satire.

The last time when social media in India went viral was the Shahrukh Khan-Shirish Kundar brawl (predictably, christened #SlapGate).

Does something about Twitter, or its format, inspire everyone to try their hand at humour? Perhaps, it's the brevity — the soul of wit, remember? —- that the platform demands. “It's also probably because it's difficult to be profound in 140 characters,” offers Nishant Shah, researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society, who tracks social media closely. Another factor could be what he calls the “gamification aesthetic” of web 2.0. “This is because our social networking sites and writing platforms are performances of a certain kind... they allow us to convert our everyday lives into games — with rewards, actions, punishments or rules.”

More Immediate

Ask Ramesh Srivats, a hugely funny ad man who's wildly popular on Twitter for his one-liners, and he believes that online humour, particularly so on Twitter, is fun because its immediate, more observational, real and allows people an opportunity to be irreverent.

There're no sacred cows here. And there's a certain mood that Twitter sets up, often depending on what's current; the rest is about timing. “Twitter doesn't allow you to analyse or discuss an issue… I'd rather do that on Facebook or elsewhere,” he explains. So is there pressure to say the next-most-funny thing on Twitter? “Of course not. If something comes to mind, I say it. It's just like a conversation among friends,” Mr. Srivats laughs.

Why not Facebook?

It's not that there aren't other forms of humour online — there are videos, blogs, Facebook pages and so on. There are indeed some incredibly humorous bloggers — many of them, however, have migrated to Twitter. But it's the mood that Twitter creates. Facebook, on the other hand, allows for more expression of angst, grief and even activism. Mr. Shah says that Facebook is to sadness what Twitter is to humour; perhaps, it is a more “nurturing and personalised space”.

The “gaming aesthetic” on Facebook, however, does exist with memes, videos, picture remixes and so on, he says. “But unlike Twitter, here the attempt is not to be merely humorous... banter on Facebook is about a post or an object, where as banter on Twitter is about the banter itself!

The original story was published in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/tweeple-say-it-pithily-with-hash-tags

New Bill to decide on individual’s right to privacy

praskrishna — 2012-02-07T07:19:07Z

A group of experts would identify issues relating to privacy and prepare a report to facilitate authoring the Privacy Bill. Vishwajoy Mukherjee's article was published in Tehelka on 6 February 2012.

American jurist William J Brennan once famously remarked, “If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion.” Now the Government of India is on the verge of formulating, for the first time, a Privacy Bill that will lay down a specific framework to adjudicate an individual’s right to privacy.

The Planning Commission has constituted a small group of experts under the chairmanship of Justice A P Shah, former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, to identify issues relating to privacy and prepare a paper to facilitate authoring the Privacy Bill. The group will be studying the privacy laws and related bills promulgated by other countries and will also be analysing the impact of various programmes being implemented by the government, from the perspective of their impact on privacy. A detailed report with suggestions and remarks will then be handed to the Planning Commission by 31 March.

In the run-up to the formulation of a new Privacy Bill in India, an All India Privacy Symposium was held on 4 February to discuss aspects of privacy in the context of transparency, national security and internet banking. One of the most vociferous oppositions to the idea of privacy becoming an enshrined right for individuals, has come from those who believe that national security is of paramount importance. “The notion that one has to choose between privacy and national security is a false dichotomy of choice… When the judiciary adjudicates between privacy and surveillance, privacy in almost all cases loses. Especially when the word terrorism is invoked,” said Oxblood Ruffin, a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, an information security and publishing collective. Speaking at the conference Ruffin stressed on the idea that the State shouldn’t act as a “peeping Tom” but instead respect the “sovereignty of its people.”

One of the more stark examples, in recent years, of the State clamping down on individual rights, such as the right to privacy, on the pretext of national security, is the Patriot Act in America. The Patriot Act was passed in the United States of America in the immediate aftermath of the September 2001 attacks on the twin towers, and allowed the government to scrutinise everything from “suspicious” bank accounts to wire-tapping lines of communication. Menaka Guruswamy, a lawyer at the Supreme Court of India, believes that unlike America, India does not yet have a codified view on privacy. “Privacy is a vast, fragile, and an open space in the Indian justice system,” she told Tehelka.

Though India doesn’t have clearly defined laws dealing with the issue of privacy, it does have certain directives under which surveillance methods such as wire-tapping can be done. Wire-tapping, which is regulated under the Telegraph Act of 1885, saw a major overhaul in a 1996 Supreme Court judgment, which ruled that wire-taps are a "serious invasion of an individual's privacy." The Supreme Court (SC) recognised the fact that the right to privacy is an integral part of the fundamental right to life enshrined under Article 21 of the Constitution, and therefore laid down guidelines defining who can tap phones and under what circumstances. Only the Union Home Secretary, or his counterpart in the states, can issue an order for a tap, and the government is also required to show that the information sought cannot to be obtained through any other means. The SC mandated the development of a high-level committee to review the legality of each wire-tap.

“Interceptions and intrusions by the state have often gone on to help exonerate people who have been falsely accused, so I think it would be unfair to demonise wire-tapping in general. One does have to ensure though, that those who intercept exchanges do not exceed limits,” said a former chief of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).

Besides the dimension of privacy versus surveillance, another important aspect which comes under the scanner when privacy laws are discussed is Internet banking. Details of personal bank accounts and other highly sensitive information of individuals have been whizzing around the cyber space with the advent of E-banking. Everything from booking tickets for movies and flights, to transferring money between accounts is happening via computers, and is happening fast. This growing trend has sparked a major debate on how safe is our information on the web, and what can the government do to secure it? In May 2000, the government passed the Information Technology Act, which laid down a set of laws intended to provide a comprehensive regulatory environment for electronic commerce.

The Act also addressed computer crimes such as hacking, damage to computer source code, breach of confidentiality and viewing of pornography and created a Cyber Appellate Tribunal to oversee and adjudicate cyber crimes. However, at the same time, the legislation gave broad discretion to law enforcement authorities through several provisions, such as Section 69, allowing the interception of any information transmitted through a computer resource and mandates that users disclose encryption keys or face a jail sentence up to seven years. Section 80 of the Act allows deputy superintendents of police to conduct searches and seize suspects in public spaces without a warrant.

“Confidentiality between banker and customer is the golden rule of traditional banking, but with the coming of E-banking, banks are using confidentiality as an excuse for not putting out data that shows how vulnerable they are to cyber crimes like hacking,” said N Vijayashankar, an E-business consultant, and a front runner in raising awareness about cyber laws in India. He said, “When framing privacy laws one has to ensure that banks are mandated to disclose data on breach of Internet security. That is the only way to ensure that banks take the necessary steps to secure customer information.” Malavika Jairam, a lawyer who focuses on technology and intellectual property, believes that allowing private participation in what should essentially be a sovereign State function is a dangerous path to tread on. “Tesco, a major retail chain in England, is now into E-banking… There are numerous examples of such private banking entities sharing customer information with insurance policy firms. These details are often used as markers for the kind of premium that will be set for a person,” Jairam said.

With the current pace of technological advancements fast thinning the line between individual privacy and public content, it remains to be seen what kind of privacy laws India will frame to keep up.

The original was published by Tehelka, Malavika Jayaram, a Fellow at CIS is quoted in it.

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