We are anonymous, we are legion

The quest for genuine clout on the internet

praskrishna — 2013-10-29T07:08:40Z

There is a lot of interest and speculation on the impact of social media on politics because of its amplification effects.

The article by Karthik Subramanian was published in the Hindu on October 13, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.

There is no denying that it has overtaken the traditional media in certain facets of news - most notably when it comes to breaking news and that it provides grounds for expressing one's ideas unbounded.

But the marketing and the advertising world are only just coming to grips with the medium. (Twitter is set to launch its IPO soon and Facebook is going to increasingly face the need to monetize its services. The Web has a history of complaints where users have found it tough to different between user-generated content and 'promoted' content.)

In effect, the question of the “influence” that social media and its star patrons wield is still being assessed, especially in the loaded context of whether its proactive use would translate to votes in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. Not only are the number of active social media users negligible in the Indian context, there are doubts on whether a 'cause and effect' scenario is possible.

There are two predominant points of view, while talking about the influence of social media campaigns on politics: One that closely reads the Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter trends as an important measure of public pulse; and the other which dismisses any sort of influence that social media has on real and grass root level politics.

T. Vishnu Vardhan, a researcher at Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, prefers the middle ground. “It is important to not ignore the growing popularity of social media in India with [telecom] service providers providing Facebook access at Rs. 1 for an entire day. However, I would refrain from seeing a direct correlation between a person's participation on social media to real-time events in society including politics.”

Propaganda fallacy

“In India and especially in Tamil Nadu it has been proved that the Propaganda Model is a fallacy. There is no simple formula, whether it be cinema of 1970s or the Social Media of the 2010s. There are too many factors and layers that influence real-time events.”

Companies around the world are trying to make sense of this 'Big Data' that people's digital lives are generating. And whilst individuals and even some clever campaigns make snap pronouncements based on superficial data and analysis, there are a few companies that are looking at it through the prism of complex algorithms and technology-enabled web crawling.

One such company Kochi-based startup Riafy Technologies is attempting to make sense of the digital noise in a broad sweeping sense looking at three domains: relational intelligence, predictive analysis and big data.

One of the their applications 'Movie Tarot' predicts the outcome of Friday releases at the movie box office, based on the digital traffic on the days preceding the release. Not every instance of praise or every denouncement is treated equally. Instead, they have an intelligent algorithm that they apply to predict the box office collections and the ultimate verdict. (They claim to have a fairly accurate track record thus far.)

The company's CEO John Mathew says there is a correlation between a person's online presence and behaviour in the real world. “This influence is significant in age groups of 18-34,” he says. “As for Lok Sabha elections, the 'social media influenced' voter turnout would be marginal when we look at the country as a whole, but this number would be substantial in the 'swing constituencies'.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-october-13-2013-karthik-subramanian-the-quest-for-genuine-clout-on-the-internet

The Public Voice: Privacy Rights are a Global Challenge

praskrishna — 2012-10-22T14:28:09Z

October 21, 2012 is an important day for global civil society defending privacy and free speech. The Public Voice coalition will be hosting a global conference in Punta del Este, Uruguay, and you are invited to take part in the conversation and interact with the panelists. Malavika Jayaram is speaking at this event.

You can follow the live conversation here, and join the conversation by using #thepublicvoice hashtag, ask questions, participate in polls and interact with those covering the event in several languages. The conference aims to assess cultures and privacy perspectives from around the World, and members of civil society wil discuss the spread of Surveillance Technologies and its implications in societies, experts will explore Latin American policy, law, and technology perspectives on privacy governance and suggest to governments and private sector to safeguard citizens privacy.

You can read the program and follow the live Webcast in English and Spanish.

During the day the panelists will assess cultures and privacy perspectives from around the world. They will raise public awareness of surveillance technology and its consequences to consumers, for freedom of expression and human rights, and they will explore Latin American policy, law, and technology perspectives. It is the small window civil society has before the 34th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners comprising all the governmental agencies all over the World, webcast available here. It certainly can bring the relevant topics for citizens to the discussion table. I hope you join us.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/privacy-rights-are-a-global-challenge

The Privatisation of Censorship: The Online Responsibility to Protect Free Expression

praskrishna — 2012-12-09T01:48:13Z

Pranesh Prakash was a panelist at this workshop organised on November 5, 2012. It was organized by Index on Censorship.

Much is known about state censorship, but increasingly private corporations are implementing censorship either at the behest of governments, or as part of a ‘walled garden’ approach. This censorship takes many guises: whether the proactive take-down of entirely legal material, the blocking of websites by overly zealous ISPs, mobile filters that cut access to websites such as Index on Censorship and the use of surveillance technology on behalf of autocratic states. The combination of state-led censorship with the privatisation of censorship requires a debate on the responsibilities of corporations and the framework needed to protect free expression online.

This side session will focus on two key areas:
1. Take-down, blocking and filtering of content
2. The export of surveillance technology, privacy

The panel will explore the ways in which the above can affect free expression online, and how civil society, governments and corporations can and should approach these issues, addressing the following questions:

1. Whether, why and in what ways censorship and surveillance is either as or more pervasive, intrusive and chilling than offline, and the impact on free speech and press freedom?
2. The inappropriate, intrusive or excessive use of filters and firewalls including how these impact directly and indirectly on access to media and the nature of news provision
3. Criminalisation of free speech and free expression – chilling use of takedown requests (impacting on public online debates, on media freedom including investigative journalism), and constraints on comment and debate (twitter, trolls, comment threads etc);
4. Excessive and blanket surveillance and data-gathering
5. Regulations and laws including intermediary responsibility that curtail digital free speech

Chair:
Michael Harris, Head of Advocacy, Index on Censorship

Panelists:

Dr Hosein Badran, Regional Chief Technology Officer, Cisco Systems International, covering MENA
Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society
Abhilash Nair, Northumbria University, UK
Camino Manjon Sierra, International Relations Policy Officer, Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, European Commission
Andrew Puddephatt, Global Partners and Associates

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/privatisation-of-censorship

The Private Eye

nishant — 2012-05-24T06:25:48Z

The world’s largest digital social networking system, oh ok, Facebook, to just name names, was recently in a lot of buzz.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on May 14, 2012

The world’s largest digital social networking system, oh ok, Facebook, to just name names, was recently in a lot of buzz. For once, it was not about the laments of how we are downgrading the meaning of friendship, eroding social relationships, and visions of an apocalyptic future where people will lose the knack of face-time to interface intimacies. Instead, the buzz was about Facebook’s collaboration with the American non-profit coalition Donate Life America to encourage more people to sign themselves up as organ donors. The feature that allows the American users to sign up as organ donors, promising their organs, in the event of their death, to others who might live through them, has been an instant hit. More than a lakh people have updated their status to reflect their volunteering as organ donors, and thousands others have signed up for the noteworthy initiative.

There is no doubt that harnessing the powers of social networks for such causes is laudable, and indeed, follows the trends that we have been witnessing the last few years, where people have mobilised their networks for a range of things — from overthrowing governments to dancing in flash mobs. It is interesting that initiatives which were already working with large-scale networks are now collaborating within the social media space to tap into the immense potential of social networking. It is also noteworthy that Facebook Connect, which is a slowly growing system by which users authenticate themselves to different portals and can use their Facebook credentials instead of creating new profiles with more passwords to remember, was used effectively to facilitate registering for a new system. It is a testimony to Facebook’s growing omnipresence, that initiatives like these can use those credentials in their systems.

There is a wide range of interests that punctuate this phenomenon and there is a rich discourse that reports, analyses and maps it. However, I want to take this opportunity to make a distinction between data types that is often lost in the presumption that all information on a social network is the same kind of information. With the enabling of this feature, Facebook has started mining a new set of personal data that is at once fiercely private and vulnerable. Till now, Facebook and other such social networking systems were already harvesting a wide range of data — personal data such as name, gender, birth-date, pictures, etc.; social data such as relationships, interactions, communities, groups, likes, etc.; usage data like preferences, navigation, search, frequency of interaction et al. While all this data has been about the personal, it is also data that we share and display in our everyday life. Who we are, what we look like, the politics that we subscribe to, the communities we are a part of, languages we speak, products we consume and people we hang out with is physical data that is available to anybody who cares to watch us.

While there are serious repercussions on what happens when such data falls into malicious hands, there is still objectivity to this data. This is data which we can understand as personal — as referring to the person, but not necessarily private. Private data is actually the information that we have singular access to. And this distinction between the personal and the private is good to understand, because with the Organ Donor badge, Facebook has entered a new realm of data mining, which is truly private. Till now, privacy arguments around Facebook have not been as fuelled as they might otherwise be, because there is an innate understanding that there is a certain performative aspect to our personal data, because it facilitates different kinds of negotiations, transactions and engagements. However, with private data — health and medical history, gender and sexual orientations, desires and fantasies, moral and ethical choices — we are entering murky waters. This happens because while violation of personal data can be easily rectified by resorting to the law, the private is more in the grey zone, subject to interpretations and often unquantifiable in its intensity.

The concerns that will emerge are the same kinds that we have seen in other large projects that deal with private data like the Aadhar project that uses biometric identification data to identify citizens in India. While Facebook might not be collecting biometric data, it is important to recognise that this new kind of data disclosure, which puts our private information in the public domain, only mandates better security and privacy control within these social networks. As we move towards a data-driven future, we need to be more aware of the different kinds of data sets that we are making public and educate ourselves about the risks of this disclosure, without being carried away by the sway of meme-like behaviour and viral trends online. The next time you decide to reveal some new kinds of data about yourself, pause for a moment and reflect on whether it is personal or private, and whether it is absolutely necessary to facilitate your interaction within that information system and the rewards and dangers it comes with.

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

The Privacy Rights of Whistleblowers

elonnai — 2012-03-22T05:47:16Z

The recent disclosures from Wikileaks have shown that the right to information, whistle-blowing, and privacy are interconnected. This note looks at the different ways in which the three are related, as well as looking at the benefits and drawbacks to Wikileaks in terms of privacy.

Introduction

In a recent interview, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner was quoted as saying “Information and the manipulation of information is the key to power. Those who can control the information can influence society enormously.” History and present-day society have both proven the truth in this statement. It is one among many reasons that the right to information is important to uphold. In India, and in other countries, there are statutes – in India, the Right To Information Act – that entitles the public to request and receive information that pertains to public bodies and their conduct, information that is publicly available because it is intrinsically related to the public interest. An entirely separate but equally critical way in which the public is kept informed is through whistle-blowing. Traditionally, whistle-blowing is any disclosure made in the name of public interest. Recent events such as the Ratan Tata case and the leaks of US diplomatic cables have brought to light the relationship between the public’s right to information, the rights of whistleblowers, and the rights of individuals to privacy. These recent cases have shown that the right to information, whistle-blowing, and the right to privacy are interconnected, because privacy can provide individuals with the means to sustain autonomy against potentially overwhelming forces of government and persons who might have mixed motivations. The right to information and whistle-blowing are means by which the government is held accountable to the public if they violate the law or the public trust. The Wikileaks case and the Ratan Tata case raise important questions about when those two interests need to give way to private interests. One of the key questions that Wikileaks raises is: if whistleblowing is supposed to be disclosure in the public interest -- i.e., to protect the public – should disclosure of personal information be permissible only if a person can demonstrate that he/she is trying to remedy or avoid actual wrongdoing rather than simply publishing information that is "interesting to the public?"

What is a Whistleblower and how does a Whistleblower Benefit from Wikileaks?

Whistleblowing is the modern counterpart to “informers” – people who reveal others’ wrongdoing. Much whistleblowing occurs by going "up the chain" in a person's own department or agency or company. If the person is reporting wrongdoing and the person ultimately goes to the authorities about illegal activity, the individual reporting the leak can sometimes get immunity for his or her own actions, can sometimes collect part of the penalties, and can under certain statutes in some countries even bring suit if the company retaliates against him -- for example, by firing him. In this way traditional whistleblowing places the responsibility for legal and ethical conduct on employees who are better situated to see wrongdoing than outsiders would be. In many countries, a person may present information of a whistleblowing nature to a judicial body. The judicial body then determines the validity of the information, the degree of public interest involved, and the proper form of redress to be taken. The judicial body offers legal protection to the whistleblower. Another method of whistleblowing is to leak information to the press. Once information is in the public domain – at least if there is freedom of press -- the information can no longer be covered up. Neither the right to free press, nor the right to protection as a whistleblower is universal. The current critique of the Indian Whistle Blowing Bill is that the right to protection will not be ensured. A Times of India article issued in September 2010 pointed out that the Whistle Blowing Act’s biggest weakness is that the Bill’s Central Vigilance Commission is designated to play both the role as competent authority to deal with complaints file by whistleblowers and as the tribunal to protect whistleblowers. Structuring the power to allow one body to fulfil both functions runs the risk of bias and could breed distrust that would cause people to avoid the system altogether. The article complained that the Bill has no teeth, and that even if the Commission believes that the whistleblowing is valid, it is able only to give advice rather than actually to prosecute individuals. The article recites extreme instances in which individuals have blown the whistle and paid for it with their lives. For example: in 2005 a manager of the Indian Oil Corporation was killed after exposing a scheme in adulterated petrol, and in 2010 an RTI activist was killed after exposing land scams in Mahrashtra. In these situations, Wikileaks is an interesting and powerful tool for individuals who either do not want to leak their information to a judicial body or are not protected if they do so in their own country. Leaking information to Wikileaks is in one sense analogous to leaking information to the press, but it is not precisely the same because it is not a news media outlet, but instead is a way for a person to post information on a mass media outlet. It should be noted, however, that informants who leak to Wikileaks are not afforded the same immunity that individuals who leak to authorities are granted. When an individual shares documents or information with Wikileaks, the site in turn acts as a platform to publish the information on the web and with the press. Being an independent entity that is neither tied down to a certain territory, government, or entity – Wikileaks has the pull of non-bias. But the strength of Wikileaks is also its weakness. When 250,000 diplomatic cables were posted, there was no one who understood the context of the content to monitor to ensure that everything was appropriate to post. As a result, the information was transmitted to an audience who normally would not be entitled to it. By doing so, the leaked information placed individual diplomats in precarious positions that could potentially put them in harm’s way and unnecessarily damage their reputations, as well as putting the reputation of the United States on the line.

Privacy and Whistleblowing

As a result the United States is looking to press charges against Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, for espionage. The way in which Wikileaks leaked information and the nature of the leak has brought privacy into the picture. When looking at the act of whistleblowing through the lens of privacy, there are obvious privacy concerns for the whistleblower, for the person or entity whose information has been leaked, and for possible third parties involved. Paul Chadwick, the Victorian Privacy Commissioner, pointed out that for the whistleblower the main privacy concerns include the individual’s identity, safety, and reputation. For the alleged wrongdoer the privacy concerns include: identity, safety, employment, and liberty (where sanctions may include imprisonment). For third parties, reputation and safety can both be jeopardized by disclosures by whistleblowers. The Wikileaks leaks squarely present the question whether intent should be brought into the analysis of privacy and whistleblowers. If a whistleblower is disclosing with the intent protect the public, the protections afforded to this person should weigh differently against the privacy interests of alleged wrongdoers and third parties than for someone who is simply defining the public interest as “interesting to the public,” or, worse, as seen in the false leak by Pakistan against India, is looking to leak information to disrupt public interest. Even though Wikileaks works to protect the anonymity of individuals who leak information, it is not bound by any law to protect the privacy of individuals involved in the leak. The concept behind Wikileaks is important. By interacting with government information, it has the ability to bring accountability and transparency to governments, but the only regulation over Wikileaks is internal (and thus inherently subjective). Wikileaks needs to change its structure to take into account leaks shared without the intent of protecting the public interest and even then needs to monitor to prevent leaks that could place individuals in precarious situations or damage reputations with no validating information.

Sources:

http://www.ctv.ca/generic/generated/static/business/article1833688.html

Chadwick, Paul. Whistleblowing, Transparency, and Privacy: Aspects of the relationship between Victoria’s Whistleblowers Protection Act and the Information Privacy Act.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy/privacy-wikilileaks-whistleblowers

The Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013: A Citizen's Draft

bhairav — 2013-07-12T11:50:20Z

The Centre for Internet and Society has been researching privacy in India since 2010 with the objective of raising public awareness around privacy, completing in depth research, and driving a privacy legislation in India. As part of this work, Bhairav Acharya has drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013.

This research was undertaken as part of the 'SAFEGUARDS' project that CIS is undertaking with Privacy International and IDRC.

The Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013 contains provisions that speak to data protection, interception, and surveillance. The Bill also establishes the powers and functions of the Privacy Commissioner, and lays out offenses and penalties for contravention of the Bill. The Bill represents a citizen's version of a possible privacy legislation for India, and will be shared with key stakeholders including civil society, industry, and government.

Click to download a full draft of the Privacy (Protection) Bill, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-protection-bill-2013-citizens-draft

The Present — and Future — Dangers of India's Draconian New Internet Regulations

anja — 2011-08-02T07:22:24Z

The uproar surrounding India's Internet Control Rules makes clear that in the Internet age, as before, the active chilling of freedom of expression by the state is unacceptable in a democracy. Yet if India's old censorship regimes are to be maintained in this new context, the state will have little choice but to do just that. Are we ready to rethink the ways in which we deal with free speech and censorship as a society? Asks Anja Kovacs in this article, published in Caravan, 1 June 2011.

WHAT ACTUALLY DEFINES A DEMOCRACY? It is a trickier question than it first seems, and yet it is worthwhile, at least every now and then, to remind ourselves of what constitutes the political system we hold so dear. Free and fair elections; an independent legislative, executive and judiciary; and freedom of the press—these are all vital ingredients. But what may be democracy’s defining element, or at least its sine qua non, is the right to freedom of opinion and expression: without this equal right to “seek, receive and impart information”, as the universal declaration of Human Rights frames it, a system of governance of the people, for the people and by the people simply remains meaningless. Without a free flow of information, democracy does not exist.

It is with good reason, then, that bloggers, tech enthusiasts and watchdogs from civil society have been up in arms over two new sets of rules, notified in April 2011, that will impact every Indian’s Internet use. Formulated by the Central Government under powers conferred to it by the IT (Amendment) Act 2008, one set governs what is known as the liability of intermediaries. This determines in which cases, and to what extent, companies ranging from Google and Facebook to local Internet service providers (ISPs) are legally responsible for the content that you upload.

The second set of rules pertains to cybercafes. In a manner reminiscent of the licence Raj, there are new registration standards for these establishments, which go beyond the usual requirements for commercial enterprises and include detailed procedures to identify all users. Cybercafes will be required to maintain and submit, on a monthly basis, logs that detail the use of all computers in the cafe and to keep backups of all users’ browser histories, to be maintained for at least one year.

There is much that is wrong with these rules, but what makes them such a particular threat to freedom of expression? Some effects are likely to be indirect: for example, the Internet has the potential to emerge as an important avenue for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to express and discuss concerns so rarely taken into account by the mainstream media. But by putting into place stringent identification requirements for cybercafe users, who are likely to be less well-off, the access of underprivileged users in particular will be further constrained. Moreover, the combination of the need for identification with the requirement for cybercafes to keep a log of every user’s browser history means that anonymity online is now effectively made impossible in India. For whistleblowers, artists, writers or anyone desiring anonymity, there is no longer a place in Indian cyberspace.

But the most troubling impact on freedom of expression of the new mandates remains direct: in their attempt to delineate the liability of Internet providers and websites, the new rules for “intermediary due diligence” actually add important new curbs on freedom of expression to Indian law. India’s Constitution recognises a fairly extensive list of so-called “reasonable restrictions” and these are more or less replicated in the Rules: “the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence”. But the Rules, which were never vetted by Parliament, do not limit themselves to these Constitutional provisions. Rather surprisingly, they add a whole new slew of qualifications, many of which are so vague, moreover, that they leave the door wide open to abuse. Thus, for example, the Rules impose a blanket ban on impersonation and make it illegal to share any information that is “grossly harmful”, “harassing”, “blasphemous”, “disparaging” or “insulting any other nation”. None of these terms have been explained or defined.

Lacking the precision that would allow citizens to precisely regulate their behaviour in line with the law, overly broad regulations such as these are widely believed to have a chilling effect: in order not to violate the law, people begin to censor themselves—to keep quiet rather than protesting or engaging. But in this particular case, the effects are likely to be particularly pernicious because of a second provision made by the Rules: wherever an intermediary receives a complaint claiming that any information they store, host or publish contravenes the provisions of the Rules, the intermediary is required to take down this information within 36 hours. Censorship, in other words, will effectively be privatised.

The prospect is all the more depressing because the intermediaries have little incentive to resist participating in such censorship. Given the restrictions on free speech that are effectively enforced within Indian society by vigilante groups, especially in the last two decades, the possible impact of these rules is even more frightening. If Facebook has little reason to uphold your right to maintain a page that is critical of say, Gandhiji, what prevents vigilante groups from policing our lives online even more than they do offline? The only recourse available to the owner of the confiscated information will be going to court—meaning that defending one’s own freedom of speech online will require endless litigation.

These are worrying omens, in other words, for those who believe that freedom of expression is the cornerstone of democracy. But to what extent do these new provisions represent a radical break with India’s existing restrictions on free speech? Since its founding, the independent Indian nation-state has wielded censorship as a tool to both contain the conflicts that emanate from India’s tremendous diversity and to ensure its homogeneous social, moral and political development. If the list of reasonable restrictions in the Constitution is fairly long, this is because the country’s lawmakers were clear at the time of Independence that freedom of expression would need to be subordinated to the social reforms necessary to put the country on Nehru’s path to development. India’s far-reaching anti-hate speech laws, too, derive from the desire to combat ill will and disharmony. Since the Internet now makes it so much easier to publish opinions that are hurtful, or indeed “grossly harmful” or “disparaging”, the new Rules can in many ways be seen as an attempt to continue this strategy in the Internet age.

The problem, however, is that irrespective of the merits of such a strategy in the past, within the radically altered communicative context of the Internet, it is simply no longer feasible. As the Internet guru Clay Shirky has argued, earlier systems of media and communication worked on a “filter, then publish” principle. Because publishing a newspaper, for example, is expensive, editors and journalists take upon themselves the role of filtering out the “worthwhile” from the “not-so-worthwhile”. Without them making that vital differentiation between “news” and “information” on the one hand and “drivel” on the other, newspapers would simply not be viable. In the Internet age, however, this principle has been reversed. The arrival of social media especially has made it so easy and cheap for anyone to share their opinions that the mantra now is: first publish, then filter. The gatekeeper role of the traditional media stands much reduced.

For the Indian government’s strategy of using censorship as a tool to mitigate social conflict, this shift has two important consequences. The first one is quantitative: it means that there are now far more speech acts to police. That undoubtedly has made the state’s task much more difficult. But there is also a second, qualitative difference: it also means that whether the government approves of this or not, there will now be a far wider range of people who will make their voices heard, and thus, a far wider range of opinions that will be expressed in the public sphere. And it is precisely to stop such a diversity from emerging that much censorship in India has been justified over the years. As a 1980 report of the Working Group on National Film Policy argued: “if the overall objective of censorship is to safeguard generally accepted standards of morality and decency, in addition to the well recognised interests of the State, the standards of censorship applicable to freedom of expression cannot be very much ahead of the standards of behaviour commonly accepted in society. Censorship can become liberal only to the extent society itself becomes genuinely liberal”.

What such statements conveniently elide, of course, is the enormous diversity within Indian society itself. Whose standards of behaviour are they thinking of? Kashmiri, Manipuri, Chhattisgarhi? Gandhian, feminist, communist? Adivasi, Muslim, Dalit? Who represents this community of the nation? Censorship always benefits the status quo, and the Indian case has been no different. The rise of the Internet has merely revealed, with increasing frequency, cracks in the supposedly uniform moral, social and political development of India that the government envisioned. If the old censorship regime is to nevertheless be maintained in this new context, it will therefore increasingly require the active chilling of freedom of expression on the part of the state. What the uproar surrounding the Internet Control Rules makes clear is that in the Internet age, as before, this is an unacceptable route for a modern democracy. A new model to deal with diversity and dissent is urgently required.

What makes our democracy? With the undeniable challenges that the Internet throws to our established ways of operating, it is time to reopen this debate as a society, rather than leaving it to politicians and bureaucrats. The open forum of the Internet may often offend, or rattle our sensibilities and beliefs, but it also presents new possibilities for engagement and debate. Will we take this opportunity?

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-present-and-future-dangers-of-indias-draconian-new-internet-regulations

The Power of Communication: The Media, Public Space and Participatory Democracy

praskrishna — 2014-09-30T05:49:27Z

Bhairav Acharya will be presenting a paper at this event to be held in the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla on October 13 and 14, 2014.

For more details, see here.

Bhairav would talk about the tension in defamation law, between its deontological command (Kant's categorical imperative of truth) and its consequentialism (harm, to reputation or to public peace).

The talk would explore the utility of our present common law construction of libel; and, if it's not too bold, he hopes to make the case that Indian libel law should incorporate a new test of serious and actual harm as its primary defence to libel, and that the defence of truth should be done away with. This is because Bhairav believes that free speech law should strictly construe Mill's harm principle. In other words, lies and rumours after all, if the state can freely engage in questionable propanganda, people should be allowed to spread baseless rumours — are good for health and should not be criminalised.

Background note

The media has been a growth sector over two decades and more of liberalisation. All evidence points towards the media industry having substantially outrun the overall rate of growth of the economy. This is not surprising since advertising which has been the principal driver of media growth, tends to leave behind other sectors in times of economic buoyancy. Technology has been another powerful driver of media growth over the last two decades. From the first glimmers of satellite broadcasting over the C band which enabled local cable operators to provide a menu of untold variety in the early 1990s, to the recent spurt in the “direct to home” transmissions, the Indian TV scenario has been transformed from a tightly controlled government monopoly, to a state of unregulated proliferation.

A further enabling mechanism has been the rapid growth of internet access. The digital divide remains very much a reality and the numbers that are able to tap into the full potential of the internet, is still a rather small fraction of the total population. The proliferation of cellular telephony though, has made limited modes of access a reality for growing numbers. And the damage potential is at the same time manifest in the growth of the politics of rumour.

It has been a central dilemma of the recent phase of media growth in India that the physical infrastructure has expanded, but the rules of the game are yet to be agreed. The official response has been to put in place a doctrine of intermediary liability, which has had a special bearing on the emerging sector of the social media. This is a principle that is being fought in the court-rooms by well-endowed internet giants. But at the level of individual users, section 66A of the Information Technology Act -- enacted in 2009 – remains a source of peril for social media users.

There are worries often expressed that competition among media channels has fuelled a race to the bottom. “Sting operations” which are by definition illegal unless they serve a strong public interest, have become a common recourse. Respect for privacy and personal reputation has become a rather loosely observed component of the code of media ethics.

Incidents in the recent past when media coverage has been directly paid for by political and business entities have fuelled public concerns about spurious and inauthentic information circulating in the public domain merely to serve profit objectives.

Episodes when the media has amplified public discontent and caused severe stress within the apparatuses of the state, have led to frequent expressions of concern. Serving and retired intelligence officials have remarked on the destabilisation potential of the new social media. And current and past prime ministers have spoken of the need to be vigilant about the use of the social media, but also to ensure that the free speech right is respected and the potential of the new media in serving larger national goals is realised.

The global financial meltdown in September 2008 made deep inroads into the fortunes of the media. The months that followed sharply highlighted the vulnerability of the media industry to corporate pressures. Despite its very loud voice and its pervasive presence in the lives of several million citizens, the media industry is dwarfed by India’s major corporate players. Illustratively, the advertising budget of just one among the leading players in the “fast moving consumer goods” (FMCG) space would be of the same order of magnitude as the total revenue of India’s biggest media groups.

This has been the context in which certain very large corporate entities – possibly among a host of smaller ones – have moved into the media space. The official response to this complex of changes has been marked by fits and spurts, which finally subside into indecision and inaction.

Efforts to transform the state-owned broadcasting agencies into public service media have faltered. And with commercial motives being dominant, large numbers of citizens who are of no conceivable interest to advertisers have fallen between the cracks, losing their voice within the public sphere.
Older experiments in using the official media as a vehicle for transmitting a message of development and diversity, have fallen into obscurity and neglect. While the ambitious experiment of using satellite-enabled broadcast media for developmental objectives is yet to be evaluated, the state-owned media are seen to have not transformed their approach according to the times.

Radio, which could be the most democratic and accessible of broadcast media, remains underdeveloped in its potential because of a refusal by the government to surrender its monopoly over news and current affairs content over the media.

A broad-based and critical debate on media policy, which looks at its promise as a space for participatory democracy, has been sorely lacking. This is in part because media industry players have worked themselves into the vantage position of setting the terms of the discourse. The voices of civil society and in particular, of those who stand to gain the most from a broadening of democratic spaces, have remained unheard.

This is the context in which an event under the above title is proposed at the institute. The ground covered in the event could include:

public understanding and perceptions of the media;
media representations of the “public” – “in” and “out” groups; voices heard and unheard;
“development” as represented in the media and the public space;
the voice afforded to diverse communities in determining development priorities;
the means afforded to diverse communities in voicing their opinion;
how the technical means of getting diverse opinions into the public space have evolved: from print, to the tightly controlled broadcasting space, to the unregulated broadcast space of the 1990s onwards;
securing transparency and public accountability in the media space;
from the perception of the telephone as a luxury irrelevant to the lives of the majority in the country, to its current status as an irreplaceable accessory of everyday life across all categories;
the plus and minus side of the ledger on the new communication possibilities;
the rights to privacy and personal reputation – reconciling these with accountability and the public right to information;
the politics of rumour; the damage potential of rumour and how rumour is also a means of enforcing public accountability;
how efforts to politically manage information invariably prove self-defeating, whether it is in the 1975-77 Emergency or today;
where do we go for a free and democratic media universe.

The event would seek to look back, look at current realities and look ahead to how things could be made better within a democratic order.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-power-of-communication-media-public-space-participatory-democracy

The Potential for the Normative Regulation of Cyberspace: Implications for India

pranav — 2018-07-31T23:49:47Z

Author: Arindrajit Basu Edited by: Elonnai Hickok, Sunil Abraham and Udbhav Tiwari Research Assistance: Tejas Bharadwaj

The standards of international law combined with strategic considerations drive a nation's approach to any norms formulation process. CIS has already produced work with the Research and Advisory Group (RAG) of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC), which looks at the negotiation processes and strategies that various players may adopt as they drive the cyber norms agenda.

This report focuses more extensively on the substantive law and principles at play and looks closely at what the global state of the debate means for India

With the cyber norms formulation efforts in a state of flux,India needs to advocate a coherent position that is in sync with the standards of international law while also furthering India's strategic agenda as a key player in the international arena.

This report seeks to draw on the works of scholars and practitioners, both in the field of cybersecurity and International Law to articulate a set of coherent positions on the four issues identified in this report. It also attempts to incorporate, where possible, state practice on thorny issues of International Law. The amount of state practice that may be cited differs with each state in question.

The report provides a bird’s eye-view of the available literature and applicable International Law in each of the briefs and identifies areas for further research, which would be useful for the norms process and in particular for policy-makers in India.Historically, India had used the standards of International Law to inform it's positions on various global regimes-such as UNCLOS and legitimize its position as a leader of alliances such as the Non-Aligned Movement and AALCO. However, of late, India has used international law far less in its approach to International Relations. This Report therefore explores how various debates on international law may be utilised by policy-makers when framing their position on various issues. Rather than creating original academic content,the aim of this report is to inform policy-makers and academics of the discourse on cyber norms.In order to make it easier to follow, each Brief is followed by a short summary highlighting the key aspects discussed in order to allow the reader to access the portion of the brief that he/she feels would be of most relevance. It does not advocate for specific stances but highlights the considerations that should be borne in mind when framing a stance.

The report focuses on four issues which may be of specific relevance for Indian policy-makers. The first brief, focuses on the Inherent Right of Self-Defense in cyberspace and its value for crafting a stable cyber deterrence regime. The second brief looks at the technical limits of attributability of cyber-attacks and hints at some of the legal and political solutions to these technical hurdles. The third brief looks at the non-proliferation of cyber weapons and the existing global governance framework which india could consider when framing its own strategy. The final brief looks at the legal regime on counter-measures and outlines the various grey zones in legal scholarship in this field. It also maps possible future areas of cooperation with the cyber sector on issues such as Active Cyber Defense and the legal framework that might be required if such cooperation were to become a reality.Each brief covers a broad array of literature and jurisprudence and attempts to explore various debates that exist both among international legal academics and the strategic community.

The ongoing global stalemate over cyber norms casts a grim shadow over the future of cyber-security. However, as seen with the emergence of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, it is not impossible for consensus to emerge in times of global tension. For India, in particular, this stalemate presents an opportunity to pick up the pieces and carve a leadership position for itself as a key norm entrepreneur in cyberspace.

Read the full report here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-potential-for-the-normative-regulation-of-cyberspace-implications-for-india

The politics of Facebook

praskrishna — 2014-04-03T11:30:51Z

With the social media becoming an important political battleground, is Facebook affecting friendships and trying to influence our political leanings?

The article by Shweta Tiwari was published in Livemint on April 1, 2014. Dr. Nishant Shah is quoted.

When social activist Uthara Narayanan, 32, posted an innocuous article link on the Gujarat riots on Facebook in January, she was in for a surprise. An old friend from college fiercely defended Gujarat chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, getting abrasive and personal in the post. “I had known her for more than 14 years and yet hadn’t seen this side to her,” says Narayanan. “I didn’t realize when she had gone off and gotten such strong views on the debate.”

From then on Narayanan decided to stay away from her friend though they live in the same city. “It left a bad taste in my mouth and marred our friendship for me, though I am still Facebook friends with her.” Almost as if agreeing with her, Facebook’s wall automatically started keeping her friend’s posts away from her wall—thanks to the EdgeRank algorithm.

Like-like stick together

EdgeRank, the Facebook algorithm that decides which posts to show in your newsfeed, bases its decision on three factors: an affinity score between the user and the one who’s created the post, the type of post (comment, like, create or tag), and time lapsed since it was created. The first basically means that you will see posts from friends you have interacted with and like to interact with on the social network.

In January, Catherine Grevet, a PhD student at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, studied this algorithm in the light of politics and concluded that people tend to get attracted to circles of friends who affirm to their own political leanings, all because of Facebook’s algorithms. “People are mainly friends with those who share similar values and interests,” Grevet wrote in the study. “As a result, they aren’t exposed to opposing viewpoints.” Grevet presented the study at the 17th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing in the US in February.

Alok Sharma, a Mumbai-based creative writer who used to be a political cartoonist, says social media has led to Indians opening up. “We are taught to be a little politically correct, especially in face-to-face conversations. But when it comes to social networking sites, Indians express their views like fanatics,” he says. He blocked a couple of Facebook friends after a spate of personal comments on one of his posts. “My friends know me and get the crux of what I might be trying to say in a thread but there are others who are on my Friends list but don’t understand the context and take it all wrong.”

The misunderstanding arises because many of us post on the network as we would speak among friends and not as we would say things in public. “Facebook is not a community, a clique or a group of friends,” says Nishant Shah, director of research at Bangalore-based non-profit The Centre for Internet and Society. “It is just a network,” he says. That means that not all people on your Facebook list are friends—you are just connected to them on the network. You might have a professional relationship with them, be teammates or acquaintances or colleagues, but you don’t know them personally. Given that the average Facebook user has 229 Facebook friends—according to the numbers from US think tank Pew Research Center’s Internet Project which tracks statistics about the social network—that’s just too many people to even know personally.

“The audience on the social network is much larger than the friend list, including Facebook itself, which, if it finds your comment problematic, will censor even before a complaint is produced,” says Shah. A post on Facebook or a comment or a like, can get you in trouble not just with other individuals or communities who take offence but even the law, as happened to a girl in 2012 who put up a post criticizing the shutdown of Mumbai after the death of Shiv Sena patriarch Bal Thackeray.

“Though used like it, Facebook is not a conversation,” says Shah, “Because everything you write is archived and recorded. And can be used against you if need be.”

A medium to shout in

But would you shout at a stranger on the street as you do on Facebook? Basav Biradar, a programme manager based in Bangalore, actively posts on politics and comments on Facebook. He feels most people on Facebook give strong opinions that are not well-informed. “A lot of these opinions are dependent on propaganda and campaigns rather than facts. Why don’t people do some homework before forming an opinion?” With over 100 million Indians active on the social network, however, an uninformed opinion is hardly reason to stop anyone from posting, commenting, liking, offending and getting offended through posts on Facebook.

Shah calls this phenomenon cyber-bullying in politics. “Specific vocal and passionate groups and communities have emerged who silence any voice of dissent or critique by trolling the dissident,” says Shah. “They do not need anonymity. They don’t try to hide who they are. They feel so empowered by the backing of the politicos who are either hiring or supporting them, that they have risen in hordes and are stifling the space for dissent and questioning even more effectively than they have been able to do in real life.”

It’s almost like standing in a rally and hearing a swarm of slogans. Sashi Kumar, chairman of the trust Media Development Foundation that runs the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, gives a similar analogy. He believes that the language of communication on Facebook is not written but oral. “Writing implies a well thought through opinion, whereas speech is responsive and involved. Within the Internet, there’s a strange morphing of written form which is expressed in a way of oral communication. You speak to someone on Facebook, you respond, you hear, you react, you communicate, you talk.” He says that this morphing is leading society back to more oral forms of communication where written forms like newspapers will be a thing of the past.

Replacing traditional media

	With surprising events like the support for Jan Lokpal law, Pink Chaddi campaign and even the backlash against the December 2012 gang rape case in Delhi, social media seems to have somewhere, somehow made all of us more participative, more aware and more active in political and social spaces. Most politicians have active Twitter and Facebook accounts. Most newspapers and even news channels quote their feed as statements when summing up news. Social networks have become almost mainstream. So much so that when earlier in March Modi attacked Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar at a political rally in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, Kumar’s response was detailed, and through a Facebook post.

With surprising events like the support for Jan Lokpal law, Pink Chaddi campaign and even the backlash against the December 2012 gang rape case in Delhi, social media seems to have somewhere, somehow made all of us more participative, more aware and more active in political and social spaces.

Most politicians have active Twitter and Facebook accounts. Most newspapers and even news channels quote their feed as statements when summing up news. Social networks have become almost mainstream. So much so that when earlier in March Modi attacked Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar at a political rally in Muzaffarpur, Bihar, Kumar’s response was detailed, and through a Facebook post.

A joint study by the IRIS Knowledge Foundation, a public service initiative of business and financial information provider IRIS Business Services Pvt. Ltd, and the industry body Internet and Mobile Association of India, suggests that social media use is now sufficiently widespread to influence the outcome of the next general election and consequently government formation. The March research, which studied Facebook’s own data, claims that among the social media spaces, Facebook users have the maximum clout.

Kumar agrees and feels that news now is more user-generated: “It’s the people who want to pursue their own news, know more about their own news, create news. In a way it democratizes journalism. People are talking more about issues, giving opinions and comparing notes. Politics has shifted from the streets to these social medias.”

The future holds more participation, and a sense of being a stakeholder in the political process. An “enlarging of political participation”, as Kumar puts it. “Of course because everyone has a mike, a mouthpiece now, there will be lot of more trivial conversation and hairsplitting which might not add up to anything, but the important thing is that people are engaging themselves politically. We are on the streets. All because of technology.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/livemint-april-1-2014-shweta-taneja-the-politics-of-facebook

The Phishing Society: Why 'Facebook' is more Dangerous than the Government Spying on You - A Talk by Maria Xynou

maria — 2013-09-27T09:16:19Z

Next Wednesday, you are all invited to listen to Maria Xynou's crazy - or not-so-crazy theory of the "Phishing Society", in which surveillance, control and oppression is not imposed in a traditional top-down manner, but rather a personal and collective "choice"...come and engage in a heated debate!

We have read and heard a lot of theories on the contemporary "Surveillance Society"...but how much of that is about surveillance per se? Are we being spied on a top-down manner...or are we enabling our own surveillance? Have the masses ever directly or indirectly "pursued" their own surveillance in the past...or are we witnessing a new phenomenon in history?

Most geeks would probably agree that the term "phishing" is used to describe the act of attempting to acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, private encryption keys and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity. In other words, "phishing" is commonly used to describe the acquisition of sensitive, personal data through the use of bait.

The aim of the talk on Wednesday is to discuss the possible existence of a "Phishing Society", through which the act of providing bait — whether it being security, commodities, services or relationships — is a common, contemporary practice on a social, political and economic level in the pursuit of the "Gold of the Digital Age": personal data. Through this discussion, the "Government spying vs. Corporate spying" debate will be looked at, in an attempt to understand why the dynamics of surveillance have changed over the last year.

Everyone with an open mind is welcome to attend this talk and to share all opinions, ideas and concerns!

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/the-phishing-society-a-talk-by-maria-xynou

The Phantom Public: The Role of Social Media in Democracy

Admin — 2019-05-01T05:09:19Z

Amber Sinha delivered an open lecture at Ambedkar University, New Delhi on 3 April 2019.

India has over 500 million internet users — over a third of its total population — making it the country with the second largest number of Internet users after China. For the world’s largest democracy, the Internet should be a boon. After all, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, had envisioned the Internet to as an “open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries.” The democratization of information it facilitated should have led to a more informed citizenry, but instead what we have is the complete opposite. The average digital citizen in India maintains a near perpetual information illiteracy about where they receive news and information from, whether or not it is true and how it is intended to manipulate them. This is, in large part, because social media has become the primary source of information.

The problems of the public, how it may get access to meaningful information, how it organises itself, and how public opinion is shaped are now deeply impacted by the rise of social media and messaging platforms as political tools of targeting, gathering and organising. How this new media thwarts and enables the goals of the public in India at present is the primary subject matter of this talk. We will cover a range of issues such as fake news and hate speech on social media, the use Facebook by Cambridge Analytica in elections, and how online platforms are governed, particularly with a view towards elections.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-phantom-public-the-role-of-social-media-in-democracy

The Personal Data (Protection) Bill, 2013

prachi — 2013-08-30T14:53:11Z

Below is the text of the Personal Data (Protection) Bill, 2013 as discussed at the 6th Privacy Roundtable, New Delhi held on 24 August 2013. Note: This version of the Bill caters only to the Personal Data regime. The surveillance and privacy of communications regime was not discussed at the 6th Privacy Roundtable.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-personal-data-protection-bill-2013

The Perils of 'Hactivism'

Chinmayi Arun — 2012-08-20T09:58:55Z

Civil disobedience includes accepting the penalty for breaking the law. Untraceable hackers are far removed from this ethic.

Chinmayi Arun's article was published in LiveMint on August 20, 2012.

Earlier this year, India had an encounter with “Anonymous”, a diffuse alliance of what are commonly (and incorrectly) called hackers. In its much-publicized “Operation India”, Anonymous blocked public access to, hacked and defaced various websites in protest against the rising censorship of the Internet. This is a legitimate political cause. However, a movement cannot be judged purely by the legitimacy of its goals, and it is important to consider the legitimacy of the means used to achieve these goals.

Anonymous used distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to submerge, albeit temporarily, many websites. The DDoS attack bombards the target website with more user requests than it can bear, until it becomes unavailable to all others. Many compare this to picketing, and use the term “virtual sit-in” for it. The DDoS attack does not breach a website’s security, and is therefore not hacking (more correctly called “cracking”). In contrast, defacement of websites, deletion of data or leaking restricted data, entails hacking, which involves breaching a website’s security and is more analogous to breaking and entering physical premises. Anonymous has done this too in India—defacing some websites and leaking confidential data from others.

There are a few crucial differences between picketing as civil disobedience, and the DDoS attack. One is that picketing requires many people to come together and sit in protest. One or two peace protesters cannot successfully block a road. Although there was a time when DDoS attacks also required a large number of people to bombard the target, they can now be achieved by one person with the technological skills to “fire” a large number of computers at the target website.Therefore, a DDoS attack no longer implies that a sizeable section of the public cares enough to be part of a virtual sit-in.

The second difference between DDoS attacks and civil disobedience lies in the “hacktivists” unwillingness to be accountable. Martin Luther King and Gandhi made it clear that civil disobedience includes accepting the penalty for breaking the law. Faceless untraceable hackers are far removed from this ethic. While it is true that they risk harsh reprisal if identified, the legitimacy and heroic aura of civil disobedience comes from the willingness to risk that reprisal.

It may therefore be difficult to argue that even the DDoS attacks by Anonymous qualify as civil disobedience, which arguably is the most legitimate of the spectrum of options available to a political dissident. If political activists use varied and escalating tactics in the physical world, “hacktivists” use strategies ranging from DDoS to more intrusive defacement, disabling and leaking of data to draw attention to political causes. The legitimacy of these methods—the proportionality and justification of harm caused—can only be determined with reference to particular contexts. One has to evaluate the threat necessitating activism, innocent casualties of the activists’ actions and whether less harmful strategies have already been explored. This is difficult. For instance, the indirect repercussions of a DDoS attack or leaking data may not be apparent at first glance.

Anonymous tried setting boundaries to avoid harming innocent citizens during Operation India. It declared that infrastructure websites such as the railway booking portal were not to be attacked, and it prevented disclosure of sensitive financial information when a cinema tickets database was hacked. These precautions, though laudable, are however not quite enough. The influential members of Anonymous cannot successfully identify every action that may cause public harm. For instance, when Anonymous attacked the Supreme Court of India and the Reserve Bank of India websites, it seemed ignorant of the potential impact on litigants and the economy. When it leaked confidential police records, it seemed unaware of the significant hazards of leaking people’s names, addresses and other private data. The precautions taken by Anonymous may vanish next time, since the loosely knit, ever-changing nature of Anonymous community means that power and influence can shift; splinter groups with fewer scruples can emerge. Anonymous cannot achieve the control and accountability possible in a more tangible organized group.

This collective operates under disturbingly low levels of transparency and accountability, greatly exacerbated by its ability to veil itself in the shadows of the Internet. New recruits are sometimes endangered by misleading information about the legality and consequences of joining in DDoS attacks. Guerilla warfare is often used without properly exploring more peaceable means, thanks to the power and revenge mob-ethic by which Anonymous is driven. The use of technological arsenal to launch cyber-attacks ignores the likelihood of escalation— “hacktivists” tend to forget that technology is a neutral tool that governments can also use. The government may counter-attack, using its considerable resources to acquire the necessary technological capacity. Citizens may end up being the casualties of the exchange.

Phase one of Operation India was riddled with moral ambiguity. If OpIndia participants wish to show the world that they are more than bored nerds playing at a social movement like it is a video game, with all the accompanying air-punching, adrenaline boosting, self-aggrandising thrills, they will ensure that phase two’s constructive and legitimate Right to Information campaign is a roaring success.

Chinmayi Arun is an assistant professor of law at National Law University, Delhi and a Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-livemint-com-chinmayi-arun-aug-20-2012-perils-of-hactivism

The Perils and Prospects of Bringing the Next Billion Online

praskrishna — 2015-08-23T08:04:01Z

Sunil Abraham is the executive director of the Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore. In his PDF talk, he explains the fight for net neutrality in India and how many solutions fall under the category of walled garden.

Video

For more see Personal Democracy Media

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/perils-and-prospects-of-bringing-next-billion-online