We are anonymous, we are legion

The Last Chance for a Welfare State Doesn’t Rest in the Aadhaar System

sumandro — 2016-04-19T13:18:42Z

Boosting welfare is the message, which is how Aadhaar is being presented in India. The Aadhaar system as a medium, however, is one that enables tracking, surveillance, and data monetisation. This piece by Sumandro Chattapadhyay was published in The Wire on April 19, 2016.

Originally published in and cross-posted from The Wire.

Once upon a time, a king desired that his parrot should be taught all the ancient knowledge of the kingdom. The priests started feeding the pages of the great books to the parrot with much enthusiasm. One day, the king asked the priests if the parrot’s education has completed. The priests poked the belly of the parrot but it made no sound. Only the rustle of undigested pages inside the belly could be heard. The priests declared that the parrot is indeed a learned one now.

The fate of the welfare system in our country is quite similar to this parrot from Tagore’s parable. It has been forcefully fed identification cards and other official documents (often four copies of the same) for years, and always with the same justification of making it more effective and fixing the leaks. These identification regimes are in effect killing off the welfare system. And some may say that that has been the actual plan in any case.

The Aadhaar number has been recently offered as the ‘last chance’ for the ailing welfare system – a last identification regime that it needs to gulp down to survive. This argument wilfully overlooks the acute problems with the Aadhaar project.

Firstly, the ‘last chance’ for a welfare state in India is not provided by implementing a new and improved identification regime (Aadhaar numbers or otherwise), but by enabling citizens to effectively track, monitor, and ensure delivery of welfare, services, and benefits. This ‘opening up’ of the welfare bureaucracy has been most effectively initiated by the Right to Information Act. Instead of a centralised biometrics-linked identity verification platform, which gives the privilege of tracking and monitoring welfare flows only to a few expert groups, an effective welfare state requires the devolution of such privilege and responsibility.

We should harness the tracking capabilities of electronic financial systems to disclose how money belonging to the Consolidated Fund of India travel around state agencies and departmental levels. Instead, the Aadhaar system effectively stacks up a range of entry barriers to accessing welfare – from malfunctioning biometric scanners, to connectivity problems, to the burden of keeping one’s fingerprint digitally legible under all labouring and algorithmic circumstances.

Secondly, authentication of welfare recipients by Aadhaar number neither make the welfare delivery process free of techno-bureaucratic hurdles, nor does it exorcise away corruption. Anumeha Yadav has recently documented the emerging ‘unrest at the ration shop’ across Rajasthan, as authentication processes face technical and connectivity delays, people get ‘locked out’ of public services for not having or having Aadhaar number with incorrect demographic details, and no mechanisms exist to provide rapid and definitive recourse.

RTI activists at the Satark Nagrik Sangathan have highlighted that the Delhi ration shops, using Aadhaar-based authentication, maintain only two columns of data to describe people who have come to the shop – those who received their ration, and those who did not (without any indication of the reason). This leads to erasure-by-design of evidence of the number of welfare-seekers who are excluded from welfare services when the Aadhaar-based authentication process fails (for valid reasons, or otherwise).

Reetika Khera has made it very clear that using Aadhaar Payments Bridge to directly transfer cash to a beneficiary’s account, in the best case scenario, may only take care of one form of corruption: deception (a different person claiming to be the beneficiary). But it does not address the other two common forms of public corruption: collusion (government officials approving undue benefits and creating false beneficiaries) and extortion (forceful rent seeking after the cash has been transferred to the beneficiary’s account). Evidently, going after only deception does not make much sense in an environment where collusion and extortion are commonplace.

Thirdly, the ‘relevant privacy question’ for Aadhaar is not limited to how UIDAI protects the data collected by it, but expands to usage of Aadhaar numbers across the public and private sectors. The privacy problem created by the Aadhaar numbers does begin but surely not end with internal data management procedures and responsibilities of the UIDAI.

On one hand, the Aadhaar Bill 2016 has reduced the personal data sharing restrictions of the NIAI Bill 2010, and has allowed for sharing of all data except core biometrics (fingerprints and iris scan) with all agencies involved in authentication of a person through her/his Aadhaar number. These agencies have been asked to seek consent from the person who is being authenticated, and to inform her/him of the ways in which the provided data (by the person, and by UIDAI) will be used by the agency. In careful wording, the Bill only asks the agencies to inform the person about “alternatives to submission of identity information to the requesting entity” (Section 8.3) but not to provide any such alternatives. This facilitates and legalises a much wider collection of personal demographic data for offering of services by public agencies “or any body corporate or person” (Section 57), which is way beyond the scope of data management practices of UIDAI.

On the other hand, the Aadhaar number is being seeded to all government databases – from lists of HIV patients, of rural citizens being offered 100 days of work, of students getting scholarships meant for specific social groups, of people with a bank account. Now in some sectors, such as banking, inter-agency sharing of data about clients is strictly regulated. But we increasingly have non-financial agencies playing crucial roles in the financial sector – from mobile wallets to peer-to-peer transaction to innovative credit ratings. Seeding of Aadhaar into all government and private databases would allow for easy and direct joining up of these databases by anyone who has access to them, and not at all by security agencies only.

When it becomes publicly acceptable that the money bill route was a ‘remedial’ instrument to put the Rajya Sabha ‘back on track’, one cannot not wonder about what was being remedied by avoiding a public debate about the draft bill before it was presented in Lok Sabha. The answer is simple: welfare is the message, surveillance is the medium.

Acceptance and adoption of all medium requires a message, a content. The users are interested in the message. The message, however, is not the business. Think of Free Basics. Facebook wants people with none or limited access to internet to enjoy parts of the internet at zero data cost. Facebook does not provide the content that the users consume on such internet. The content is created by the users themselves, and also provided by other companies. Facebook own and control the medium, and makes money out of all content, including interactions, passing through it.

The UIDAI has set up a biometric data bank and related infrastructure to offer authentication-as-a-service. As the Bill clarifies, almost all agencies (public or private, national or global) can use this service to verify the identity of Indian residents. Unlike Facebook, the content of these services do not flow through the Aadhaar system. Nonetheless, Aadhaar keeps track of all ‘authentication records’, that is records of whose identity was authenticated by whom, when, and where. This database is gold (data) mine for security agencies in India, and elsewhere. Further, as more agencies use authentication based on Aadhaar numbers, it becomes easier for them to combine and compare databases with other agencies doing the same, by linking each line of transaction across databases using Aadhaar numbers.

Welfare is the message that the Aadhaar system is riding on. The message is only useful for the medium as far as it ensures that the majority of the user population are subscribing to it. Once the users are enrolled, or on-boarded, the medium enables flow of all kinds of messages, and tracking and monetisation (perhaps not so much in the case of UIDAI) of all those flows. It does not matter if the Aadhaar system is being introduced to remedy the broken parliamentary process, or the broken welfare distribution system. What matters is that the UIDAI is establishing the infrastructure for a universal surveillance system in India, and without a formal acknowledgement and legal framework for the same.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-last-chance-for-a-welfare-state-doesnt-rest-in-the-aadhaar-system

The kids are all on Facebook

praskrishna — 2012-07-20T06:24:17Z

In one photo, Prerna stands in front of the mirror, back slightly arched, a fringe covering her left eye, one hand on her hip, pursing her lips. The other hand holds the camera in a steadfast grip. Below this picture are almost a hundred likes and comments. There is nothing unusual as such about this photo on Facebook. Prerna, however, is just 11.

This article by Shikha Kumar was published in Daily News & Analysis on July 8, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

"Stop looking so pretty" and "OMG! You’re so thin" are some of the comments that appear under the picture of this young girl.

In another picture, Diksha’s wavy hair cascades around her face as she fixes the camera with an unwavering stare. The caption reads — "I love my hair. I know I sound like a conceited bitch." Diksha is 12.

Children like Prerna and Diksha, who are under the age of 13, are officially not allowed to open accounts on Facebook. But they are among the 7.5 million under-13 users of the popular social networking website, according to a study released by Consumer Reports last year. The study further revealed that among such users, 5 million were under the age of 10. Closer home, a McAfee-Synovate survey conducted across various cities in India revealed that 64% kids in the age group of 9-12 are members of social networking sites.

You may find the trend daunting since ‘kids’ are supposed to step out and socialise, rather than chat online. However, it’s a reality that we have no choice but to accept as a modern reality.

Internally, Facebook seems to have accepted the trend. As revealed by a news reports last month, the company is readying a technology that will allow children younger than 13 to open accounts and operate them in a secure manner. Possible approaches include connecting the children’s Facebook accounts with their parents’, and giving parents the control over who befriends their children on the website.

The New ways of being in touch with ‘friends’
The move has once again put the spotlight on the ways in which social networking is changing the way children interact with each other.

Namrata Bhoomkar, 13, logs on to the website at least two to three times a day. "I check my news feeds and see what my friends are up to. If you’re not on Facebook, you can’t be updated with what’s happening with everybody," she says.

Apart from finding out what their friends are up to, kids also spend a lot of time sharing their pictures, and are proficient at photo editing software like Photoshop, Picasa and Photobooth to make their pictures more striking.

Another way of standing out is to give pictures creative captions. "I google random quotes on love and life and then put those up as captions on the pictures. I get a lot of likes for it, which makes me feel nice," says 13-year old Sakshi Shrivastav.

Having No clue about privacy settings
However, while the kids use many of Facebook’s features, few are aware of the risks or the privacy settings available on the website that can protect them. In the McAfee-Synovate survey, 32% of the kids were not aware of any online threats, such as cyber hacking, stalking, bullying and identity thefts.

As a result, lessons are often learnt the hard way. "A 39-year-old man started sending me messages saying that I’m very pretty. My father found out and told me to disable my account. I was very upset since all my friends are on Facebook. So finally, my sister helped me activate my privacy settings," says an underage girl on the condition of anonymity.

Anandita Mishra, a security expert at McAfee Cybermum India, says that she does not advocate kids’ presence on Facebook. "There are several dangers; there might be paedophiles lurking, strangers pretending to be younger or your child may be a victim of online abusing or bullying," she says.

With the new timeline format, even though one’s account is protected, the cover pictures are always visible to everybody. In such cases, Mishra recommends either keeping no cover photo or keeping pictures of favourite cartoon characters.

In the face of so many risks, some experts believe that Facebook’s move to officially allow younger kids under some form of parental supervision is a step in the right direction.

"Children’s interaction online should always be under parental supervision. Censorship and control is not the responsibility of the government, but of parents," points out Sunil Abraham, director, Centre for Internet and Society.

Abraham believes that if this technology comes into force, children will consume content more responsibly. This will also give them the chance to go out in the real world and get some real communication experience, the old-fashioned way.

"They will even behave responsibly. If the account is supervised, they are less likely to engage in bullying, abusing, sexting or any other unacceptable forms of social behaviour," he adds.

While she is not totally in favour of this development, McAfee’s Mishra sees no other way because parents are unable to control their children. "Seven million kids are online with or without parental supervision. You cannot have cyber policing of children. It is important to inculcate the right values about responsible internet usage," she says.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/kids-on-facebook

The internet’s new billion

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:31:19Z

New web users — in countries like Brazil and China — are changing the culture of the internet.

The harried mother had little wish to visit an internet cafe with two squirmy boys in tow, but she said there was no choice.

New to this potholed neighborhood on the city’s northern edge, Fabina da Silva, 31, needed to enroll her sons in school. Registering online was the only way.

“If it wasn’t a necessity, I wouldn’t be here,” da Silva said on a recent afternoon as her 6-year-old, Lucas, thumped his toy Sponge Bob on the mouse pad beside her. “Nowadays, internet in Brazil is a necessity.”

Brazil has long been a bellwether nation for emerging-market internet trends and it’s riding a wave that will soon sweep the globe. The newest billion people to venture online are doing so in developing countries rather than North America or Europe.

And whether those newcomers are getting online for fun or because they must, they’re doing so en masse. For businesses nimble enough to serve markets as diverse as Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia, the shift promises a staggering number of new customers.

But internet trend-watchers say there’s more at stake than the emergence of a worldwide class of digital consumers. The new users are changing the culture of the internet itself. Researchers say the web as it was originally, if idealistically, conceived — a largely free, monolingual space where a shared digital culture prevailed — may soon be a distant memory. And it’s happening remarkably fast.

“Potentially explosive” is how Marcos Aguiar describes the growth. He’s a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group’s Sao Paulo office who co-authored a report released in September called “The Internet’s New Billion.” It concludes the number of web users in developing-world “BRICI” countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia — will jump from 610 million this year to 1.2 billion by 2015.

When the internet crossed the billion-user threshold just five years ago, the developed world commanded a 60-40 majority online, according to the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union. Today, that proportion has roughly reversed.

The new users are younger, poorer and more numerous than ever before, BCG’s analysts said, and increasing numbers will need web access and won't be able to afford broadband in their living room.

As Fabina da Silva pecked away on a keyboard to register her sons for school, she was in many ways typical of low-income Brazilian users. Those who don’t have web access at home often pay small fees to use ad hoc cybercafes known here as “LAN houses.” Many began as rooms full of connected computers, or local area networks, for multi-player gaming, but their customer base has since broadened.

In India, those following the trend say a huge portion of the new billion will enter the web via mobile devices.

“If you look at our broadband figures in India, it’s quite pathetic,” said Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a think tank in Bangalore. “And less than 1 percent of the population has ever accessed the internet.”

But recently, many Indian telecommunication firms have begun giving out free data plans with their mobile devices — a move Sunil said will instantly send millions of Indians onto the internet. “The moment an end user acquires a smart phone they become a data user because they’re not paying for it,” he said. “But they’re not coming onto the internet like you and I know.”

Instead, phone companies only provide access to a few sites, such as Wikipedia and Facebook Zero, a stripped-down mobile version of the social networking site that omits photos but allows messaging and status updates. “They’re coming onto a network that, from the beginning, is a complete walled garden,” he said.

The new walls dividing regions of the internet aren’t likely to stop there. Even as more users join the web worldwide, they are increasingly separated by language. What the nearly 400 million users in China experience as the internet is vastly different than the web surfed by Americans. Much of the software and websites on the Chinese web are produced domestically in the local language. That’s also how it works in Russia and Indonesia.

Some observers say this difference has political consequences. “Many of the local companies provide far better service than the likes of Google and Facebook in those markets,” said Evgeny Morozov, a digital technology researcher at Stanford University. “But also those local websites are much easier to censor because the corporate entities behind those sites all have some domestic presence.”

Morozov is author of an up-coming book “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” and he said there’s a dark side to be found in the internet’s new billion, too. Because poorer users resort to more centralized methods for getting online — cybercafes, cell-phone towers — their activity will be much easier to monitor.

“The fact that so much of this is happening in cybercafes and mobile devices actually empowers the government because those two things are much easier to control than a desktop computer in your house,” Morozov said.

Morozov is also skeptical of notions that greater diversity of cultures online will lead to more cultural dialogue. “There is very little interaction between communities and it’s not because the tools are lacking. It’s just that modern-day Indians and modern-day Russians have nothing to talk about most of the time,” he said. “There may simply be no demand for joining that global village.”

More optimistic web scholars argue there will be cultural conversations, but bridging the gaps between communities will take effort. “The internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “There’s some interface between them but there’s a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.”

Instead of becoming the world’s biggest tool for cultural exchange, Zuckerman said the web could become its principal medium for mutual misunderstanding. “We’re mostly talking to people like ourselves rather than talking across cultural boundaries,” Zuckerman said. “And when we do cross cultural boundaries, it’s often in a way where we’re overhearing something that really pisses us off.”

Take for example the 2005 scandal after a Danish newspaper posted cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, sparking riots across the Muslim world. Zuckerman said such incidents may become routine. “It’s a problem of unseen audiences,” he said. “We always have to be aware there are other audiences out there listening, and they’re particularly listening for mentions of themselves.”

For a more amusing and recent online snafu, Zuckerman prefers citing a topic that went viral on the micro-blogging site Twitter this summer. The topic, the Brazilian Portuguese phrase “Cala boca, Galvao,” was mysterious to many English-speaking users. Asked to explain, a few mischievous Brazilians claimed the Galvao was a rare Amazon bird being slaughtered to extinction for its colorful feathers. For everyone who re-tweeted the phrase, so the pranksters claimed, 10 cents would be donated to a global effort to save the bird.

The encouragement helped catapult the phrase into the ranks of Twitter’s top-trending topics, or most-repeated phrases worldwide last June. But in reality, Galvao was the first name of Galvao Bueno, a Brazilian sports commentator on the Globo network, whose pronouncements during the World Cup had irritated many of his compatriots. In Brazilian Portuguese, “Cala boca” roughly means, “shut up.”

“There’s an entirely different conversation going on that’s so incomprehensible to Americans that the Brazilians make fun of us when we try to understand,” Zuckerman said. “In many ways that sort of characterizes for me what’s going on with the contemporary ‘net.'”

But Zuckerman still believes virtual borders can be crossed. In 2005, he co-founded Global Voices, an aggregator and translator of blogs from around the world, in part to help the next billion web users communicate.

“These billion users are sort of proxy for the global middle class,” he said. “They’re an increasing economic force, an increasing cultural force, and they are the people we need to negotiate with and have a conversation with if we want to address problems like climate change.”

In the run-down Engenho da Rainha neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, some of the LAN house customers seemed more interested in using the web to play games than solve the world’s problems.

One wiry teen in a blue baseball cap barely glanced away from his screen to answer questions. “I’ll spend all day, all night on the internet if I’m allowed,” said Carlos Wallace Cruz, 16. “I’d say I’m 98 percent addicted.”

Cruz’s drug of choice isn’t likely to ring a bell with Americans his age. It’s a video game available only on Orkut, a Google social networking site, wildly popular in Brazil and India but less so in the United States.

When a visitor asked if he ever spent time on Orkut’s much more famous rival site, Cruz responded with earnest puzzlement.

“What’s Facebook?” he asked.

Read the original in the Global Post

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

The Internet, Culture, and Society - Looking at Past, Present, and Future Worldwide

praskrishna — 2011-10-21T10:13:23Z

It is now well known that with 4.5 billion mobile phone owners in the world and increased Internet penetration, global cultures and communities have experienced shifts in their economic, political, and social well-being due to the digital revolution. As a scholar and consultant who works worldwide, Prof Ramesh Srinivasan will illustrate how new media technologies have been used creatively to enable political movements in Kyrgyzstan, literacy and educational reform in India, and economic development across the developing world. In addition to this, he will discuss some of digital culture's biggest challenges, including considering how the Web can start to empower different types of cultural perspectives and knowledges. The talk will be live streamed.

Prof. Ramesh Srinivasan

Ramesh Srinivasan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. He is a hybrid of an engineer, designer, social scientist, and ethnographer. His research and consultancy work focuses on the interaction between new media technologies and global cultures and communities. This involves studying the ways in which information technology shapes global education, health, economics, politics, governance, and social movements. He works in such diverse parts of the world as Kyrgyzstan, India, Native America, and more. Ramesh earned a doctorate in design from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.

For more information on Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan

video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/Internet-Culture-Society

The Internet Will Be Everywhere In 2025, For Better Or Worse

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T09:08:38Z

In 2025, the Internet will enhance our awareness of the world and ourselves while diminishing privacy and allowing abusers to "make life miserable for others," according to a new report by the Pew Research Center and Elon University.

The blog post was originally published on the website of WCAI Cape and Islands NPR on March 12, 2014. Dr. Nishant Shah is quoted.

But more than anything, experts say, it will become ubiquitous and embedded in our lives — the same way electricity is today.

"The Internet will shift from the place we find cat videos to a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives," says Joe Touch, director of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. "We won't think about 'going online' or 'looking on the Internet' for something. We'll just be online, and just look."

The report follows a survey last month on how the Internet has affected our lives in the 25 years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee released a paper proposing the World Wide Web. By 1989, the Internet had already been around for nearly two decades, but it wasn't widely accessible. Berners-Lee's ideas became the foundation of the way we access the Internet today.

So the Pew report asked: What do you expect to be the most significant overall impacts of our uses of the Internet on humanity between now and 2025? Here are some of the 1,800 respondents' predictions:

Survey Highlights

The Internet will allow us to collect information on every aspect of our lives and become more aware of our behavior — at the peril of privacy.

"We'll have a picture of how someone has spent their time, the depth of their commitment to their hobbies, causes, friends, and family. This will change how we think about people, how we establish trust, how we negotiate change, failure, and success," says Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University. Other experts predict that this can also effectively personalize health care and disease prevention.

But the conveniences come with tradeoffs. Llewellyn Kriel, head of a media services company in South Africa, has a far less rosy view. "Everything will be available online with price tags attached. Cyberterrorism will become commonplace. Privacy and confidentiality of any and all personal will become a thing of the past," he says.

Some predict that privacy in 2025 will be a luxury reserved for the upper class.

The Internet's pervasiveness will spread both education and ignorance

"The smartest person in the world currently could well be stuck behind a plow in India or China," says Hal Varian, chief economist for Google. "Enabling that person — and the millions like him or her — will have a profound impact on the development of the human race."

The downside? Group-think, mob mentality and manipulation. "The Internet will be used as the most effective force of mind control the planet has ever seen, leaving the Madison Avenue revolution as a piddling, small thing by comparison," says Mikey O'Connor, an elected representative to ICANN's GNSO Council, representing the ISP and Connectivity Provider Constituency.

We can't fully understand its effects yet

"The greatest impact of the Internet is what we are already witnessing, but it is going to accelerate," says Nishant Shah, director of research at the Centre for Internet and Society in India.

It might not even do as much as we think, as Dell engineer Anoop Ghanwani predicts: "Regulation will always stand in the way of anything significant happening."

Jeff Jarvis, entrepreneurial journalism professor at the City University of New York, compares the Internet to the printing press: Its significance could not have been predicted. "The impact of the book on society was not fully realized until 100 years after the invention of the press. ... In the development of the Net and its impact on society, we are at 1472 in Gutenberg years," Jarvis says. "Consider the change brought by the Web its first 20 years, and now you ask us to predict the next dozen? Sorry."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/cape-and-islands-march-12-2014-the-internet-will-be-everywhere-in-2025-for-better-or-worse

The Internet Way

nishant — 2014-02-14T06:59:48Z

Dr. Nishant Shah's review of the book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” by Bantam Press/Random House Group, London was published in Biblio Vol. 19 No.8 (1&2), January – February 2014.

Click to download the file (PDF, 2436 Kb). Dr. Nishant Shah's review can be found on page 16.

The Age of Amazon’ is not just the title of a book, it is a retrospective on the history of e-commerce as well as a prophecy for the shape of things to come. In his meticulously reported book, Brad Stone takes us through the roller coaster ride of the ‘Everything Store’ that Amazon has become, building a gripping tale of an idea that has become synonymous to the world of online shopping in just over two decades.

The book reads well as a biopic on the visionary lunacy of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, as well as a gripping tale of how ideas grow and develop in the digital information age. Stone is an expert storyteller, not only because of his eye for the whimsical, the curious and the enchantment of the seemingly banal, but also because of his ability to question his own craft.

At the very outset, Stone warns us that the book has been compiled through workers at employee, but not Bezos himself. This helps Stone separate the maker from the brand — unlike Steve Jobs who became the cult icon for Apple, Bezos himself has never become the poster child of his brand, allowing

Amazon to become not only an everything store but everybody store. But it means that Stone’s task was to weave together the personal biography of Bezos, his dramatic journey through life with the tumultuous and adventurous inception and growth of Amazon, and his skill lies in the meeting of the twines, which he does with style, ease and charm.

One of the easiest accusations to throw at a book like this is to state that it reduces the murky, blurred, messy and incoherent set of events into a narrative that establishes causes and attributes design and intention where none existed. However, Stone was confronted with the idea of ‘Narrative Fallacy’ — a concept coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his Black Swan, referring to the tendency of human beings to reduce complex phenomenon to “soothing but oversimplified stories”. In fact, the challenge to not reduce the book to a series of connected anecdotes was posed by Bezos when Stone pitched the book to him. And what has emerged is a book about accidents, serendipity, risk, redundancy, failure charting the ineffable, inscrutable and inexplicable ways in which digital technologies are shaping the worlds we live in.

With the rigour and journalistic inquiry that Stone has displayed in his regular writings in The Businessweek, The Everything Store has stories which are as memorable as they are unexpected. Stone does a fantastic job of charting Bezos’ life — from tracking down the lost father who had no idea what his son, who he had abandoned at age three, has become, to the chuckleworthy compilation of Bezos’ favourite quotes (Stone calls it his ‘greatest hits’), the book is filled with pointed and poignant observations and stories that give us an idea of the extraordinary life of Jeff Bezos. But unlike the expected character creation of a mad genius, what you get is the image of a man who lived in contradictions: wedded to his internal idea of truth but also ruthless in his business policies which were predatory and competitive to say the least; a businessman who once wrote a memo titled ‘Amazon.love’ about how he wanted a company to be “loved not feared” but also used the metaphor of a “cheetah preying on the gazelles” in its acquisition of smaller businesses; a man who thought of himself as a “missionary rather than a mercenary” and yet built a business empire that embodies some of the most discriminatory, exploitative and stark conditions of adjunct, adhoc, underpaid and contract-based labour of our precariously mobile worlds.

Stone is masterful as he segues from Bezos’ personal life and ambitions into the monomaniacal and turbulent trajectory of Amazon. Amazon is not a simple success story. It tried and failed at many things, but what remains important is how, it failed at the traditional way of doing things and succeeded at the internet way of thinking. So when Amazon failed, it was not a failure to succeed, but a failure that resulted because the infrastructure needed to make it succeed was not yet in place. Stone’s narrative that effortlessly takes us through the economics, trade, policies, regulation, administration and struggles of Amazon, shows how it was a company that had to invent the world it wanted to succeed in, in order to succeed. In many ways, the book becomes not only about Amazon and its ambitions to sell everything from A-Z, but about how it built prototypes for the rest of the world so that it could become relevant and rule.

But the book is not a Martin-Scorsese-type homage to the scoundrel or the villain. While it is imbued up and spit you out. And if you are good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.” Or as Stone himself suggests, that is the way the company is going to grow “until either Jeff Bezos exits the scene or no one is left to stand in his way”. This policy of taking everything from its employees and channelling it to the relentless growth of the company accounts for not only the high attrition rate of top executives but also the growing controversies about work and labour conditions in Amazon warehouses and on-the-ground delivery services.

Stone’s book does not go into great detail about the new work force that companies like Amazon produce — a work force that is reduced to being a cog in a system, performing mechanical tasks, working at minimal wage, and without the protections that are offered to the white collar high-level technology executives that are the popup children of the digital trade. Stone reminds us that behind the incredible platform that Amazon is, is a massive physical infrastructure which almost reminds us of the early industrial days where the labourer was in a state of exploitation and precariousness. And even as we celebrate the rise of these global behemoths, we might forget that behind the seductive interfaces and big data applications, that under the excitement of drone-based delivery systems and artificial intelligence that will start delivering things even before you place the order, is a system that pushes more and more workers in unprotected and exploitative work conditions.

All in all, The Everything Store is a little bit like Amazon itself. It is a love story of a man with his ideas, and how the rest of the world has shifted, tectonically, to accommodate these eruptions. In its historical retrospective, it shows us the full scope of the ideas and possibilities that inform Amazon, and thus the future that it is going to build for us. And with masterful craftsmanship, Brad Stone writes that it is as much about the one man and his company, as it is about the physical and affective infrastructure of our rapidly transforming digital worlds.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/biblio-january-february-volume-ix-8-nishant-shah-the-internet-way

The Internet Has a New Standard for Censorship

jyoti — 2016-01-30T09:17:54Z

The introduction of the new 451 HTTP Error Status Code for blocked websites is a big step forward in cataloguing online censorship, especially in a country like India where access to information is routinely restricted.

The article was published in the Wire on January 29, 2016. The original can be read here.

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 opens with the declaration, “It was a pleasure to burn.” The six unassuming words offer a glimpse into the mindset of the novel’s protagonist, ‘the fireman’ Guy Montag, who burns books. Montag occupies a world of totalitarian state control over the media where learning is suppressed and censorship prevails. The title alludes to the ‘temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns,’ an apt reference to the act of violence committed against citizens through the systematic destruction of literature. It is tempting to think about the novel solely as a story of censorship. It certainly is. But it is also a story about the value of intellectual freedom and the importance of information.

Published in 1953, Bradbury’s story predates home computers, the Internet, Twitter and Facebook, and yet it anticipates the evolution of these technologies as tools for censorship. When the state seeks to censor speech, they use the most effective and easiest mechanisms available. In Bradbury’s dystopian world, burning books did the trick; in today’s world, governments achieve this by blocking access to information online. The majority of the world’s Internet users encounter censorship even if the contours of control vary depending on the country’s policies and infrastructure.

Online censorship in India

In India, information access blockades have become commonplace and are increasingly enforced across the country for maintaining political stability, for economic reasons, in defence of national security or preserving social values. Last week, the Maharashtra Anti-terror Squad blocked 94 websites that were allegedly radicalising the youth to join the militant group ISIS. Memorably, in 2015 the NDA government’s ham-fisted attempts at enforcing a ban on online pornography resulted in widespread public outrage. Instead of revoking the ban, the government issued yet another vaguely worded and in many senses astonishing order. As reported by Medianama, the revised order delegates the responsibility of determining whether banned websites should remain unavailable to private intermediaries.

The state’s shifting reasons for blocking access to information is reflective of its tendentious attitude towards speech and expression. Free speech in India is messily contested and normally, the role of the judiciary acts as a check on the executive’s proclivity for banning. For instance, in 2010 the Supreme Court upheld the Maharashtra High Court’s decision to revoke the ban on the book on Shivaji by American author James Laine, which, according to the state government, contained material promoting social enmity. However, in the context of communications technology the traditional role of courts is increasingly being passed on to private intermediaries.

The delegation of authority is evident in the government notifying intermediaries to proactively filter content for ‘child pornography’ in the revised order issued to deal with websites blocked as result of its crackdown on pornography. Such screening and filtering requires intermediaries to make a determination on the legality of content in order to avoid direct liability. As international best practices such as the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability point out, such screening is a slow process and costly and intermediaries are incentivised to simply limit access to information.

Blocking procedures and secrecy

The constitutional validity of Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2008 which grants power to the executive to block access to information unchecked, and in secrecy was challenged in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. Curiously, the Supreme Court upheld S69A reasoning that the provisions were narrowly-drawn with adequate safeguards and noted that any procedural inconsistencies may be challenged through writ petitions under Article 226 of the Constitution. Unfortunately as past instances of blocking under S69A reveal the provisions are littered with procedural deficiencies, amplified manifold by the authorities responsible for interpreting and implementing the orders.

Problematically, an opaque confidentiality criteria built into the blocking rules mandates secrecy in requests and recommendations for blocking and places written orders outside the purview of public scrutiny. As there are no comprehensive list of blocked websites or of the legal orders, the public has to rely on ISPs leaking orders, or media reports to understand the censorship regime in India. RTI applications requesting further information on the implementation of these safeguards have at best provided incomplete information.

Historically, the courts in India have held that Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India is as much about the right to receive information as it is to disseminate, and when there is a chilling effect on speech, it also violates the right to receive information. Therefore, if a website is blocked citizens have a constitutional right to know the legal grounds on which access is being restricted. Just like the government announces and clarifies the grounds when banning a book, users have a right to know the grounds for restrictions on their speech online.

Unfortunately, under the present blocking regime in India there is no easy way for a service provider to comply with a blocking order while also notifying users that censorship has taken place. The ‘Blocking Rules’ require notice “person or intermediary” thus implying that notice may be sent to either the originator or the intermediary. Further, the confidentiality clause raises the presumption that nobody beyond the intermediaries ought to know about a block.

Naturally, intermediaries interested in self-preservation and avoiding conflict with the government become complicit in maintaining secrecy in blocking orders. As a result, it is often difficult to determine why content is inaccessible and users often mistake censorship for technical problem in accessing content. Consequently, pursuing legal recourse or trying to hold the government accountable for their censorious activity becomes a challenge. In failing to consider the constitutional merits of the confidentiality clause, the Supreme Court has shied away from addressing the over-broad reach of the executive.

Secrecy in removing or blocking access is a global problem that places limits on the transparency expected from ISPs. Across many jurisdictions intermediaries are legally prohibited from publicising filtering orders as well as information relating to content or service restrictions. For example in United Kingdom, ISPs are prohibited from revealing blocking orders related to terrorism and surveillance. In South Korea, the Korean Communications Standards Commission holds public meetings that are open to the public. However, the sheer volume of censorship (i.e. close to 10,000 URLs a month) makes it unwieldy for public oversight.

As the Manila Principles note, providing users with an explanation and reasons for placing restrictions on their speech and expression increases civic engagement. Transparency standards will empower citizens to demand that companies and governments they interact with are more accountable when it comes to content regulation. It is worth noting, for conduits as opposed to content hosts, it may not always be technically feasible for to provide a notice when content is unavailable due to filtering. A new standard helps improve transparency standards for network level intermediaries and for websites bound by confidentiality requirements. The recently introduced HTTP code for errors is a critical step forward in cataloguing censorship on the Internet.

A standardised code for censorship

On December 21, 2015, the Internet Engineering Standards Group (IESG) which is the organisation responsible for reviewing and updating the internet’s operating standards approved the publication of 451-’An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles’. The code provides intermediaries a standardised way to notify users know when a website is unavailable following a legal order. Publishing the code allows intermediaries to be transparent about their compliance with court and executive orders across jurisdictions and is a huge step forward for capturing online censorship. HTTP code 451 was introduced by software engineer Tim Bray and the code’s name is an homage to Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451.

Bray began developing the code after being inspired by a blog post by Terence Eden calling for a censorship error code. The code’s official status comes after two years of discussions within the technical community and is a result of campaigning from transparency and civil society advocates who have been pushing for clearer labelling of internet censorship. Initially, the code received pushback from within the technical community for reasons enumerated by Mark Nottingham, Chair of the IETF HTTP Working Group in his blog. However, soon sites began using the code on an experimental and unsanctioned basis and faced with increasing demand for and feedback, the code was accepted.

The HTTP code 451 works as a machine-readable flag and has immense potential as a tool for organisations and users who want to quantify and understand censorship on the internet. Cataloguing online censorship is a challenging, time-consuming and expensive task. The HTTP code 451 circumvents confidentiality obligations built into blocking or licensing regimes and reduces the cost of accessing blocking orders.

The code creates a distinction between websites blocked following a court or an executive order, and when information is inaccessible due to technical errors. If implemented widely, Bray’s new code will help prevent confusion around blocked sites. The code addresses the issue of the ISP’s misleading and inaccurate usage of Error 403 ‘Forbidden’ (to indicate that the server can be reached and understood the request, but refuses to take any further action) or 404 ‘Not Found’ (to indicate that the requested resource could not be found but may be available again in the future).

Adoption of the new standard is optional, though at present there are no laws in India that prevent intermediaries doing so. Implementing a standardised machine-readable flag for censorship will go a long way in bolstering the accountability of ISPs that have in the past targeted an entire domain instead of the specified URL. Adoption of the standard by ISPs will also improve the understanding of the burden imposed on intermediaries for censoring and filtering content as presently, there is no clarity on what constitutes compliance. Of course, censorious governments may prohibit the use of the code, for example by issuing an order that specifies not only that a page be blocked, but also precisely which HTTP return code should be used. Though such sanctions should be viewed as evidence of systematic rights violation and totalitarian regimes.

In India where access to software code repositories such as Github and Sourceforge are routinely restricted, the need for such code is obvious. The use of the code will improve confidence in blocking practices, allowing users to understand the grounds on which their right to information is being restricted. Improving transparency around censorship is the only way to build trust between the government and its citizens about the laws and policies applicable to internet content.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-jyoti-panday-january-29-2016-internet-has-a-new-standard-for-censorship

The Internet and Illusions of Space and Liberty

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:40:05Z

Talk by Kiran Sahi

The Centre for Internet and Society invites you to a talk by Kiran Sahi on 'The Internet and Illusions of Space and Liberty'. Kiran will use this talk as an opportunity to look at the parallels that can be drawn between the spatial elements of the mind, corporal physical space, and the virtual domains of the internet. Reflecting on the roles of these parallel domains, we can discuss how dissident elements within society, traditionally found in geographical wildernesses, have found new opportunities for freedom in the realms of the internet. The talk will also explore the idea of the internet as a heterotopia, a safe space for displaced realities, and the pressures which make it adopt a panoptic structure.

Speaker

Kiran Sahi is is a designer and educator working from his home in a village north of Bangalore. His work involves presenting and interpreting the changing socio-political geography of his locality for teachers and students visiting from international academic institutions and education authorities. He also advises on local education development projects. Kiran works as a consultant design faculty, teaching materials and sculptural design, and runs a ceramic studio that produces large scale ceramic murals for public spaces. His previous work has involved exploring cultural narratives and their visual representations. He has been interested in exploring the possibilities of a collaborative community based business involving professional designers and local craftsmen.

Time and Date

Saturday, 7 March, 2009; 5.00-6.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/the-internet-and-illusions-of-space-and-liberty

The India Privacy Monitor Map

maria — 2013-10-09T16:26:14Z

The Centre for Internet and Society has started the first Privacy Watch in India! Check out our map which includes data on the UID, NPR and CCTNS schemes, as well as on the installation of CCTV cameras and the use of drones throughout the country.

In a country of twenty-eight diverse states and seven union territories, it remained unclear to what extent surveillance, biometric and other privacy-intrusive schemes are being implemented. We are trying to make up for this by mapping out data in every single state in India on the UID, CCTNS and NPR schemes, as well as on the installation of CCTV cameras and the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), otherwise known as drones.

In particular, the map in its current format includes data on the following:

UID: The Unique Identification Number (UID), also known as AADHAAR, is a 12-digit unique identification number which the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is currently issuing for all residents in India (on a voluntary basis). Each UID is stored in a centralised database and linked to the basic demographic and biometric information of each individual. The UIDAI and AADHAAR currently lack legal backing.

NPR: Under the National Population Register (NPR), the demographic data of all residents in India is collected on a mandatory basis. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) supplements the NPR with the collection of biometric data and the issue of the AADHAAR number.

CCTV: Closed-circuit television cameras which can produce images or recordings for surveillance purposes.

UAV: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), otherwise known as drones, are aircrafts without a human pilot on board. The flight of a UAV is controlled either autonomously by computers in the vehicle or under the remote control of a pilot on the ground or in another vehicle. UAVs are used for surveillance purposes.

CCTNS: The Crime and Criminal Tracking Networks and Systems (CCTNS) is a nationwide networking infrastructure for enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of policing and sharing data among 14,000 police stations across India.

Our India Privacy Monitor Map can be viewed through the following link: http://cis-india.org/cisprivacymonitor

This map is part of on-going research and will hopefully expand to include other schemes and projects which are potentially privacy-intrusive. We encourage all feedback and additional data!

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

The India Conference on Cyber Security and Cyber Governance

praskrishna — 2014-10-13T07:10:19Z

Following the success of CYFY 2013 the CYFY 2014 will be held from October 15 to 17, 2014 in New Delhi. The Centre for Internet and Society is a knowledge partner for this event and Sunil Abraham is participating as a panelist in the session "Privacy is Dead".

Click to download the event details. The event brochure can be downloaded here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-conference-cyber-security-and-cyber-governance

The Impact of Consolidation in the Internet Economy on the Evolution of the Internet

Akriti Bopanna and Gurshabad Grover — 2019-07-03T12:53:53Z

The Centre for Internet and Society in partnership with the Internet Society organized an event on the impact of consolidation in the Internet economy. It was divided into two roundtable discussions, the first one focusing on the policies and regulation while the latter dealt with the technical evolution of the Internet. This report contributed to the Internet Society’s 2019 Global Internet Report on Consolidation in the Internet Economy.

Edited by Swaraj Barooah, Elonnai Hickok and Vishnu Ramachandran. Inputs by Swagam Dasgupta

This report is a summary of the proceedings of the roundtables organized by the Centre for Internet and Society in partnership with the Internet Society on the impact of consolidation in the Internet economy. It was conducted under the Chatham House Rule, at The Energy and Resource Institute, Bangalore on the 29 June 2018 from 11AM to 4PM. This report was authored on 29 June 2018, and subsequently edited for readability on 25 June 2019. This report contributed to the Internet Society’s 2019 Global Internet Report on Consolidation in the Internet Economy.

The roundtables aimed to analyze how growing forces of consolidation, including concentration, vertical and horizontal integration, and barriers to market entry and competition would influence the Internet in the next 3 to 5 years.

To provide for sufficient investigation, the discussions were divided across two sessions. The focus of the first group was the impact of consolidation on applicable regulatory andpolicy norms including regulation of internet services, the potential to secure or undermine people’s ability to choose services, and the overall impact on the political economy. Thesecond discussion delved into the effect of consolidation on the technical evolution of the internet (in terms of standards, tools and software practices) and consumer choices (interms of standards of privacy, security, other human rights).

The sessions had participants from the private sector (2), research (4), government (1), technical community (3) and civil society organizations (6). Five women and eleven men constituted the participant list.

Click to download and read the full report

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/akriti-bopanna-and-gurshabad-grover-july-3-2019-impact-of-consolidation-in-the-internet-economy-on-the-evolution-of-the-internet

The Idea of the Book

nishant — 2012-04-10T09:53:27Z

Its future lies in a trans-media format that is ever evolving, writes Nishant Shah in an article which was published in the Indian Express on April 8, 2012.

If you are a true bibliophile, you have long transcended making mortal judgements about books, based on insignificant factors such as plot, narrative, or writing style. A true bibliophile is in love with the form of the book — the joy that comes from the rustle of a turned page, the euphoria of holding a book in your arms, the satisfaction that rises from watching a tottering stack of books. For hardcore bibliomaniacs, the love is at a sub-molecular level, so to speak, finding their happiness and content in shapes of fonts, thickness of paper, methods of binding, imprints and meta-data that tells its own story. For all these true lovers of books, their affection goes beyond the content of the book. They love the book as an artefact, as an object of desire. It is as if there was a “bookness” to the book that they deeply appreciate.

It is these people, along with many others, who mourn the death of the book in the age of digital mass production. With the advent of the e-book and the ubiquitous presence of reading devices, many have announced the death of the book. The ‘dead-tree book’, as it is often derisively described in many circles, is a thing of the past. As we live in worlds of increasing interface, the surfaces we read on, the way we read, and the forms that we read have undergone a dramatic reconfiguration. Swype-and-touch has replaced turn-and-fold and the book as we know it, is growing extinct.

Professor Bruno Latour — one of the first theorists and critics of digital technologies, large-scale networks, and new methods of knowledge production — from Sciences Po in Paris, during his recent visit to Bangalore, suggested that instead of accepting the imminent death of the book and mourning its demise, it might be more fruitful to look at its future. The digital, he says, does not question the idea of the book, but merely the form. This, for me, is a fascinating idea. We often recognise the book as a form — something that is written, something that is bound, or something that is found in libraries. If you were to define a book, you would talk about the different kinds, shapes, colours and sizes of books but you won’t necessarily be able to explain it. This is because a book is only a material manifestation of a much larger idea and this is what we need to focus on.

The book has seen many transitions in its form from the pre-print, hand-written manuscripts by trained scribes to the print-on-demand paperbacks which can be assembled easily. Technologies have not threatened but actually helped it change, evolve and keep up with the times. When we think of the digital book and the possibilities it offers, these are much more exciting than the rather Luddite lament about how the book is dead.

In the digital medium, the future of multimedia narratives is convergence. An ability to tell stories, record knowledge, share information and make connections through a variety of media forms and styles changes the future of the book. Imagine a book that begins with a text, continues through music, blends into user-generated pictures and ends with a video. Imagine this book being written, not only in different media but also by different people, simultaneously, resulting in a layered palimpsest rather than a static page. Imagine each page and every word on the page not as a fixed thing but one of a series of alternatives. Imagine a book that is written as it is read, and no longer excludes print-challenged or differently-abled people from contributing to the writing, reading and sharing process.

A trans-media format would stay true to the democratic and inclusive vision of a book and correct the limitations of print. Such a book would also free knowledge and information from businesses — let’s not forget that the publishing and education system is a business — and allow a new audience to participate in knowledge production. This is not a mere fantasy. We already have new models such as mash-ups which give us a new logic to sort and store information. Imagine Facebook as a collaborative platform where different information can come together to supplement the traditional book. Wikipedia is a space of knowledge production, which might simulate the older encyclopaedia form, but it is written by unpaid contributors, collaboratively, even as the Encyclopaedia Britannica announces its last ever print publication.

The form of the book is going to change as it has over the last 500 years. However, the idea of the book — a receptacle that contains and records collective wisdom, information, ideas, knowledge, experiences and imagination of humankind – is here to stay. The digital book has to be understood not merely as a digitisation of an older book, but has to be imagined as a smorgasbord of possibilities which will revolutionise the form of the book and bring it closer to its intended vision. It is time indeed to announce, ‘The Book is Dead! Long Live the Book!’

Read the original from the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/idea-of-the-book

The I-MACX Summit & Demo Day (Spring 2015)

praskrishna — 2015-08-23T09:37:40Z

IIIT-B Innovation Center organized this event in Bangalore on June 18, 2015. Sunil Abraham participated as a speaker.

Programme

Time	Agenda
1.00 p.m.	Registration
1.15 p.m.	Welcome Address
1.30 p.m.	Keynote: “Solving Civic Issues through Technology Platforms” by Dr. Pramod Varma, Chief Architect – Technology, UIDAI
1.50 p.m.	Panel Discussion: “Opportunities and Challenges in Civic-Tech Startup Space” Ms. Radha Kizhanattam, Principal – Unitus Seed Fund Mr. Shyam Menon, Co-founder – Infuse Ventures Mr. Sunil Abraham, Executive Director – The Center for Internet & Society Mr. Rajith Shaji, Product Manager – Janaagraha Mr. VS Prakash, Director – Karnataka State Natural Disasters Monitoring Center (Retd.); Currently Registrar – IIIT Bangalore Mr. Syed Suhale Perveez, Senior Manager – Emergency Management Research Institute (108) Moderated by Dr. TK Srikanth, Professor – IIIT Bangalore
2.45 p.m.	Startups Pitch
3.55 p.m.	Vote of Thanks
4.00 p.m.	Investors – Startups discuss over High Tea Startups demonstrate their innovative solutions

About the Summit:

The I-MACX Summit is a civic-tech focused event that intends to bring together innovators from government and social organizations along with civic-minded startups, influencers, activists, investors and entrepreneurs.

The I-MACX Summit aims to not only bring out the opportunities and the challenges in the civictech space, but also showcase the offerings that are being created by the civic-tech startups nurtured at IIIT-B Innovation Center.

The I-MACX Summit, envisions itself as a thought-leadership forum that would delve into how the various players in the civic-tech ecosystem could potentially transform governance and society, using the emerging technologies (IOT, Data Analytics, Sensors, Mobile, Cloud).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/icmax-summit-and-demo-day

The Humpty-Dumpty Censorship of Television in India

bhairav — 2015-11-29T08:37:53Z

The Modi government’s attack on Sathiyam TV is another manifestation of the Indian state’s paranoia of the medium of film and television, and consequently, the irrational controlling impulse of the law.

The article originally published in the Wire on September 8, 2015 was also mirrored on the website Free Speech/Privacy/Technology.

It is tempting to think of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting’s (MIB) attack on Sathiyam TV solely as another authoritarian exhibition of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s intolerance of criticism and dissent. It certainly is. But it is also another manifestation of the Indian state’s paranoia of the medium of film and television, and consequently, the irrational controlling impulse of the law.

Sathiyam TV’s transgressions

Sathiyam’s transgressions began more than a year ago, on May 9, 2014, when it broadcast a preacher saying of an unnamed person: “Oh Lord! Remove this satanic person from the world!” The preacher also allegedly claimed this “dreadful person” was threatening Christianity. This, the MIB reticently claims, “appeared to be targeting a political leader”, referring presumably to Prime Minister Modi, to “potentially give rise to a communally sensitive situation and incite the public to violent tendencies.”

The MIB was also offended by a “senior journalist” who, on the same day, participated in a non-religious news discussion to allegedly claim Modi “engineered crowds at his rallies” and used “his oratorical skills to make people believe his false statements”. According to the MIB, this was defamatory and “appeared to malign and slander the Prime Minister which was repugnant to (his) esteemed office”.

For these two incidents, Sathiyam was served a show-cause notice on 16 December 2014 which it responded to the next day, denying the MIB’s claims. Sathiyam was heard in-person by a committee of bureaucrats on 6 February 2015. On 12 May 2015, the MIB handed Sathiyam an official an official “Warning” which appears to be unsupported by law. Sathiyam moved the Delhi High Court to challenge this.

As Sathiyam sought judicial protection, the MIB issued the channel a second warning August 26, 2016 citing three more objectionable news broadcasts of: a child being subjected to cruelty by a traditional healer in Assam; a gun murder inside a government hospital in Madhya Pradesh; and, a self-immolating man rushing the dais at a BJP rally in Telangana. All three news items were carried by other news channels and websites.

Governing communications

Most news providers use multiple media to transmit their content and suffer from complex and confusing regulation. Cable television is one such medium, so is the Internet; both media swiftly evolve to follow technological change. As the law struggles to keep up, governmental anxiety at the inability to perfectly control this vast field of speech and expression frequently expresses itself through acts of overreach and censorship.

In the newly-liberalised media landscape of the early 1990s, cable television sprang up in a legal vacuum. Doordarshan, the sole broadcaster, flourished in the Centre’s constitutionally-sanctioned monopoly of broadcasting which was only broken by the Supreme Court in 1995. The same year, Parliament enacted the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 (“Cable TV Act”) to create a licence regime to control cable television channels. The Cable TV Act is supplemented by the Cable Television Network Rules, 1994 (“Cable Rules”).

The state’s disquiet with communications technology is a recurring motif in modern Indian history. When the first telegraph line was laid in India, the colonial state was quick to recognize its potential for transmitting subversive speech and responded with strict controls. The fourth iteration of the telegraph law represents the colonial government’s perfection of the architecture of control. This law is the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, which continues to dominate communications governance in India today including, following a directive in 2004, broadcasting.

Vague and arbitrary law

The Cable TV Act requires cable news channels such as Sathiyam to obey a list of restrictions on content that is contained in the Cable Rules (“Programme Code“). Failure to conform to the Programme Code can result in seizure of equipment and imprisonment; but, more importantly, creates the momentum necessary to invoke the broad powers of censorship to ban a programme, channel, or even the cable operator. But the Programme Code is littered with vague phrases and undefined terms that can mean anything the government wants them to mean.

By its first warning of May 12, 2015, the MIB claimed Sathiyam violated four rules in the Programme Code. These include rule 6(1)(c) which bans visuals or words “which promote communal attitudes”; rule 6(1)(d) which bans “deliberate, false and suggestive innuendos and half-truths”; rule 6(1)(e) which bans anything “which promotes anti-national attitudes”; and, rule 6(1)(i) which bans anything that “criticises, maligns or slanders any…person or…groups, segments of social, public and moral life of the country” (sic).

The rest of the Programme Code is no less imprecise. It proscribes content that “offends against good taste” and “reflects a slandering, ironical and snobbish attitude” against communities. On the face of it, several provisions of the Programme Code travel beyond the permissible restrictions on free speech listed in Article 19(2) of the Constitution to question their validity. The fiasco of implementing the vague provisions of the erstwhile section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 is a recent reminder of the dangers presented by poorly-drafted censorship law – which is why it was struck down by the Supreme Court for infringing the right to free speech. The Programme Code is an older creation, it has simply evaded scrutiny for two decades.

The arbitrariness of the Programme Code is amplified manifold by the authorities responsible for interpreting and implementing it. An Inter-Ministerial Committee (IMC) of bureaucrats, supposedly a recommendatory body, interprets the Programme Code before the MIB takes action against channels. This is an executive power of censorship that must survive legal and constitutional scrutiny, but has never been subjected to it. Curiously, the courts have shied away from a proper analysis of the Programme Code and the IMC.

Judicial challenges

In 2011, a single judge of the Delhi High Court in the Star India case (2011) was asked to examine the legitimacy of the IMC as well as four separate clauses of the Programme Code including rule 6(1)(i), which has been invoked against Sathiyam. But the judge neatly sidestepped the issues. This feat of judicial adroitness was made possible by the crass indecency of the content in question, which could be reasonably restricted. Since the show clearly attracted at least one ground of legitimate censorship, the judge saw no cause to examine the other provisions of the Programme Code or even the composition of the IMC.

This judicial restraint has proved detrimental. In May 2013, another single judge of the Delhi High Court, who was asked by Comedy Central to adjudge the validity of the IMC’s decision-making process, relied on Star India (2011) to uphold the MIB’s action against the channel. The channel’s appeal to the Supreme Court is currently pending. If the Supreme Court decides to examine the validity of the IMC, the Delhi High Court may put aside Sathiyam’s petition to wait for legal clarity.

As it happens, in the Shreya Singhal case (2015) that struck down section 66A of the IT Act, the Supreme Court has an excellent precedent to follow to demand clarity and precision from the Programme Code, perhaps even strike it down, as well as due process from the MIB. On the accusation of defaming the Prime Minister, probably the only clearly stated objection by the MIB, the Supreme Court’s past law is clear: public servants cannot, for non-personal acts, claim defamation.

Censorship by blunt force

Beyond the IMC’s advisories and warnings, the Cable TV Act contains two broad powers of censorship. The first empowerment in section 19 enables a government official to ban any programme or channel if it fails to comply with the Programme Code or, “if it is likely to promote, on grounds of religion, race, language, caste or community or any other ground whatsoever, disharmony or feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between different religious, racial, linguistic or regional groups or castes or communities or which is likely to disturb the public tranquility.”

The second empowerment is much wider. Section 20 of the Cable TV Act permits the Central Government to ban an entire cable television operator, as opposed to a single channel or programmes within channels, if it “thinks it necessary or expedient so to do in public interest”. No reasons need be given and no grounds need be considered. Such a blunt use of force creates an overwhelming power of censorship. It is not a coincidence that section 20 resembles some provisions of nineteenth-century telegraph laws, which were designed to enable the colonial state to control the flow of information to its native subjects.

A manual for television bans

Film and television have always attracted political attention and state censorship. In 1970, Justice Hidayatullah of the Supreme Court explained why: “It has been almost universally recognised that the treatment of motion pictures must be different from that of other forms of art and expression. This arises from the instant appeal of the motion picture… The motion picture is able to stir up emotions more deeply than any other product of art.”

Within this historical narrative of censorship, television regulation is relatively new. Past governments have also been quick to threaten censorship for attacking an incumbent Prime Minister. There seems to be a pan-governmental consensus that senior political leaders ought to be beyond reproach, irrespective of their words and deeds.

But on what grounds could the state justify these bans? Lord Atkins’ celebrated war-time dissent in Liversidge (1941) offers an unlikely answer:

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-bhairav-acharya-humpty-dumpty-censorship-of-tv-in-india

The Historian Wins Over the Biographer

nishant — 2011-12-31T12:15:10Z

In Walter Isaacson's eponymous biography of Steve Jobs, the multibillion dollar man who is credited with single handedly changing the face of computing and the digital media industry, we face the dilemma of a biographer: how do you make sense of a history that is so new, it is still unfolding? Nishant Shah's detailed review of Steve Jobs' biography is now out in the Biblio and is is available online (after a free registration) as a PDF.

And how do you stitch it together around a person so iconic that he was always larger than life? Steve Jobs, the authorised story, that Steve Jobs never got to read because of his death to cancer on 5th October 2011, captures the tension between being a biographer and a historian that marks Isaacson's ambitious project. As a biographer, he hasn't yet achieved enough critical distance with the subject at hand, and hence, instead of engaging with Jobs to give us inroads into his mind, we get a history that dons the mantle of objectivity and accuracy, to create a eulogy that would fit Steve Jobs' journey from Apple II to Apps.

Written lucidly in a fairly conversational style reminiscent of Isaacson’s time spent with the Time Magazine, Steve Jobs is a story stitched together with love, care, rigour and honesty, to look at the times, people, places and circumstances that created the megalith icon Steve Jobs. Isaacson, whose earlier works include biographical histories of Benjamin Franklin (Simon & Schuster, 2003) and Albert Einstein (Simon & Schuster, 2008), confesses to his love of exploring the intersections of technology and humanity. He establishes Steve Jobs as a worthy successor in the series, using Jobs’ own description of himself – “I always thought of myself as a Humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics” – as the springboard for writing this ambitious history.

Like a good historian, Isaacson refuses to take Jobs at face value, well aware of his ‘Reality Distortion Field’ that sucks you in even if you are aware of it, making reality appear in morphed forms. With a rigour that befits the project, he sets out in search of the historical truth using over a hundred interview sources comprised of influential people in Jobs’ life, an exhaustive riffling through the public discourse around Apple and its poster boy, a shrewd hand on the economic and technological pulse of the late 20th century and an uncanny ability to read between the lines. The result is a biography filled with tales that we know, stories that we speculated about, anecdotes about what we suspected.

In one of the most memorable interviews in the book, Isaacson interviews Debi Coleman, one of the early managers at Apple, who says, “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You ---hole, you never do anything right.’ ... Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.” Isaacson traces
this peculiar power that Jobs had over people in his life, to make them feel special and worthless at the same time, to Jobs’ own early knowledge of his adoption and of his oscillations between feeling “Abandoned. Special”. Isaacson shows how Jobs’ own life constantly referenced these two positions – from his dysfunctional relationships with women (the short story of how he got his girlfriend pregnant at 23 and then abandoned her, even denying paternity), to his long travels to India in search of spiritual belonging, and the lessons he learned from his adoptive father, who he hero-worshipped only to later realise that he was “smarter than him” — the adoption and its effects on his young mind, come up repeatedly. It serves as a way of understanding his abrasive attitude to authority, his rude and insensitive behaviour with colleagues and friends, and his strange fads at self improvement that ranged from fruitarian diets to extreme purging and fasting.

Steve Jobs offers a wide range of examples of his awful behaviour – the bullying, the belittling, the lying – till you are numbed by them. At the same time, there is a fanboy who takes us gleefully through the history that preceded the world of iPod, iPhone and iPad, with backstories of the known, the presumed and the plausible. The book quenches the thirst for information about one of the most private public figures and confirms the polarity, not only of Jobs’ dealings with the world, but also his own life and how he saw it. There is an explosion of facts – unknown facts – that entice you into reading the book, but facts alone do not a good biography make.

What is missing from the book, is insight. Throughout the book, while Jobs’ own dramatic life choices sustain your attention and interest, the author does not work too hard at either creating his own impressions of Jobs or at giving insight in more than the surface. There is no doubt that Isaacson is an expert historian— the most enjoyable parts of the book are when he looks at the histories that came together to create Jobs. Using his rich knowledge of the ’70s and the ’80s in the USA he portrays an enchanted universe of the hippy lifestyle, rebellious attitudes to authority, reforming education system, the transition from the analogue to digital technologies, and the heyday of creative experimentation enjoyed by a plush economy.

The layers of enchantment start fading when Isaacson lets go of the mantle of history and starts talking about the person he is studying. It is almost as if after having done his research on Jobs and then failing to invest in him as an author, he sought respite in writing history rather than giving us more of the person involved. Which is why, after reading the first half of the book, going through a series of strategic beginnings, looking at a wide range of people like Steve Wozniak, Nolan Bushnell, Andrea Cunningham, Daniel Kotke and Mike Markkula, one gets a feeling that you know more about these people than you know about Jobs. While each one of these characters, even in their cameo appearances, bring flavour, variety, complexity and emotionality to the tale, Jobs remains the “enlightened but cruel” person who, even as he grows and transforms, remains tied to that description. Jobs becomes an organising principal for making sense of the jumbled influences behind the making of Apple rather than a person we can know more about. He is often named as an enigma but there is very little effort put into actually exploring his mystery. The historian wins over the biographer in getting you more interested in the time-space continuum rather than in the person.

I don’t want you to go away with the idea that there is not much substance to Isaacson’s writing. With a fine pen (which could have done with a little reflexive editing — and I am sure this would have happened had the book been released as planned in January of next year instead of being brought forward to fill the void created by Jobs’ death), Isaacson does lead us into Jobs’ universe (if not into his head) in interesting ways. He paints little sketches of the past — like Jobs’ run-in with Bill Gates, like Apple’s rivalry with IBM, like Apple’s ‘stealing’ of the GUI (Graphic User Interface) ideas and technology from Xerox PARC, like the first Mac advertisement that posited Apple as the rebel against the ‘thought police’ in George Orwell’s dystopian epic 1984, or even in the parting of ways between the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak). Isaacson knows how to tell even an oft-told story well and takes you through a simple but intricate narrative of how Jobs became the poster-boy of the company he founded and his eventual ousting from it as a result of his obnoxious behaviour and the obsessive compulsive personality that was affecting the productivity and business of Apple.

However, the second half of the book, separated with some poignant and memorable pictures from Jobs’ life, makes it clearer than ever that Isaacson’s interest in Jobs is not as a biographer but as a historian. It deals with Jobs’ ousting from Apple, his near bankrupt status as both Next and Pixar fell to bad days, and the eventual return of Jobs to the Apple empire not as the prodigal son but the ascendant angel. In pithy prose, Isaacson captures the turmoil, frustration and chaos that emerged when the brightest star of the computing industry almost collapsed in his own overambition. We get a sense of the ruthlessness, the hard heartedness and the short memory of a technology industry that is simultaneously unforgiving, forgetful and hinged on a business ethic of capital and market expansion. If Isaacson notices the irony of Jobs’ own firing of “B grade players” from his Macintosh project and the abrasive dismissal of “shitheads” that Jobs regularly engaged in, to feed his own sense of power and control, he doesn’t dwell on it.

The most dramatic rags-to-riches fairy tale of Jobs’ rise to power and his subsequent emergence as a tech superstar who changed the world as we know it with the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, in a quest to make his mark in history, is a lacklustre effort. The narrative is slow and sluggish, often making you want to skim through the page and move on. There is also a repeated emphasis on how Jobs was a visionary, was brilliant, was a man who, as he grew, was getting to deal with his life better, instead of an analysis of the different events that have marked Jobs’ public and personal life. The historian, when faced with the present just rushes through it to complete the book. Yet, the last interviews with Jobs, where he refers to himself as a machine, “one click, and it is all gone” are rich in emotions and texture. Isaascon does justice to Jobs’ belief in his being good “at making people talk”. There is a sense of closure that comes with angst, grief, pain and the feeling of loss that Jobs’ death must incite.

The discontent I am left with is that in what is being read as a homily to the man, there is very little of the man in it. I knew Steve Jobs, through the legends and stories that surround him, as an abrasive and arrogant whizkid who manipulated everybody around him ruthlessly to execute his own visions and dreams. I knew Steve Jobs, through the public discourse and rumours, as a flawed man who could be at once the best and the worst thing that could happen to you, using people as gods when he needed them and shattering them when he no longer needed them in his new visions. I knew Steve Jobs, through the grapevine and the gossip as a man who was obsessed with control and as one who sought spirituality in design and salvation in a good sale. I knew Steve Jobs as a bundle of contradictions and contrariness and while this book explains in fascinating ways the confluences that created this legend, it gives me very little in terms of understanding the man behind the mask.

The interwebz are already abuzz with the debates for or against Steve Jobs. There is surprise at how Isaacson waters down some of the personal and professional scuffles, often bordering on the unrelenting and the unethical, in his rendering of Jobs’ life. Speculation is rife about some of the more controversial decisions that Jobs took and whose side Isaacson is on. The book captures, comprehensively, so much of Jobs’ life that it is bound to lead to infinite discussion and critique. However, I would recommend that you read the book not as a biography but as a history. If you read it as a history where Steve Jobs features prominently, because, after all, histories are written by those who win, you will be rewarded richly. It is a history that offers innovative ways of looking at technology, one that maps one of the most crucial transitions of the 20th century from the analogue to the digital and shows how a handful of people have shaped the information age we live in. However, if you approach Steve Jobs as a way of understanding Steve Jobs, chances are you will feel short changed.

Read the original published in the Biblio VOL. XV NOS. 11 & 12, NOVEMBER- DECEMBER 2011

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/historian-wins-over-biographer