We are anonymous, we are legion

Social Activist Alleges Threat By Police Officer Over Possession of Aadhaar

Admin — 2017-07-20T14:31:12Z

Social activist Shabnam Hashmi recorded a policeman telling her those without address proof and Aadhaar could be “eliminated”.

The article by Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar was published in the Wire on July 16, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Well-known social activist Shabnam Hashmi held a press conference to say she was threatened on the telephone by a police officer at the Lajpat Nagar police station warning her that the government had launched a ‘surround and eliminate’ campaign against people whose addresses are not known and who do not possess Aadhaar numbers or cards. This is now a standing instruction to all police stations, Hashmi was told. Moreover, the officer – accused of threatening and abusing Hashmi when she called him on the night of July 14 to know why the husband of a woman, who learns stitching at a training centre run by the NGO Pehchan at Jaitpur in south-east Delhi, had been summoned at a late hour – insisted that police personnel were well within their rights to act in this way.

The police may brush aside this assertion as the concerned officer’s personal opinion, or they may deny the veracity of the conversation, which Hashmi recorded and shared with the media; but she and other anti-Aadhaar activists say the interaction raises questions about the consequences – intended or unintended – of the Centre’s stress on making Aadhaar mandatory for the personal liberty and civil rights of ordinary residents.

Many Aadhaar critics have, in the past, expressed the fear that the irresponsible use or misuse of Aadhaar could lead to India becoming a ‘surveillance state’ or ‘police state’ by placing enormous discretionary powers in the hands of unscrupulous state officials.

Petitioners in SC had cautioned against misuse of Aadhaar

Earlier this year, Communist Party of India leader Binoy Viswam had filed a petition in the Supreme Court questioning the introduction of Section 139 AA of the IT Act to link Aadhaar cards with PAN cards. Subsequently, in an interview in April this year, he had noted that “the citizens are becoming instruments in the hands of the state” as “by taking fingerprints, iris scans and other details of the citizens of the country, the state is becoming the custodian of its people.” He had also expressed the fear that “the state can use this data according to its whims and fancies”.

Viswam could not have been more correct. Much before the use of data, “elements” of the state have started using the ruse of creation of data itself as a convenient tool to threaten and intimidate people and this is precisely what happened in the case of Hashmi.

Recalling the incident, Hashmi, who is the founding trustee of Pehchan, said the NGO runs a small centre in Jaitpur extension where it teaches school dropouts to appear for class 10 and 12 examinations and also runs sewing classes for women.

Hashmi said that at around 9 pm on July 14, Haseen, the husband of Mubina, one of the trainees, was summoned by a sub-inspector to the Lajpat Nagar police station regarding a complaint. When Hashmi called up the police station to find out what the summons was about, the policeman allegedly “hurled abuses”, and used “highly derogatory and uncivilised language” during the conversation.

Though Hashmi did not have a recorder in her phone at the time of the first call, she subsequently downloaded one and later recorded her conversation with the same officer.

In this conversation, the policeman is heard reasoning with Hashmi that he had not summoned Haseen at a late hour. He claimed that he used harsh language in the first conversation since she had not identified herself and had only proclaimed herself to be a social worker. It also comes across in the conversation that Hashmi had told the man in the earlier conversation that he was drunk while being on duty and that this had irked him. It emerged that the cop had got an inkling that she was recording the later conversation, because of which he apparently mellowed down.

The issue assumes significance as after declaring twice in the past that Aadhaar cannot be made mandatory for delivering services, the Supreme Court had recently upheld the validity of an Income Tax law amendment linking PAN with Aadhaar for filing tax returns.

Former Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi had argued that the government was “entitled to have identification” and that “as constituents of society people can’t claim immunity from identification.” Rohatgi had insisted that “no right is absolute, right to body is not absolute. Under extreme cases even right to life can be taken away, under due process.”

Experts have often cautioned against Aadhaar misuse

According to legal experts, the illegalities related to Aadhaar do not just end with such arguments. Writing for The Wire, Prashant Reddy T., a research associate at the School of Law, Singapore Management University, had noted that in the past couple of months the “Modi government has increasingly used its rule-making powers under various laws in a manner which is contrary to the law of the land.” He was referring to the Centre’s announcement to mandatorily link Aadhaar numbers to all non-small bank accounts, failing which, access to the bank accounts would be disabled after December 31.

“As is often the case with this government, the question now is whether this new mandatory Aadhaar requirement (and the threatened punishment) is legal,” the expert had asked.

Earlier this year, writing for the Hindustan Times, Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, and an affiliated fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, had referred to the immense potential of Aadhaar for profiling and surveillance. He had called for fundamentally altering Aadhaar, saying that if the rampant misuse of surveillance and wilful ignorance of the law by the state were anything to go by, the future looked bleak.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-wire-gaurav-vivek-bhatnagar-july-16-2017-social-activist-alleges-threat-by-police-officer-over-possession-of-aadhaar

So Much to Lose

nishant — 2012-12-07T16:39:09Z

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have been a witness to the maelstrom of events that accompanied the death of the political leader Bal Thackeray.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on December 2, 2012.

Unless you have been hiding under a rock, you have been a witness to the maelstrom of events that accompanied the death of the political leader Bal Thackeray. For me, the brouhaha was elbowed out by the case of the police arresting two women for critiquing the events on Facebook. The person who wondered about the nature of the enforced mourning and the state of our public life, and her friend who “liked” the comment on Facebook, were booked and arrested under charges that can only be considered preposterous.

I will not repeat these arguments because it is needless to say that I am on the side of the women and think of this as yet another manifestation of the stringent measures which are being evolved as an older broadcast way of thinking meets the decentralised realities of digital technologies.

In the midst of this the idea of internet freedom needs to be revisited. The global Press Freedom Index 2011-12 report compiled by Reporters Without Borders, ranks India at 131, or as a “partly free” country, marking us as a country where the notion of internet freedom is not to be taken for granted, and possibly also one where the concept is not properly understood.

Citing various instances from the central government’s plans to censor the social web to the authoritarian crackdown on activists and cultural producers involved in online civic protests, from the traditional media industry’s stronghold over intellectual property regimes to the arrest of individuals for voicing their independent critiques online, the report shows that we not only have an infrastructure deficit (with only 10 per cent of the people in the country connected), but also a huge social and political deficit, which is being exposed by our actions and reactions to the Web.

Take the case of professor Ambikesh Mahapatra dean of the chemistry department of Jadavpur University, who was picked up by the police and lodged in the lock up for almost 40 hours for forwarding an e-mail that contained a cartoon of Trinamool Congress leaders Mamata Banerjee, Mukul Roy and Dinesh Trivedi. He and his housing society co-resident Subrata Sengupta were charged with defamation and outraging the modesty of a woman. While the proceedings are underway with the next date of hearing slated in February, 2013, the Jadavpur university professor says, “Section, 66A of the IT Act is being used for suppression of the freedom of speech. In my opinion, it is being misused by the state government, repeatedly. The section does not empower anyone to arrest those who voice their opinion and never meant to harm anybody’s image. Prompt action is needed to check the misuse of law.”

Likewise, Ravi Srinivasan, a 46-year-old a businessman from Pondicherry, was arrested for tweeting against Karti Chidambaram, son of Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram. His arrest and consequent release has not blunted his spirit. He says, “At the time (of the arrest) I had not heard of Section 66(A). I still cannot fathom why and how a tweet sent out to just 12 people — half of them family and friends — caught the eye of the police. By evening, when I had come home from the police station, my Twitter following had gone up to 1,700. About 15,000 people re-tweeted the statement that got me arrested.”

Given the series of incidents that have marked the last year and the whimsical nature of regulatory injunctions on internet freedom in the country, it might be a good idea for us to reflect on democracy and freedom.

We need to examine the fundamental nature of freedom, and how these attempts at regulating the internet are only a symptom of the systemic failures of enshrining freedom of speech, information, identity and dignity in India. However, internet freedom is often a difficult concept to engage with, because it is one of those phrases that seem to be self-explanatory but without a straightforward explanation. There are three axes which might be useful to unpack the baggage that comes with internet freedom, both for our everyday practices, and our imagined future:

Freedom of: The freedom of the internet is something that is new and needs more attention. We have to stop thinking of the internet as merely a medium or a conduit of information. As the Web becomes inextricably linked with our everyday lives, the internet is no longer just an appendage or an externality. It becomes a reference point through which our social, political and economic practices are shaped. It becomes a defining point through which we draw our meanings of what it is to be a part of the society, to have rights, to be politically aware, to be culturally engaged — to be a human. The freedom of the Net is important because the crackdowns on the Net are an attack on our rights and freedoms. The silencing of a voice on Facebook, might soon gag the voices of people on the streets, creating conditions of silence in the face of violence perpetuated by the powerful.

Freedom to: Freedom to the internet is often confused with access to the internet. While, of course, access is important in our imagination of a just society where everybody is equally connected, freedom is also about creating open and fair societies. If the power of the internet is in creating alternative spaces of expression, deliberation and opinion-making, then the freedom to the internet is about being safe and responsible in these spaces. A society that controls these spaces of public discussion, under the guise of security and public safety, is a society that has given up its faith in freedom.

Freedom for: It is often not clear that when popular technologies of information and communication are regulated and censored, it is not merely the technology that is being controlled. What is being shaped and contained is the way people use them. The freedom for the internet is about the freedom for people. The possibility that Internet Service Providers are being coerced into revealing personal information of users to police states, that intermediaries are being equipped to remove content that they find offensive from the web, and that views expressed on the social media can lead to legal battles by those who have the power but not the acumen to exercise it, all have alarming consequences. There is a need to fight for freedom, not only for the defence of technology but also for the defence of the rights that we cherish that risk being eroded.

The case of these Facebook arrests is not new. It has happened before and it will continue happening as immature governments are unable to cope with the real voices of representational democracy. These cases sometimes get naturalised because they get repeated, and even without our knowledge, can start creating a life of fear, where we internalise the regulatory system, not voicing our opinions and ideas for fear of persecution. And so, whether you agree with their politics or not, whether you endorse the viewpoints of the people who are under arrest, whether you feel implicated or not in this case, we have to realise that even if we might not agree with somebody’s viewpoint, we must defend their right to have that particular viewpoint. Anything else, and tomorrow, when you want to say something against powers of oppression, you might find yourself alone, as your voice gets heard only by those who will find creative ways of silencing you.

— With inputs from Gopu Mohan, Madhuparna Das and V Shoba

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-dec-2-2012-nishant-shah-so-much-to-lose

Snooping technology: Will CMS work in India?

praskrishna — 2013-07-22T07:19:02Z

The Indian government plans to spend $132 million on setting up its brand new Central Monitoring System this year.

Pierre Fitter's article was published in FirstPost on July 17, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Several articles have raised valid questions about privacy violations, including this one by Danish Raza. Elsewhere, Pranesh Prakash has raised important points about how CMS may actually violate several laws and at least one Supreme Court verdict.

I ask a much more basic question: will CMS work? Can it really help security agencies eavesdrop on criminals and terrorists, despite several known technical hurdles?

	Encryption In 2008, a prominent Brazilian banker and investor named Daniel Dantas was arrested and charged with money laundering and tax evasion along with a former mayor of Sao Paulo. For five months, the Brazilian National Institute of Criminology tried to read the contents of his hard drive but failed to crack it. Dantas had encrypted his data using a free program called Truecrypt. The INC sent the hard drive to the FBI in the US, which spent a whole year trying to crack it; it too failed. Dantas’s use of encryption likely helped him escape the money laundering and tax evasion charges. He was ultimately convicted of attempting to bribe a police officer.

Encryption

In 2008, a prominent Brazilian banker and investor named Daniel Dantas was arrested and charged with money laundering and tax evasion along with a former mayor of Sao Paulo. For five months, the Brazilian National Institute of Criminology tried to read the contents of his hard drive but failed to crack it. Dantas had encrypted his data using a free program called Truecrypt. The INC sent the hard drive to the FBI in the US, which spent a whole year trying to crack it; it too failed. Dantas’s use of encryption likely helped him escape the money laundering and tax evasion charges. He was ultimately convicted of attempting to bribe a police officer.

This story illustrates a fundamental loophole at the heart of CMS. A criminal, using free and easy-to-use software, can protect his data from even the most advanced surveillance tools available in law enforcement. NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden himself used encrypted email to communicate with journalists at the Guardian. In an online chat where he took questions from the public, Snowden noted that encryption was “one of the few things that you can rely on” to protect you from the eavesdropping behemoth created of the NSA.

It should hardly be surprising then, that terror groups have been encrypting their emails and data for at least the last five years. In fact Al Qaeda developed its own encryption software called ‘Mujahideen Secrets’, to encrypt emails, chat sessions and files. Version two of Mujahideen Secrets even included a tool to delete files securely so that they could not be recovered using special software if the computer was captured. Al Qaeda’s links to several terror groups operating in India has been widely reported in the past. It is not inconceivable that they have shared their encryption software with their comrades-in-arms.

Over the years it has become easier to encrypt one’s communication. YouTube tutorials train even novice users to set up email encryption within minutes. Phone calls, text messages and online chats can also be encrypted with free, easy-to-install apps.

The biggest problem with encryption is that it is virtually impossible to break the code in a time frame that’s useful for law-enforcement purposes. Without getting too technical, modern encryption relies calculating the prime factors of very, very large integers. In 2009, a group of some of the world’s best-known mathematicians and cryptographers reported that it took them four years to factor a 768-bit integer. They estimated it would take 1,000 times longer to factorise a 1024-bit integer. GPG, which is the most widely-used email encryption software, allows users up to 4096-bit encryption. Unless you have the password to the encrypted files, it would take you a very long time to crack the encryption.

Here’s an example to help you understand why encryption makes CMS redundant. Let’s say the system intercepts an encrypted email sent by a LeT handler in Karachi to a sleeper cell in Mumbai. The email contains instructions to detonate a bomb in a specific market at a specific time four days from now. Even if India’s intelligence agencies managed to link up every computer they had available to process the encryption, they would still not be able to crack it in time to learn the details and stop the attack.

What about ‘Metadata’?

It should be noted that encryption only protects the body of the email. The metadata, including the sender’s and receiver’s email addresses remain unencrypted, else the service provider would be unable to send the email to its destination. Law enforcement agencies often partner with email providers to track down the exact computer on which tell-tale emails were read.

However, this method of tracing criminals has a limitation. Programs such as TOR and Hotspot Shield disguise the IP address of a user’s PC. For example, when I use TOR, Facebook will often ask me to confirm my identity as it sees me as logging in from an unfamiliar location. TOR has thousands of servers around the world through which it bounces your data before sending it to its destination.

There is another limitation to using metadata. Due to obvious legal hurdles, CMS will only be deployed to capture communication within India. If terrorists were planning an attack from elsewhere in India’s neighbourhood (as happened with 26/11), we would have to rely on that country’s intelligence services for an alert. Good luck with that!

To make untraceable phone calls, terrorists have been known to use “burner” phones. These are pre-paid phones that are easily available in the US and other countries that do not require an ID for such mobile connections. They can be topped up using cash, which makes their prolonged using even more untraceable.

Even if CMS allowed spooks to listen to these calls, it would not be able to tell who was talking to whom. From details that emerged following the Abbottabad operation that killed Osama bin Laden, we also know that terrorists have been trained to turn off their phones and remove the battery to prevent being tracked even while not on a call.

So what is CMS good for?

If terrorist communications can easily be hidden from CMS, you have to wonder why the government is going through all the effort and expense to set up such a system. What good can come off the mass hoovering of data of ordinary citizens’?

Imagine if CMS intercepted a ‘BBM chat’ between two businessmen, who were discussing a contract that could affect the business interests of a government MP.

Imagine the government getting access to emails exchanged between a journalist and a source in the IAS who wants to expose a major corruption scandal involving a cabinet minister.

Imagine if the government had access to phone calls between two opposition politicians discussing election strategies.

What if CMS tracks a PhD candidate who is researching Naxal terror and has downloaded Naxal pamphlets? What if this researcher has been able to establish contact with Naxals for an interview. Can the government use such data to charge him with participating in a Naxal conspiracy, even if his only intention was to research their motivations? In a country where chief ministers label their critics as “Naxals” for merely raising questions, are we certain we want such unmitigated power in the government’s hands?

These are all questions well worth asking, especially since the ostensible reason for setting up the CMS—monitoring terrorists and criminals—is a fool’s errand at best.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/firstpost-pierre-fitter-july-17-2013-snooping-technology

Snooping Can Lead to Data Abuse

sunil — 2012-03-21T10:39:22Z

THE NATGRID, aiming to link databases of 21 departments and ministries for better counter- terror measures, adopts blunt policy approach, subjecting every citizen to the same level of blanket surveillance, instead of a targeted approach that intelligently focuses on geographic or demographic areas that are currently important.

All you manage to do with the current approach help software, hardware and biometric equipment vendors achieve their sales targets. It is quite unlikely that security agencies will learn anything insightful by putting everybody under the same degree of surveillance. There is no scientific evidence to show that we will be a safer nation if the government eavesdropped into all aspects of a citizen’s life. Targeted surveillance, on the other hand, is like good old- fashioned detective work. Put a particular section — of potential troublemakers — under surveillance and leave the others alone.

With round- the- clock, 100- per cent, 360- degree surveillance, all the data is scrutinised all the time. The more effective approach is to sample and collect data while maintaining data trails. If anything suspicious is noticed, the rest of the trail can be dug up. Blanket surveillance only leads to leaks and abuse and tremendous distraction. The surveillance infrastructure will be overburdened as 99 per cent of the records and files scanned will be of no interest terms of fighting terrorism, etc.

The 21 databases need to be opened only when there is anything suspicious in any of the extracted and scrutinised samples or subsets. If there is a suspicious pattern, it should lead to opening of subsets in all the databases. Obviously, there should be ways in which the databases can talk to each other — demand for a particular subset, and not for all the records to be available to agencies all the time.

The NATGRID has to be able to let investigators selectively go in and out of the necessary subsets data. No one should be able to have a 360 degree view of all activities of all Indians. AS OF now, the NATGRID design does not appear to have a safeguard for data abuse. And no matter what you see Hollywood movies, this configuration does not exist in Europe or the US. Two important forms of protections that should be available in democracies with robust privacy laws are missing in India. The first is breach notification.

If intelligence agencies and the police have looked up your files, you have a right to be informed. Secondly, you can request for a copy of the information that is maintained on you and request modifications if the data is inaccurate, so as to prevent harassment. Such checks and balances are necessary an intelligent and appropriate surveillance regime.

Merging all 21 databases for 1.2 billion people into a single system only provides a juicy target for any internal or external enemy. From the perspective national security, it is a foolish thing to do. Terrorist groups will be able to target a single failure point destroy over a billion lives. Since the current configuration of the NATGRID only undermines national security, one is forced conclude that national security is a false pretext.

This explains the deep scepticism among many the intelligence agencies involved. The real purpose of the project is to scare citizens in the age of Arab springs. The NATGRID is a disciplinary measure aimed at social engineering of citizens’ behaviour. Unfortunately, our media has been misled by the corporate cheerleaders of this humongous waste of money.

The writer is executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore.
( As told to Max Martin)

Follow on Mail Today

Download the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/snooping-to-data-abuse

SMS Block as Threat to Free Speech

Chinmayi Arun — 2012-09-02T09:02:11Z

If you could text just one or two people in a day, who would you choose? Many of us have had to make this choice thanks to the order limiting us to five texts a day. Short Message Service (SMS) is not used primarily to send staccato messages like the telegraph was.

(This article was published in the Business Line print edition dated September 1, 2012)

Whole conversations take place across SMS, and language has mutated to facilitate this. Anyone accustomed to this universe of parallel conversation, relationships and support must have found the five texts, and perhaps even the 20 texts, limit very restrictive. It isolated the hearing-impaired and created chaos for those who use bulk-texts to schedule classes or meetings, or run businesses.

Such a ban on communication must be examined to see whether it violates our right to freedom of speech and expression. The texting limit had a direct restrictive effect on our freedom of speech, since it limited communication.

We need to consider whether our rights were restricted legitimately, for reasons permitted by the Constitution. The Indian judiciary has created guidelines to help evaluate the reasonability of restrictions on free speech. The SMS block will be examined against these guidelines to see whether the restriction of communication was justified.

‘Reasonable’ curbs

The Constitution permits restriction of the right to freedom of speech only for limited permitted reasons, one of which is ‘public order’.

However, any such restriction must also qualify as reasonable when measured against the standard created by the Supreme Court. For instance, banning publication of all newspapers for a month because of some newspapers carrying material that may incite riots would most certainly not be reasonable.

The question then arises as to what would amount to a reasonable restriction. The judiciary has considered this question several times and stated that it will take into account, among other things, the nature of the rights infringed, the circumstances under which the restriction has been imposed, the extent and urgency of evil sought to be remedied and the proportionality of the imposition. The order restricting freedom must also have a proximate relationship with the achievement of public order.

Examining the situation at hand from this perspective, we find that people of north-east Indian origin in southern India have been receiving threats — via SMS and other communication channels — of such severity, that it has prompted them to uproot themselves from their lives and their homes en masse. That so many citizens were made to feel unsafe in their own country is cause for concern and the Government is right to take it seriously. It can be argued that this is a public order problem.

However the reasonability of the restriction on SMS is much harder to prove. For such a wide restriction on the freedom of speech to be reasonable, there would need to be a demonstrable nexus or proximate relationship between the bulk-text ban and the resolution of the public order problem. Additionally, the proportionality of the restriction is questionable since it is unclear why such a universal block of bulk-texts was necessary, instead of filtration of texts based on keywords, or identification of a pool of mobile users who pose a greater risk.

SMS and public order

The nexus between texting and restoration of public order appears remote for two reasons. The first is that SMS is not the only way to spread rumours and threats. The block was unlikely to go a long way in protecting anyone from harm since other ways of threatening and rumour-mongering remained available: Third-generation mobile technology, telephone calls and good old-fashioned word-of-mouth.

The second reason is that the dissemination of rumours and threats by themselves would be of less concern if they did not cause the exodus, which had little to do with technology. The problem lies less in SMS technology’s facilitation of rapid communication, and more in the reality of how people of north-eastern origin are treated in other parts of India and why the state security forces like the police do not inspire much confidence in them.

In this socio-political reality, restricting the number of reassuring texts and information that people of northeastern origin may send each other was hardly going to help them feel safer.

Universal embargo

Additionally, the universality of the block is particularly vulnerable to being challenged as unconstitutional. The Delhi High Court has recently declared that an order blocking bulk-SMS unreasonably restricts the right to freedom of speech because such a universal embargo, even if directed at protecting consumers’ privacy, is too broad since it affects not just telemarketers but also people sending non-commercial bulk messages.

The Court felt that since all categories of texts were blocked regardless of their connection to the harm in question, the bulk-text ban unjustifiably affected citizens’ legitimate free speech rights.

The order limiting everyone to 200 texts a day was therefore set aside to the extent that it affected people other than the specific group at which it should have been directed. Imagine how this principle might apply to an order that limits the bulk of mobile phone users to five, or even 20, texts a day.

The trouble with new communications technology is that it takes some time for policy-makers and interested parties to learn to balance the various rights affected. The SMS block, which was been lifted on August 30, unsuccessfully to protect a group of citizens from harm at the cost of many people’s freedom of speech rights. However laudable the motives, this block was an illustration of the worrying lack of accountability and procedural safeguards that lie between our rights and state excesses.

Right to communicate

If Arab Spring made headlines on how mobile phones were use to mobilise, Bahrain’s silenced revolution demonstrated use of the same technology to unravel mobilisation by blocking communication. Our constitution protects our right to communicate freely as well as our right to assemble. As technology evolves to better enable communication, we need to protect its infrastructure, by embedding our rights in the new communication framework.

It is to be hoped that India provides better protection of constitutional rights across communication networks. Restriction of communication needs to be proportionate, justified and within the constitutional accountability mechanism, so that citizens’ rights are not violated any more than strictly necessary.

Without this, we are powerless in the face of what may come — be it the mass surveillance that was once the stuff of dystopic novels or the throttling of communication in the public sphere reminiscent of China.

However, laudable the motives, the SMS block was an illustration of the lack of accountability and procedural safeguards that lie between our rights and state excesses.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-the-hindubusinessline-op-ed-sep-1-2012-chinmayi-arun-sms-block-as-threat-to-free-speech

Smriti Irani brings back focus on voyeurism prevailing in our country

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T00:59:30Z

The case of Union minister Smriti Irani finding a CCTV camera at Goa's Fab India has again brought back the focus on digital voyeurism and how a critical issue like surveillance can be exploited. Irani's case comes days after a woman found a mobile phone strapped to a changing room door of a Van Heusen store in Lajpat Nagar's Central market, a popular shopping hub.

The article by Amrita Madhukalya was published in DNA on April 6, 2015. Pranesh Prakash gave his inputs.

Bangalore girl Sumitra (name changed) remembers the day in 2009 she saw a camera when trying on a skirt at Palika Bazaar. "I looked around the tiny changing room and saw a camera with a dipping red light. I quickly rushed out and accused the shopkeeper. But, Palika is not a place of great repute, and my friend who was accompanying me asked me to forget the matter," she says, and that's what she did. She was a degree student at Delhi University, and being relatively unaware of the city, decided to keep mum. "But look at what has happened: if they can film a Union minister at a Fab India store, they will film anyone. We need stringent action."

One of the first cases of digital voyeurism was reported in Pune in 2003 when a peon in an establishment at Sahakar Nagar installed a web camera in a changing room. In 2005, landowner Mohan Kulkarni from Navi Peth was arrested for filming women tenants. In 2007, two MMS clips from the changing rooms of a renowned departmental store in Kolkata started making the rounds. In one, a girl was shown changing clothes while in the other a couple was shown having sex. Then a year later, shop assistant Sunil Kumar Jha was found filming women in a clothes store from below the trial room door in Kolkata.

Debarati Halder, advocate and founder of the Centre for Cyber Victim Counselling, feels that had it not been a politician like Irani, the case would not have been highlighted at all. "People would have brushed off the incident had it been another woman. It is hard to escape the amount of negative publicity a case like this garners," she says. This is reflected in the case of a woman who was filmed in a leading store in Mumbai and was scared to approach the police, as she and her father did not want to go through the "legal hassles" of the case. The woman spoke of her story to a journalist of a leading daily and the ensuing report eventually led to the arrest of the shop assistant.

Cyber security expert Pranesh Prakash says that digital voyeurism is a huge problem in India and elsewhere. "There is a mismatch between privacy protection provided in the IT Act against non-consensual sharing of certain forms of sexual images, and the utter disregard for privacy in other parts of the law. Given that cybercafes have often been places where users are secretly filmed, the law should seek to crack down on such invasions of privacy. Instead, the law doesn't prohibit that, and in fact the Cybercafe Rules, encourage cybercafe owners to photograph all users, including minors. The rules say that untrustworthy cybercafe owners keep these records for a minimum period of one year, but there is no maximum period," says Prakash.

Section 66E of the Information Technology Act, 2000, amended in 2008, deals with digital voyeurism. And section 354 (C) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) deals with voyeurism in general.

But, there are many loopholes. "When the footage is shot by a government-run establishment, then the clause of surveillance is a cover, like in an MMS of Delhi Metro (where a couple was shown making out)."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/dna-april-6-2015-amrita-madhukalya-smriti-irani-brings-back-focus-on-voyeurism-prevailing-in-the-country

Smartphone rumours spark series of mob killings in India

Admin — 2018-07-31T14:30:06Z

Nation reels from killings blamed on fake reports of kidnappers spread on WhatsApp

The article by Samanth Subramanian was published in the National on July 2, 2018. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

All it takes these days to kill a man in India is the merest spark of mistrust, fuelled perhaps by a rumour on social media. Strangers travelling through villages, a transgender woman and even a government official have all been set upon by mobs and killed across the country over the past two months.

On Sunday, in the most recent attack, five men were beaten to death in the district of Dhule, in Maharashtra. Three others survived. The eight men had been seen getting off a bus near a village and talking to a young girl, police officials said.

Residents had been reading hoax messages on WhatsApp for a few days already, which claimed that kidnappers were in the area, looking for victims. So a group confronted the eight travellers at the local market and, choosing not to believe their story, beat them to death with sticks.

On Monday, police said they had arrested 23 people in connection with the killing. "I appeal to everybody not to believe in such posts that are circulated on social media," Deepak Kesarkar, Maharashtra's junior home minister, said. "The law should not be taken into one's own hands."

Including the incident in Dhule, at least 19 people in 11 states have been killed in public killings since the beginning of May. Dozens more have been injured in such attacks.

In Tamil Nadu, a 55-year-old woman was killed for handing out sweets to children — again, the residents suspected her to be a kidnapper. In Hyderabad, a transgender woman was killed, seemingly without provocation. In Assam, two men were set upon and killed when they stopped in a rural part of the state to ask for directions.

The darkest case is laced with irony. Sukanta Chakrabarty was appointed by the government of the state of Tripura to tour its villages and dispel social media rumours about child kidnappers. Last Thursday, he was mistaken for a kidnapper and killed by four young men in the village of Kalacherra.

In response, the government of Tripura cut mobile internet services for two days, to try to cut down the spread of rumours. Other states have also reacted. In Hyderabad in May, police arrested a Facebook user for posting a false video about a "kidnapper" named "Afzal Sagar".

Karnataka’s police department has a social media control room that monitors viral posts. And Tamil Nadu's police have launched awareness drives to alert users about the dubious nature of forwarded WhatsApp messages.

But in a country with nearly 500 million smartphone users, the state is hard pressed to curb the flow of information on WhatsApp and social media.

At least 200 million Indians are on WhatsApp, a messaging platform owned by Facebook. In a statement released two weeks ago, a WhatsApp spokesman encouraged users to "report problematic messages so that we can take action. We're also stepping up our education efforts so that people know how to spot fake news or hoaxes on WhatsApp."

A new WhatsApp feature, which appends a "Forwarded" tag as a caveat to any forwarded message, has not yet been introduced across the entire platform.

The violence instigated by such messages, however, is as much a societal problem as a technological one, said Pranesh Prakash, a fellow with the Centre for Internet and Society, a think tank in Bengaluru.

"I don't think this is a particular moment in time where people are being taken over by a hatred of the outsider,” Mr Prakash said. “I was doing a little digging and found a very similar case even in 2015, in Maharashtra. But what's new is the speed with which this has spread across the country over the past few months."

In part, Mr Prakash said, the violence betrays mistrust of outsiders but also a lack of confidence in law enforcement. People are not sure that reporting suspected kidnappers to the police will result in a prompt or thorough investigation.

"In a newspaper, I read about how someone in the town of Salem [in Tamil Nadu] had said: ‘Why would the police ever tell us the truth?’ That’s uniquely problematic."

But the adequacy of WhatsApp's response is also under scrutiny, especially given Facebook's troubles over fake news and the manipulation of users in the US and other countries.

"It's important that they do all they can to cut down on the spread of these rumours without impinging upon the freedom of speech," Mr Prakash said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-national-july-2-2018-samanth-subramanian-smartphone-rumours-spark-series-of-mob-killings-in-india

Smart City Standardization - ICT Perspective

Admin — 2018-12-10T16:00:28Z

An event on Smart City standardization – ICT Perspective was organized by the Bureau of Indian Standards in Bangalore on October 30, 2018. Gurshabad Grover attended the event.

Different efforts and challenges in the space of smart city standardisation were discussed by the speakers and panelists. See the agenda.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/smart-city-standardization-ict-perspective

Smart City Policies and Standards: Overview of Projects, Data Policies, and Standards across Five International Smart Cities

Kiran A. B., Elonnai Hickok and Vanya Rakesh — 2016-06-11T13:29:04Z

This blog post aims to review five Smart Cities across the globe, namely Singapore, Dubai, New York City, London and Seoul, the Data Policies and Standards adopted. Also, the research seeks to point the similarities, differences and best practices in the development of smart cities across jurisdictions.

Download the brief: PDF.

Introduction

Smart City as a concept is evolutionary in nature, and the key elements like Information and Communication Technology (ICT), digitization of services, Internet of Things (IoT), open data, big data, social innovation, knowledge, etc., would be intrinsic to defining a Smart City [1].

A Smart City, as a “system of systems”, can potentially generate vast amounts of data, especially as cities install more sensors, gain access to data from sources such as mobile devices, and government and other agencies make more data accessible. Consequently, Big Data techniques and concepts are highly relevant to the future of Smart Cities. It was noted by Kenneth Cukier, Senior Editor of Digital Products at The Economist, that Big Data techniques can be used to enhance a number of processes essential to cities - for example, big data can be used to spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, tack legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions [2]. Having said this, data is deemed to be the lifeblood of a Smart City and its availability, use, cost, quality, analysis, associated business models and governance are all areas of interest for a range of actors within a smart city [3]

This blog reviews five Smart Cities namely Singapore, Dubai, New York City, London and Seoul. In doing so, the research seeks to point the similarities, differences and best practices in the development of smart cities across jurisdictions. To achieve this, the research reviews:

The definition of a Smart City in a given context or project (if any).
Existing policy/regulations around data or notes the lack thereof.
The cities adherence to the International standards and providing an update on the current status of the Smart City programme.

Singapore

Introduction

The Smart Nation programme in Singapore was launched on 24th November, 2014. The programme is being driven by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, through which Singapore seeks to harness ICT, networks and data to support improved livelihoods, stronger communities and creation of new opportunities for its residents [4] According to the IDA, a Smart Nation is a city where “people and businesses are empowered through increased access to data, more participatory through the contribution of innovative ideas and solutions, and a more anticipatory government that utilises technology to better serve citizens’ needs” [5]. The Smart Nation programme is driven by a designated Office in the Prime Minister’s Office [6]. As a core component to the Smart Nation Programme, the Smart Nation Platform has been developed as the technical architecture to support the Programme. This Platform enables greater pervasive connectivity, better situational awareness through data collection, and efficient sharing and access to collected sensor data, allowing public bodies to use such data to develop policy and practical interventions [7] Such access would allow for anticipatory governance - a goal of the Smart Nation Programme as noted by Dr. Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for Communications and Information stating “Insights gained from this data would enable us to better anticipate citizens’ needs and help in better delivery of services” [8].

Status of the Project

The Smart Nation Programme is an ongoing initiative, being built on the past programme Intelligent Nation 2015 (iN2015 masterplan). The plan involves putting in place the infrastructure, policies, ecosystem and capabilities to enable a Smart Nation, by adopting a people-centric approach [9]. A number of co-creating solutions adopted by the Government include:

Development of Mobile Apps to facilitate communication between the public and the providers of public services.
Organization of Hackathons by government agencies or corporations in collaboration with schools and industry partners to ideate and develop solutions to tackle real-world challenges.
Adopt measure for smart mobility to create a more seamless transport experience and providing greater access to real-time transport information so that citizens can better plan their journeys.
Smart technologies are also being introduced to the housing estates [10].

Policies and Regulations

The Smart Nation plan derives its legitimacy from the constitution of Singapore, holding the Prime Minister responsible to take charge of the subject ‘Smart Nation’ blueprint under the Statutory body of ‘Smart Nation’ Programme Office [11]. Singapore has a comprehensive data protection law – the Personal Data Protection Act 2012, rules governing the collection, use, disclosure and care of personal data. The Personal Data Protection Commission of Singapore has committed to work closely with the private sector, and also to support the Smart Nation vision on data privacy and cyber security ecosystem [12] [13].

Towards achieving the Smart Nation vision the government has also promoted the use of open data. In 2015 the Department of Statistics has made a vast amount of data available (across multiple themes say transport, infocomm, population, etc.) for free to the public in order to encourage innovation and facilitate the Smart Nation [14]. Prior to this initiative, the government had adopted the Open Data Policy in 2011, enabling public data for analysis, research and application development [15]. The concept of Virtual Singapore, which is a part of the Smart Nation Initiative, has been developed to adopt and simulate solutions on a virtual platform using big data analytics [16].

Adoption of International Standards

The Smart Nation initiative follows the standards laid under the purview of the Singapore Standards Council (SSC). It specifies three types of Internet of Things (IoT) Standards – sensor network standards (TR38 - for public areas & TR40 - for homes), IoT foundational standards (common set of guidelines for IoT requirements and architecture, information and service interoperability, security and data integrity) and domain-specific standards (healthcare, mobility, urban living, etc.) [17].

Singapore is part of ISO/IEC JTC 1/WG7 Sensor Networks and ISO/IEC JTC 1/WG10 Internet of Things (IoT) [18]. Singapore IT standards abides to the international standards as defined by ISO, ITU, etc.Singapore is a member of many international standards forums (see Singapore International Standards Committee) which includes JTC1/WG9 - Big Data; JTC1/WG10 - Internet of Things; JTC1/WG11 - Smart Cities.

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Introduction

The Dubai Smart City strategy was launched as part of the Dubai Plan 2021 vision, in the year 2015 [19]. Dubai Plan 2021 describes the future of Dubai evolving through holistic and complementary perspectives, starting with the people and the society and places the government as the custodian of the city’s development. Within the Plan, the smart city theme envisions a platform that is fully connected and integrated infrastructure that enables easy mobility for all residents and tourists, and provides easy access to all economic centers and social services, in line with the world’s best cities [20]. Center to the smart city platform is data and data analytics, particularly cross functional data and big data techniques to give a complete view of the city [21] As envisioned, the Dubai Data portal would provide a gateway to empower relevant stakeholders to understand the nuances of the city and pursue questions that will result in the greatest impact from the city’s data [22]. The platform will be based on current data and existing services, initiatives, and networks to identify opportunities for a smart city [23]. The Smart City Plan also includes a framework for aligning districts of Dubai with the Smart City vision and dimensions [24].

The Smart Dubai roadmap 2015 provides a consolidated report and planned smart city services, its status and the stage of its implementation, for e.g. Smart Grid, Mobile Payment, Smart Water, Health applications, Public Wi-Fi, Municipality, E-Traffic solutions, etc [25].

Status of the Project

The Smart Dubai strategy is envisioned to be completed by the year 2020, and currently it’s ongoing. The first phase of Smart Dubai masterplan is expected to end by 2016. Between 2017 and 2019, the plan aims to deliver new initiatives and services. The second phase of the masterplan is expected to be completed by the year 2020 [26].

Policies and Regulations

The Smart City Plan is being driven by the Dubai Smart City Office – which has been established under Law No. (29) of 2015 on the establishment of Dubai Smart City Office; Law No. (30) of 2015 on the establishment of Dubai Smart City Establishment; Decree No. (37) of 2015 on the formation of the Board of the Dubai Smart City Office; and Decree No (38) of 2015- appointing a Director General for the Office, which will develop overall policies and strategic plans, supervise the smart transformation process and approve joint initiatives, projects and services [27]. Also, an open data law called Dubai Open Data Law was issued to complete the legislative framework for transforming Dubai into a Smart City [28]. This law will enable the sharing of non-confidential data between public entities and other stakeholders.

Adoption of International Standards

In 2015 the Smart Dubai Executive Committee has collaborated through an agreement with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) adopt the performance indicators by the ITU Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities to evaluate the feasibility of the indicators [29]. The Focus Group is working towards identifying global best practices for the development of smart cities [30].

New York City, United States of America

Introduction

The ‘One New York Plan’ announced in the year 2015 is a comprehensive plan for a sustainable and resilient city. It includes the adoption of digital technology and considers the importance of the role of data in transforming every aspect of the economy, communications, politics, and individual and family life [31]. Furthermore, through a publication on 'Building a Smart+Equitable City', the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation (MOTI) describes efforts to leverage new technologies to build Smart city.

Accordingly, the plan seeks to establish better lives through establishing principles and strategic frameworks to guide connected device and Internet of Things (IoT) implementation; MOTI serving as the coordinating entity for new technology and IoT deployments across all City agencies; collaborating with academia and the private sector on innovative pilot projects, and partnering with municipal governments and organizations around the world to share best practices and leverage the impact of technological advancements [32].

Status of the Project

OneNYC represents a unified vision for a sustainable, resilient, and equitable city developed with cross-cutting interagency collaboration, public engagement, and consultation with leading experts in their respective fields. The Mayor’s Office of Sustainability oversees the development of OneNYC and now shares responsibility with the Mayor’s Office of Recovery and Resiliency for ensuring its implementation [33].

Policies and Regulations

As per the Local Law 11 of 2012, each City entity must identify and ultimately publish all of its digital public data for citywide aggregation and publication by 2018. In adherence to this law, there exists a NYC Open Data Plan which requires annual data updation [34].

The LinkNYC initiative, one of the key projects to make New York a ‘smart’ city, aims to connect everyone through a city wide wi-fi network. The LinkNYC initiative will retrofit payphones with kiosks to provide high-speed WiFi hotspots and charging stations for increased connectivity [35]. Data Privacy in the initiative is addressed through the customer first privacy policy, which considers user’s privacy on priority and will not sell any personal information or share with third parties for their own use. LinkNYC will use anonymized, aggregate data to make the system more efficient and to develop insights to improve your Link experience [36].

Adoption of International Standards

The ANSI Network on Smart and Sustainable Cities (ANSSC) is a forum for information sharing and coordination on voluntary standards, conformity assessment and related activities for smart and sustainable cities in the US [37]. The US is a signatory of the ISO/ITU defined standards on smart cities [38].

London, United Kingdom

Introduction

The Smart London Plan was unveiled in the year 2013 by the Mayor of London. The plan is being driven through the Greater London Authority, with the advice of the Smart London Board. The Smart London Plan envisions ‘Using the creative power of new technologies to serve London and improve Londoner’s lives’ [39]. ‘Smart London’ is about harnessing new technology and data so that businesses, Londoners and visitors experience the city in a better way, and do not face bureaucratic hassle and congestion. Smart London seeks to improve the city as a whole and focuses on city macro functions that result from the interplay between city subsystems - such as local labour markets to financial markets, from local government to education, healthcare, transportation and utilities. According to strategy documents, a smarter London recognises and employs data as a service and will leverage data to enable informed decision making and the design of new activities.

Status of the Project

This project is currently ongoing. Since its formation in March 2013, the Smart London Board has been advising the Greater London Authority.The Plan sits within the overarching framework of the Mayor’s Vision 2020 [40].

Policies and Regulations

The Smart London Plan incorporates the existing open data platform called ‘London DataStore’. The rules and guidelines for this platform are defined by the Greater London Authority, which includes working with public and private sector organisations to create, maintain and utilise it, enabling common data standards, identify and prioritise which data are needed to address London’s growth challenges, establish a Smart London Borough Partnership to encourage boroughs to free up London’s local level data. Also, privacy is protected and there is transparent use of data - to ensure data use is managed in the best interests of the public rather than private enterprise.⁴² The Smart London Plan aims to build on this existing datastore to identify and publish data that addresses specific growth challenges, with an emphasis on working with companies and communities to create, maintain, and use this data [41].

The Open Data White Paper, issued by the Office of Paymaster General, seeks to build a transparent society by releasing public data through open data platforms and leveraging the potential of emerging technologies [42]. The Greater London Authority processes personal data in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998 [43].

Adoption of International Standards

The British Standards Institution (BSI) has already established Smart City standards and has associated with the ISO Advisory Group on smart city standards. The UK subscribes to the BSI standards for smart cities and has adopted the same [44]. The following standards and publications help address various issues for a city to become a smart city:

The development of a standard on Smart city terminology (PAS 180)
The development of a Smart city framework standard (PAS 181)
The development of a Data concept model for smart cities (PAS 182)
A Smart city overview document (PD 8100)
A Smart city planning guidelines document (PD 8101)
BS 8904 Guidance for community sustainable development provides a decision-making framework that will help setting objectives in response to the needs and aspirations of city stakeholders
BS 11000 Collaborative relationship management
BSI BIP 2228:2013 Inclusive urban design - A guide to creating accessible public spaces.

Further, the Smart London Plan incorporates open data standards in accordance with London DataStore [45]. Various government reports – Smart Cities background paper, Open Data White Paper, etc., have suggested the use of standards related to Internet of Things (IoT), open data standards, etc [46].

Seoul, Korea

Introduction

Smart Seoul 2015 was announced in June 2011 by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, which envisions integrating IT services into every field, including administration, welfare, industry and living. Through this, the Seoul Metropolitan Government plans to create a Seoul that uses smart technologies by 2015 [47]. Towards this, the Seoul Metropolitan Government plans to make use of Big Data in policy development, and through scientific analytics, will provide customized administrative services and reduce wasteful spending. Also, the government is utilising Big Data to analyse trends emerging from existing services [48]. Examples of projects that leverage big data that the government has undertaken include the Taxi Matchmaking Project – analyzes the data related to taxi stands and passengers, the Owl Bus [49] - maps the bus routes, etc.

Status of the Project

Building on the Smart Seoul 2015, the Seoul Metropolitan Government plans to establish 'Global Digital Seoul 2020 – New Connections, Different Experiences' vision in next five-years. In this multi-objective plan, it aims to establish a ’Big Data campus’ providing win-win cooperation among public, private, industry and university [50].

Policies and Regulations

The Smart Seoul 2015 aims to create a ‘Seoul Data Mart’, which will be an open platform that makes public information available for data processing [51]. Furthermore, Seoul has opened the Seoul Open Data Plaza [52], an online channel to share and provide citizens with all of Seoul’s public data, such as real-time bus operation schedules, subway schedules, non-smoking areas, locations of public Wi-Fi services, shoeshine shops, and facilities for disabled people, and the information registered in Seoul Open Data Plaza is provided in the open API format.⁴⁵

South Korea has a comprehensive law governing data privacy – Personal Information Protection Act, 2011. The law includes data protection rules and principles, including obligations on the data controller and the consent of data subjects, rights to access personal data or object to its collection, and security requirements. It also covers cookies and spam, data processing by third parties and the international transfer of data [53].

International Standards

The smart city standards are adopted in the development of smart cities in Korea [54]. Korea has adopted the ISO/TC 268, which is focused on sustainable development in communities. Korea also has one working group developing city indicators and another working group developing metrics for smart community infrastructures [55].

Conclusion

The smart city projects studied are at different levels of implementation and have both similarities and differences. Below is an analysis of some of the key similarities and differences between smart city projects, a comparison of these points to India’s 100 Smart City Mission, and a summary of best practices around the development of smart city frameworks.

Nodal Agency

All cities studied have nodal agencies driving the smart city initiatives and many have policies in place backing these initiatives. For example, while the Smart Nation programme in Singapore is being driven by the Infocomm Development Authority, in London the smart city project is governed by the Great London Authority. The Smart Seoul Project in Korea is governed by the Seoul Metropolitan Government and New York has the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation serving as the coordinating entity for new technology and IoT deployments across all City agencies. In India, the nodal agency driving the 100 Smart Cities Project is the Ministry of Urban Development under the Indian Government. In India, the implementation of the Mission at the City level will be done by a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), which will be a limited company and will plan, appraise, approve, release funds, implement, manage, operate, monitor and evaluate the Smart City development projects.

Policies

Many of the cities had open data policies and data protection policies that pertain to the Smart City initiatives. In Dubai, an open data law called Dubai Open Data Law has been issued to complete the legislative framework for transforming Dubai into a Smart City and the Smart City Establishment will develop policies for the project. New York also has an Open Data Plan in place and LinkNYC will use anonymized, aggregate data to address data privacy of users. In London, the Smart London Plan incorporates the existing open data platform called ‘London DataStore’, the rules for which are defined by the Greater London Authority, which also ensures privacy and transparent use of data by processing personal data in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998. For regulation of data in Seoul, a ‘Seoul Data Mart’ will be established to make public information available for data processing and the Seoul Open Data Plaza is an existing online channel to share and provide citizens with all of Seoul’s public data. South Korea has a comprehensive law governing data privacy in place as well. In Singapore, the Personal Data Protection Commission has committed to work and support the Smart Nation vision on data privacy and cyber security ecosystem. To achieve the vision of the project, the government has also promoted the use of open data. It can be said the these countries , with clearly laid out policies to support and guide the project, have well planned ecosystem for regulation and governance of systems, technologies and cities. All cities have incorporated open data into smart cities and many have developed guidelines for its use. All cities have similar goals of enhancing the lives of citizens and developing anticipatory regulation, however, there appears to be little discussion on the need to amend existing law or enable new law around privacy and data protection in light of data collection through smart cities. In India, no enabling legislation or policy has been formulated by the Government, apart from releasing “Mission Statement and Guidelines”, which provides details about the Project and vision, excluding a definition of a ‘smart city’ or the relevant applicable laws and policies. No information is publicly available regarding deployment of open data, use of specific technologies like cloud, big data, etc., the relevant policies and applicability of laws. Unlike India, all cities recognize the importance of big data techniques in enabling smart city visions, technology and policies. On the lines of these cities, India must work towards addressing the need for an open data framework in light of the 100 Smart Cities Mission to enable the sharing of non-confidential data between public entities and other stakeholders. This requires co-ordination to incorporate, enable and draw upon open data architecture in the cities by the Government with the existing open data framework in India, like the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, 2012. Use of technology in the form of IoT and Big Data entails access to open data, bringing another policy area in its ambit which needs consideration. Also, identification and development of open standards for IoT must be looked at. Also, as data in smart cities will be generated, collected, used, and shared by both the public and private sector. It is essential that India’s existing data protection standards and regime must be amended to extend the data regulation beyond a body corporate and oversee the collection and use of data by the Government, and its agencies.

Standards

In Singapore, the Smart Nation initiative follows the standards laid under the purview of the Singapore Standards Council (SSC)and the Singapore IT standards abides to the international standards as defined by ISO, ITU, etc. The Country is also a member of many international standards forums (see Singapore International Standards Committee) which includes JTC1/WG9- Big Data; JTC1/WG10 - Internet of Things; JTC1/WG11 - Smart Cities. In Dubai, the Smart Dubai Executive Committee with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to adopt the performance indicators by the ITU Focus Group on Smart Sustainable Cities to evaluate the feasibility of the indicators. For the purpose of standards, the ANSI Network on Smart and Sustainable Cities (ANSSC) in New York is a forum smart and sustainable cities, along with US being a signatory of the ISO/ITU defined standards on smart cities. Also, The British Standards Institution (BSI) has already established Smart City standards and has associated with the ISO Advisory Group on smart city standards. The UK subscribes to the BSI standards for smart cities and has adopted the same and the Smart London Plan incorporates open data standards in accordance with London DataStore. For development of smart cities, Korea has adopted the ISO/TC 268, which is focused on sustainable development in communities and also has one working group developing city indicators and another working group developing metrics for smart community infrastructures. However, in India, the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has undertaken the task to formulate standardised guidelines for central and state authorities in planning, design and construction of smart cities by setting up a technical committee under the Civil engineering department of the Bureau. However, adoption of the standards by implementing agencies would be voluntary and intends to complement internationally available documents in this area. Also, The Global Cities Institute (GCI) has undertaken a mission in the year 2015 to align with the Bureau of Indian Standards regarding development of standards of smart cities and also to forge relationships with Indian cities in light of ISO 37120. It can be said that India has currently not yet adopted international standards, but is in the process of developing national standards and adopting key international standards. Unlike other cities,which are adopting standards - national, ISO, or ITU, Indian cities are yet to adopt standards for regulation of the future smart cities.

Notes for India

India is in the nascent stages of developing smart cities across the country. Drawing from the practices adopted by cities across the world, smart cities in India should adopt strong regulatory and governance frameworks regarding technical standards, open data and data security and data protection policies. These policies will be essential in ensuring the sustainability and efficiency of smart cities while safeguarding individual rights. Some of these policies are already in place - such as India’s Open Data Policy and India’s data protection standards under section 43A of the ITA. It will be important to see how these policies are adopted and applied to the context of smart cities.

References

[1] Smart Cities and Transparent Evolution, http://www.posterheroes.org/Posterheroes3/_mat/PH3_eng.pdf.

[2] "Data, Data Everywhere." The Economist, February 25, 2010. Accessed March 17, 2016, http://www.economist.com/node/15557443.

[3] "Smart Cities." ISO. 2015. Accessed March 17, 2016, http://www.iso.org/iso/smart_cities_report-jtc1.pdf.

[4] Transcript of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's speech at Smart Nation launch on 24 November, http://www.pmo.gov.sg/mediacentre/transcript-prime-minister-lee-hsien-loongs-speech-smart-nation-launch-24-november.

[5] Smart Nation Vision, https://www.ida.gov.sg/Tech-Scene-News/Smart-Nation-Vision.

[6] Smart Nation, http://www.pmo.gov.sg/smartnation.

[7] Smart Nation Platform, https://www.ida.gov.sg/~/media/Files/About%20Us/Newsroom/Media%20Releases/2014/0617_smartnation/AnnexA_sn.pdf.

[8] Transcript of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's speech at Smart Nation launch on 24 November, https://www.ida.gov.sg/blog/insg/featured/singapore-lays-groundwork-to-be-worlds-first-smart-nation/.

[9] Prime Ministers’ Office Singapore-Smart Nation, http://www.pmo.gov.sg/smartnation.

[10] Prime Ministers’ Office Singapore-Smart Nation, http://www.pmo.gov.sg/smartnation.

[11] Constitution of the Republic of Singapore (Responsibility of the Prime Minister) Notification 2015, http://statutes.agc.gov.sg/aol/search/display/view.w3p;page=0;query=Status%3Acurinforce%20Type%3Aact,sl%20Content%3A%22smart%22;rec=4;resUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fstatutes.agc.gov.sg%2Faol%2Fsearch%2Fsummary%2Fresults.w3p%3Bquery%3DStatus%253Acurinforce%2520Type%253Aact,sl%2520Content%253A%2522smart%2522;whole=yes.

[12] Personal Data Protection Singapore-Annual Report 2014-15, https://www.pdpc.gov.sg/docs/default-source/Reports/pdpc-ar-fy14---online.pdf.

[13] Balancing Innovation and Personal Data Protection, https://www.ida.gov.sg/Tech-Scene-News/Tech-News/Digital-Government/2015/9/Balancing-innovation-and-personal-data-protection.

[14] Department of Statistics Singapore- Free Access to More Data on the SingStat Website from 1 March 2015, http://www.singstat.gov.sg/docs/default-source/default-document-library/news/press_releases/press27022015.pdf.

[15] Singapore Marks 50th Birthday With Open Data Contest, https://blog.hootsuite.com/singapore-open-data/.

[16] Virtual Singapore - a 3D city model platform for knowledge sharing and community collaboration, http://www.sla.gov.sg/News/tabid/142/articleid/572/category/Press%20Releases/parentId/97/year/2014/Default.aspx.

[17] Internet of Things (IoT) Standards Outline to Support Smart Nation Initiative Unveiled, http://www.spring.gov.sg/NewsEvents/PR/Pages/Internet-of-Things-(IoT)-Standards-Outline-to-Support-Smart-Nation-Initiative-Unveiled-20150812.aspx.

[18] Information Technology Standards Committee, https://www.itsc.org.sg/technical-committees/internet-of-things-technical-committee-iottc and https://www.ida.gov.sg/~/media/Files/Infocomm%20Landscape/iN2015/Reports/realisingthevisionin2015.pdf.

[19] Government of Dubai-2021 Dubai Plan-Purpose, http://www.dubaiplan2021.ae/the-purpose/.

[20] Government of Dubai-2021 Dubai Plan, http://www.dubaiplan2021.ae/dubai-plan-2021/.

[21] Smart Dubai, http://www.smartdubai.ae/foundation_layers.php.

[22] The Internet of Things: Connections for People’s happiness, http://www.smartdubai.ae/story021002.php.

[23] Smart Dubai - Current State, http://www.smartdubai.ae/current_state.php.

[24] Smart Dubai - District Guidelines, http://smartdubai.ae/districtguidelines/Smart_Dubai_District_Guidelines_Public_Brief.pdf.

[25] See; http://roadmap.smartdubai.ae/search-services-public.php and http://roadmap.smartdubai.ae/search-initiatives-public.php.

[26] Smart Dubai-Smart District Guidelines, http://smartdubai.ae/districtguidelines/Smart_Dubai_District_Guidelines_Public_Brief.pdf.

[27] Dubai Ruler issues new laws to further enhance the organisational structure and legal framework of Dubai Smart City, https://www.wam.ae/en/news/emirates/1395288828473.html.

[28] See: http://slc.dubai.gov.ae/en/AboutDepartment/News/Lists/NewsCentre/DispForm.aspx?ID=147&ContentTypeId=0x01001D47EB13C23E544893300E8367A23439 and http://www.smartdubai.ae/dubai_data.php.

[29] Dubai first city to trial ITU key performance indicators for smart sustainable cities, http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2015/12.aspx#.VtaYtlt97IU.

[30] Smart Dubai Benchmark Report 2015 Executive Summary, http://smartdubai.ae/bmr2015/methodology-public.php.

[31] Building a Smart + Equitable City, http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/forward/documents/NYC-Smart-Equitable-City-Final.pdf

[32] Building a Smart + Equitable City, http://www1.nyc.gov/site/forward/innovations/smartnyc.page.

[33] One New York: The Plan for a Strong and Just City, http://www1.nyc.gov/html/onenyc/about.html

[34] Open Data for All, http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/home/downloads/pdf/reports/2015/NYC-Open-Data-Plan-2015.pdf.

[35] 7 public projects that are turning New York into a “smart city”, http://www.builtinnyc.com/2015/11/24/7-projects-are-turning-new-york-futuristic-technology-hub.

[36] LinkNYC, https://www.link.nyc/faq.html#privacy.

[7] ANSI Network on Smart and Sustainable Cities, http://www.ansi.org/standards_activities/standards_boards_panels/anssc/overview.aspx?menuid=3

[38] IoT-Enabled Smart City Framework, http://publicaa.ansi.org/sites/apdl/Documents/News%20and%20Publications/Links%20Within%20Stories/IoT-EnabledSmartCityFrameworkWP20160213.pdf.

[39] Smart London (UK) Plan: Digital Technologies, London and Londoners, http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/ipl/files/2015/03/KleinmanM_Smart-London-UK-v5_30AP2015.pdf.

[40] Smart London Plan, http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/smart_london_plan.pdf.

[41] Smart London Plan, http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/smart_london_plan.pdf.

[42] Open Data White Paper, https://data.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Open_data_White_Paper.pdf.

[43] London Datastore-Privacy, http://data.london.gov.uk/about/privacy/.

[44] Future Cities Standards Centre in London, https://eu-smartcities.eu/commitment/5937.

[45] Smart London Plan, http://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/smart_london_plan.pdf.

[46] Smart Cities background paper, October 2013, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/246019/bis-13-1209-smart-cities-background-paper-digital.pdf.

[47] Presentation of 2015 Blueprint of Seoul as ‘State-of-the-art Smart City’, http://english.seoul.go.kr/presentation-of-2015-blueprint-of-seoul-as-%E2%80%98state-of-the-art-smart-city%E2%80%99/.

[48] “Policy Where There is Demand,” Seoul Utilizes Big Data, http://english.seoul.go.kr/policy-demand-seoul-utilizes-big-data/

[49] Seoul’s “Owl Bus” Based on Big Data Technology, http://www.citiesalliance.org/sites/citiesalliance.org/files/Seoul-Owl-Bus-11052014.pdf

[50] Seoul Launches “Global Digital Seoul 2020”, http://english.seoul.go.kr/seoul-launches-global-digital-seoul-2020/

[51] Smart Seoul 2015, http://english.seoul.go.kr/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/SMART_SEOUL_2015_41.pdf

[52] Disclosing public data through the Seoul Open Data Plaza, http://english.seoul.go.kr/policy-information/key-policies/informatization/seoul-open-data-plaza/

[53] Data protection in South Korea: overview, http://uk.practicallaw.com/2-579-7926.

[54]Smart Cities Seoul: a case study, https://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/23/01/T23010000190001PDFE.pdf

[55] Smart Cities-ISO, http://www.iso.org/iso/livelinkgetfile-isocs?nodeid=16193764.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/policies-and-standards-overview-of-five-international-smart-cities

Smart Cities in India: An Overview

vanya — 2016-01-11T01:30:07Z

The Government of India is in the process of developing 100 smart cities in India which it sees as the key to the country's economic and social growth. This blog post gives an overview of the Smart Cities project currently underway in India. The smart cities mission in India is at a nascent stage and an evolving area for research. The Centre for Internet and Society will continue work in this area.

Overview of the 100 Smart Cities Mission

The Government of India announced its flagship programme- the 100 Smart Cities mission in the year 2014 and was launched in June 2015 to achieve urban transformation, drive economic growth and improve the quality of life of people by enabling local area development and harnessing technology. Initially, the Mission aims to cover 100 cities across the countries (which have been shortlisted on the basis of a Smart Cities Proposal prepared by every city) and its duration will be five years (FY 2015-16 to FY 2019-20). The Mission may be continued thereafter in the light of an evaluation to be done by the Ministry of Urban Development (MoUD) and incorporation of the learnings into the Mission. The Mission aims to focus on area-based development in the form of redevelopment of existing spaces, or the development of new areas (Greenfield) to accommodate the growing urban population and ensure comprehensive planning to improve quality of life, create employment and enhance incomes for all - especially the poor and the disadvantaged. ^{^[1]} On 27th August 2015 the Centre unveiled 98 smart cities across India which were selected for this Project. Across the selected cities, 13 crore population ( 35% of the urban population will be included in the development plans. ^{^[2]} The mission has been developed for the purpose of achieving urban transformation. The vision is to preserve India's traditional architecture, culture & ethnicity while implementing modern technology to make cities livable, use resources in a sustainable manner and create an inclusive environment. ^{^[3]}

The promises of the Smart City mission include reduction of carbon footprint, adequate water and electricity supply, proper sanitation, including solid waste management, efficient urban mobility and public transport, affordable housing, robust IT connectivity and digitalization, good governance, citizen participation, security of citizens, health and education.

Questions unanswered

Why and How was the Smart Cities project conceptualized in India? What was the need for such a project in India?
What was the role of the public/citizens at the ideation and conceptualization stage of the project?
Which actors from the Government, Private industry and the civil society are involved in this mission? Though the smart cities mission has been initiated by the Government of India under the Ministry of Urban Development, there is no clarity about the involvement of the associated offices and departments of the Ministry.

How are the Smart Cities being selected?

The 100 cities were supposed to be selected on the basis of Smart cities challenge^{^[4]} involving two stages. Stage I of the challenge involved Intra-State city selection on objective criteria to identify cities to compete in stage-II. In August 2015, The Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India announced 100 smart cities ^{^[5]} evaluated on parameters such as service levels, financial and institutional capacity, past track record, called as the 'shortlisted cities' for this purpose. The selected cities are now competing for selection in the Second stage of the challenge, which is an All India competition. For this crucial stage, the potential 100 smart cities are required to prepare a Smart City Proposal (SCP) stating the model chosen (retrofitting, redevelopment, Greenfield development or a mix), along with a Pan-City dimension with Smart Solutions. The proposal must also include suggestions collected by way of consultations held with city residents and other stakeholders, along with the proposal for financing of the smart city plan including the revenue model to attract private participation. The country saw wide participation from the citizens to voice their aspirations and concerns regarding the smart city. 15th December 2015 has been declared as the deadline for submission of the SCP, which must be in consonance with evaluation criteria set by The MoUD, set on the basis of professional advice. ^{^[6]} On the basis of this, 20 cities will be selected for the first year. According to the latest reports, the Centre is planning to fund only 10 cities for the first phase in case the proposals sent by the states do not match the expected quality standards and are unable to submit complete area-development plans by the deadline, i.e. 15th December, 2015. ^{^[7]}

Questions unanswered

Who would be undertaking the task of evaluating and selecting the cities for this project?
What are the criteria for selection of a city to qualify in the first 20 (or 10, depending on the Central Government) for the first phase of implementation?

How are the smart cities going to be Funded?

The Smart City Mission will be operated as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme (CSS) and the Central Government proposes to give financial support to the Mission to the extent of Rs. 48,000 crores over five years i.e. on an average Rs. 100 crore per city per year. ^{^[8]} The additional resources will have to be mobilized by the State/ ULBs from external/internal sources. According to the scheme, once list of shortlisted Smart Cities is finalized, Rs. 2 crore would have been disbursed to each city for proposal preparation.^{^[9]}

According to estimates of the Central Government, around Rs 4 lakh crore of funds will be infused mainly through private investments and loans from multilateral institutions among other sources, which accounts to 80% of the total spending on the mission. ^{^[10]} For this purpose, the Government will approach the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) for a loan costing £500 million and £1 billion each for 2015-20. If ADB approves the loan, it would be it will be the bank's highest funding to India's urban sector so far.^{^[11]} Foreign Direct Investment regulations have been relaxed to invite foreign capital and help into the Smart City Mission. ^{^[12]}

Questions unanswered

The Government notes on Financing of the project mentions PPPs for private funding and leveraging of resources from internal and external resources. There is lack of clarity on the external resources the Government has/will approach and the varied PPP agreements the Government is or is planning to enter into for the purpose of private investment in the smart cities.

How is the scheme being implemented?

Under this scheme, each city is required to establish a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) having flexibility regarding planning, implementation, management and operations. The body will be headed by a full-time CEO, with nominees of Central Government, State Government and ULB on its Board. The SPV will be a limited company incorporated under the Companies Act, 2013 at the city-level, in which the State/UT and the Urban Local Body (ULB) will be the promoters having equity shareholding in the ratio 50:50. The private sector or financial institutions could be considered for taking equity stake in the SPV, provided the shareholding pattern of 50:50 of the State/UT and the ULB is maintained and the State/UT and the ULB together have majority shareholding and control of the SPV. Funds provided by the Government of India in the Smart Cities Mission to the SPV will be in the form of tied grant and kept in a separate Grant Fund.^{^[13]}

For the purpose of implementation and monitoring of the projects, the MoUD has also established an Apex Committee and National Mission Directorate for National Level Monitoring^{^[14]}, a State Level High Powered Steering Committee (HPSC) for State Level Monitoring^{^[15]} and a Smart City Advisory Forum at the City Level ^{^[16]}.

Also, several consulting firms^{^[17]} have been assigned to the 100 cities to help them prepare action plans.^{^[18]} Some of them include CRISIL, KPMG, McKinsey, etc. ^{^[19]}

Questions unanswered

What policies and regulations have been put in place to account for the smart cities, apart from policies looking at issues of security, privacy, etc.?
What international/national standards will be adopted while development of the smart cities? Though the Bureau of Indian Standards is in the process of formulating standardized guidelines for the smart cities in India^{^[20]}, yet there is lack of clarity on adoption of these national standards, along with the role of international standards like the ones formulated by ISO.

What is the role of Foreign Governments and bodies in the Smart cities mission?

Ever since the government's ambitious project has been announced and cities have been shortlisted, many countries across the globe have shown keen interest to help specific shortlisted cities in building the smart cities and are willing to invest financially. Countries like Sweden, Malaysia, UAE, USA, etc. have agreed to partner with India for the mission.^{^[21]} For example, UK has partnered with the Government to develop three India cities-Pune, Amravati and Indore.^{^[22]} Israel's start-up city Tel Aviv also entered into an agreement to help with urban transformation in the Indian cities of Pune, Nagpur and Nashik to foster innovation and share its technical know-how.^{^[23]} France has piqued interest for Nagpur and Puducherry, while the United States is interested in Ajmer, Vizag and Allahabad. Also, Spain's Barcelona Regional Agency has expressed interest in exchanging technology with the Delhi. Apart from foreign government, many organizations and multilateral agencies are also keen to partner with the Indian government and have offered financial assistance by way of loans. Some of them include the UK government-owned Department for International Development, German government KfW development bank, Japan International Cooperation Agency, the US Trade and Development Agency, United Nations Industrial Development Organization and United Nations Human Settlements Programme. ^{^[24]}

Questions unanswered

Do these governments or organization have influence on any other component of the Smart cities?
How much are the foreign governments and multilateral bodies spending on the respective cities?
What kind of technical know-how is being shared with the Indian government and cities?

What is the way ahead?

On the basis of the SCP, the MoUD will evaluate, assess the credibility and select 20 smart cities out of the short-listed ones for execution of the plan in the first phase. The selected city will set up a SPV and receive funding from the Government.

Questions unanswered

Will the deadline of submission of the Smart Cities Proposal be pushed back?
After the SCP is submitted on the basis of consultation with the citizens and public, will they be further involved in the implementation of the project and what will be their role?
How will the MoUD and other associated organizations as well as actors consider the implementation realities of the project, like consideration of land displacement, rehabilitation of the slum people, etc.
How are ICT based systems going to be utilized to make the cities and the infrastructure "smart"?
How is the MoUD going to respond to the concerns and criticism emerging from various sections of the society, as being reflected in the news items?
How will the smart cities impact and integrate the existing laws, regulations and policies? Does the Government intend to use the existing legislations in entirety, or update and amend the laws for implementation of the Smart Cities Mission?

^{^[1]} Smart Cities, Mission Statement and Guidelines, Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, June 2015, Available at : http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/SmartCityGuidelines.pdf

^{^[2]} http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-08-27/news/65929187_1_jammu-and-kashmir-12-cities-urban-development-venkaiah-naidu

^{^[3]} http://india.gov.in/spotlight/smart-cities-mission-step-towards-smart-india

^{^[4]} http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/Process%20of%20Selection.pdf

^{^[5]} Full list : http://www.scribd.com/doc/276467963/Smart-Cities-Full-List

^{^[6]} http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/Process%20of%20Selection.pdf

^{^[7]} http://www.ibtimes.co.in/modi-govt-select-only-10-cities-under-smart-city-project-this-year-report-658888

^{^[8]} http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/Financing%20of%20Smart%20Cities.pdf

^{^[9]} Smart Cities presentation by MoUD : http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/Presentation%20on%20Smart%20Cities%20Mission.pdf

^{^[10]} http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/smart-cities-projectfrom-france-to-us-a-rush-to-offer-assistance-funds/

^{^[11]} http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/funding-for-smart-cities-key-to-coffer-lies-outside-india/#sthash.5lnW9Jsq.dpuf

^{^[12]} http://india.gov.in/spotlight/smart-cities-mission-step-towards-smart-india

^{^[13]} http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/SPVs.pdf

^{^[14]} http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/National%20Level%20Monitoring.pdf

^{^[15]} http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/State%20Level%20Monitoring.pdf

^{^[16]} http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/City%20Level%20Monitoring.pdf

^{^[17]} http://smartcities.gov.in/writereaddata/List_of_Consulting_Firms.pdf

^{^[18]} http://pib.nic.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=128457

^{^[19]} http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/49242050.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

^{^[20]} http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/in-a-first-bis-to-come-up-with-standards-for-smart-cities-115060400931_1.html

^{^[21]} http://accommodationtimes.com/foreign-countries-have-keen-interest-in-development-of-smart-cities/

^{^[22]} http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2015-11-20/news/68440402_1_uk-trade-three-smart-cities-british-deputy-high-commissioner

^{^[23]} http://www.jpost.com/Business-and-Innovation/Tech/Tel-Aviv-to-help-India-build-smart-cities-435161?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=socialnetwork

^{^[24]} http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/smart-cities-projectfrom-france-to-us-a-rush-to-offer-assistance-funds/#sthash.nCMxEKkc.dpuf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/smart-cities-in-india-an-overview

Sixth Meeting of the two Sub-Groups on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah

praskrishna — 2012-08-23T09:48:55Z

The sixth meeting of the two sub-groups on privacy issues will be held on August 31, 2012 at 10.00 a.m. in Committee Room No. 228, Yojana Bhawan, Sansad Marg, New Delhi under the chairmanship of Justice AP Shah, former chief justice of Delhi High Court.

No. M-13040/43/2012-CIT&I (Pt. File)
Government of India
Planning Commission
(CIT&I Division)

Yojana Bhawan, Sansad Marg,
New Delhi, dated the 23rd August, 2012

Meeting Notice

Subject: Meeting of the Group of Experts on Privacy Issues to be held on 31st August, 2012 under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court.

The meeting of the Group of Experts on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court is scheduled to be held on 31st August, 2012, at 10.00 AM in the Committee Room No. 228, Yojana Bhawan, Sansad Marg, New Delhi - 110001.

The agenda of the meeting is to discuss and finalize the draft report prepared on the basis of the recommendations of the two Sub-Groups of the Expert Group (Copy enclosed).

You are requested to kindly make it convenient to attend the meeting.

(S. Bose)
Deputy Secretary (CIT&I)

Through e-mail to:

Justice A.P. Shah, Chairman
Shri R. S. Sharma, D.G., UIDAI
Dr. Gulshan Rai, D.G. CERT-In, DeITy
Shri Manoj Joshi, J.S. DOPT
Shri R. Ragupathi,Additional Secretary, Department of Legal Affairs
Shri Som Mittal, Nasscom
Ms. Barkha Dutt, NDTV
Ms. Usha Ramanathan
Shri Sunil Abraham, CIS
Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj
Ms. Mala Dutt
Shri R.K. Gupta

Copy for information to:
Dr. C.M. Kumar, Sr. Adviser (CIT&I)
PS to MOS (Planning, S&T and Earth Sciences)

(S. Bose)
Deputy Secretary (CIT&I)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/sixth-meeting-of-sub-groups-on-privacy-issues

Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, Nairobi: A Summary

praskrishna — 2011-10-24T09:09:14Z

The sixth annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum was held from 27 to 30 September 2011 at the United Nations Office in Nairobi, Kenya. Sunil Abraham participated in six workshops: Privacy, Security, and Access to Rights: A Technical and Policy Analyses, Use of Digital Technologies for Civic Engagement and Political Change: Lessons Learned and Way Forward, The Impact of Regulation: FOSS and Enterprise, Proprietary Influences in Free and Open Source Software: Lessons to Open and Universal Internet Standards, Access and Diversity of Broadband Internet Access and Putting Users First: How Can Privacy be Protected in Today’s Complex Mobile Ecosystem?

Privacy, Security, and Access to Rights: A Technical and Policy Analyses

Workshop No. 219
The workshop was moderated by Kim Pham, Expression Technologies, Civil Society (United States). The panel members included Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza, Centro de Technologica e Socieda (Brazil), Christopher Soghoian, Indiana University (United States), Karen Reilly, Tor Project, Technical/Civil Society (United States) and Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society (India).
See the workshop details here

Use of Digital Technologies for Civic Engagement and Political Change: Lessons Learned and Way Forward

Workshop No. 184
The workshop was moderated by Katim S Touray Council Vice Chair, Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa and Member, ICANN Board of Directors. Fouad Bajwa of Gerry Morgan Foundation (Pakistan) was the remote moderator. Nnenna Nwakanma of Nnenna.org, Simeon Oriko of @TheKuyuProject &@StorySpaces, Wael Khalil, Activist and Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet & Society were the panel members. Nishant Shah from the Centre for Internet & Society participated remotely from Bangalore.
See the workshop details here
See the entire transcription here

The Impact of Regulation: FOSS and Enterprise

Workshop No. 211
The workshop was moderated by Dorothy Gordon, Director General, AITI-KACE, Judy Okite was the remote moderator. The panel members were Satish Babu, ICFOSS, India, Yves Miezan Ezo, Smile Training, Manager, (France), Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, Evans Ikua, FOSS Certification Manager, ict@innovation program.
See the workshop details here
See the entire transcription here

Proprietary Influences in Free and Open Source Software: Lessons to Open and Universal Internet Standards

Workshop No. 201
The workshop was moderated by Alejandro Pisanty, Director General for Academic Computing Services of the National University of Mexico (UNAM), Mexico. Tracy Hackshaw, Computer Society of Trinadad and Tobago, Trinadad and Tobago, Venkatesh Hariharan, Head of Public Policy and Government Affairs at Google, India and Scott O Bradner, University Technology Security Officer, Harvard University, USA were the panel members.
See the workshop details here
See the entire transcription here

Access and Diversity of Broadband Internet Access

Workshop No. 113
The workshop was moderated by N Ravi Shanker, Addl Secy, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India (Chair). Abhishek Singh, Director, Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Information Technology, Government of India, Venkatesh Hariharan, Head of Public Policy and Government Relations, Google India and Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, The Centre for Internet and Society, India were the panel members.
See the workshop details here
See the entire transcription here

Putting users First: How can Privacy be Protected in Today’s Complex Mobile Ecosystem?

Workshop No. 75
This workshop was moderated by Ambassador David Gross, Partner, Wiley Rein LLP, Yiannis Theodorou, Regulatory Policy Manager, GSMA was the remote moderator. The panel members included Pat Walshe, Director of Privacy-GSMA), Jeff Brueggeman (Vice President-Publiy Policy AT&T), Patrick Ryan, Policy Counsel, Open Internet for Google Inc, Ms Juliana Rotich, Executive Director of Ushahidi Inc, Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, The Centre for Internet and Society (India) and Ian Brown, co-director of Oxford University's Information Security and Privacy Programme.
See the workshop details here
See the entire transcription here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sixth-annual-meeting-igf

Siri, did you hear me? Adapting Privacy to New Technologies, Automated Decision-making, and Cloud Computing

Admin — 2018-03-25T03:21:24Z

Amber Sinha participated as a panelist in the discussion on adapting privacy to new technologies organised by the USIBC on March 6, 2018 in New Delhi.

The way consumers interact with technology is quickly evolving, and there are distinct implications for privacy as these new applications and products become embedded in our daily lives. Many new technologies eliminate the need for consumers to interface with a screen, relying on sensor data, verbal interactions, or innate human communications – a grin or hand gesture. As technology evolves, so must the privacy protections.

Moderator: Ashutosh Chadha, Group Director, government Affairs & Public policy, Microsoft India

Panelists:

Shaundra Watson, Director, Policy, BSA | The Software Alliance
Betsy Broder, Counsel for International Consumer Protection, U.S. FTC
Amber Sinha, Senior Programme Manager, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)
Riccardo Masucci, Global Director of Privacy Policy, Intel
Srinivas Poosarla, Vice President & Head (Global), Privacy & Data Protection, Infosys Limited

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/siri-did-you-hear-me-adapting-privacy-to-new-technologies-automated-decision-making-and-cloud-computing

Silence on the Dera Front

Sat Singh — 2017-12-20T15:58:44Z

Strap: How DSS followers, accused of violent protests after their leader was sentenced, manage without the internet.

Sirsa, Haryana: Raj Rani’s two expensive smartphones are her whole world. But the 32-year-old entrepreneur from Haryana’s Hisar district found them entirely useless when she needed them most – on August 25, during the violent protests by members of the spiritual group Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS) after their leader Gurmeet Ram Rahim was convicted of rape.

“My family follows DSS, and had gone to attend the monthly congregation on August 15 (which also happened to be Ram Rahim’s birthday), when were told that ‘Pitaji’ asked us to stay back in the premises, in case of an adverse verdict by the court in rape cases against him,” she says. This is understood to have been done as a show of support that could put pressure on the judiciary and state for a favourable verdict.

Along with lakhs of other followers, Rani was present in Dera’s Sirsa headquarters with her two children. She stayed in constant touch with her husband Sunny Kumar, a businessman based in New Delhi. "Every day, I showed him the Dera premises and religious activities through WhatsApp video calls,” she says.

She recalls “the nightmarish moment” on the night of August 24 when the Haryana police and the Indian army surrounded the Dera. They imposed a curfew in the town, and restricted people from coming in and going outside the premises spread over 700 acres.

Rani says that the government blocked the internet on August 24 – a day before the self-styled godman appeared in the Panchkula court. Service providers of different companies, including mobile phone and landline services, were also barred at the Dera Sacha Sauda headquarters. As a result, Rani lost all contact with her husband. “I was confident until I was connected with my family over WhatsApp call and video chat, but as soon as this went away, I started losing faith, and felt afraid,” she says.

After the curfew was imposed and internet was shut down, Rani says the devotees started to panic. They demanded that the DSS management permit them to go to their respective homes after Gurmeet’s arrest on August 25. After his conviction for rape, Rani says the politically influential and funds-flushed DSS fell like a house of cards. “There was chaos all around,” she says.

Fearing that Dera followers would vandalise public property to protest their leader’s conviction, the police had restricted public transport. Private vehicles were being allowed to move only after multiple security checks. On the morning of August 27, hundreds of devotees started to leave the Dera premises by foot. Rani walked about 50 kms along the national highway 10 (Hisar-Sirsa) up to Fatehabad district.

It was a coordination committee of police, legislators, and bureaucrats from Haryana, Punjab and Chandigarh, under the chairmanship of Punjab governor and union territory administrator VP Singh Badnore, that took the decision to ban the internet. After the order on August 24, all the SMSes, dongle, and data services provided on mobile network were suspended. The government only allowed phone calls during the internet shutdown in affected districts in these states.

Dissing the police’s claims that Dera followers started the violence first, provoking the cops to fire, 32-year-old shopkeeper Gaurav Soni, an ardent DSS follower for seven years, insists that things went out of control because the internet connection was snapped. He says that senior members in the Dera’s internal WhatsApp groups couldn’t send messages to calm angry followers. “Whatever happened was a result of a communication gap,” says Soni, who joined the protests. “No one asked the followers to get violent, and followers never attempt such things without proper instructions. But since there was a leadership gap, thanks to the break in communication, all this occurred.”

Vikas Kumar, an IT expert of the Dera Sacha Sauda agrees, "As soon as we came to know about the conviction, we tried to send a message from Dera chairperson Vipasana Insan, requesting followers to maintain peace, and keep faith in the judicial process. But we couldn’t upload this message because mobile internet and broadband services were banned." They also tried to call key Dera leaders. “But it was too late by then, and followers clashed with law enforcement agencies," Vikas adds.

The Dera’s protests, and the related internet and transport shutdown seemed to have impacted the group’s own followers too.

Those outside Haryana received misleading or panic-inducing forwards and videos, worrying them, but also worsening the anger against the state administration. Rajat Singh, a 65-year-old Dera follower from Mansa district, Punjab, says his son Rishipal Singh, had gone with several followers to the court in Panchkula, Haryana, where Gurmeet’s case was being heard. Rajat Singh says that since the internet was not banned at Punjab’s Mansa, he continuously received photographs of bullet-ridden bodies, charred cars, massive fires, and vandalism on WhatsApp. It’s unclear how Dera members from Haryana were able to send these pictures, overriding the blocked internet. “I was so disturbed,” he says. “As soon as we came to know that the Haryana police had opened fire on the followers, I started calling my son,” he says. But phone networks were constantly busy or spotty. “My son’s phone was not reachable. I asked relatives to send him text messages, or messages on WhatsApp, but the internet was not working.” It was much later, when Rishipal made a rushed call, that they were assured of his well-being.

Unaware of the violence at the Dera, 37-year-old Rakesh Kumar, a DSS follower from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, was visiting Sirsa on August 24. “I booked a hotel in Sirsa district through an app, and chose to pay at the hotel. When I reached Sirsa, the internet was off.” Kumar went to the Dera taking lifts from a few vehicles plying on the sly, but soon returned to his hotel after followers went on a rampage. He wanted to leave Sirsa, but “got stuck” because the hotel didn’t allow him to leave without paying. ATMs were closed, vandalised, or not working, and it was generally unsafe to go out. “I had some balance on PayTM, but that was also not working as there was no internet connection,” he says.

Without Facebook or Twitter accounts, the Sirsa police had no way to counter rumours, discourage violence, or call for peace, says additional deputy commissioner (ADC) Sirsa, Munish Nagpal. A ban, he says, was the only way for them to nip crowd mobilisation in the bud, and curb rumours from spreading to Dera followers in other states of north India.

“The ban controlled the situation to a certain extent, but it handicapped us, and slowed the process of our communication with seniors in Chandigarh,” admitted Ashwin Shenvi, the superintendent of police (SP).

The Haryana police, chief minister and health minister are usually active on social media, and the government too prides itself on being digitally savvy, but during the ban, every account was inactive. This despite the state offices having broadband.

It is worth pointing out that DSS is credited for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s first ever win in Haryana in the 2014 state elections. Gurmeet Ram Rahim and CM Manohar Lal Khattar have even shared stages multiple times for photo-ops. Many believe this to be the reason behind the state government not being very vocal, online or offline, in condemning the violence by Gurmeet’s followers. It could have ticked off DSS’s over 50 million followers, a large votebank. The political dynamics, hence, were also responsible for internet becoming a victim of the violence unleashed.

Sat Singh is a Rohtak-based journalist and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.

Shutdown stories are the output of a collaboration between 101 Reporters and CIS with support from Facebook.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/silence-on-the-dera-front

Shreya Singhal and 66A

sunil — 2015-04-19T08:09:42Z

Most software code has dependencies. Simple and reproducible methods exist for mapping and understanding the impact of these dependencies. Legal code also has dependencies --across court orders and within a single court order. And since court orders are not produced using a structured mark-up language, experts are required to understand the precedential value of a court order.

The article was published in the Economic and Political Weekly Vol-L No.15. Vidushi Marda, programme officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, was responsible for all the research that went into this article. PDF version here.

As a non–lawyer and engineer, I cannot authoritatively comment on the Supreme Court’s order in Shreya Singhal vs Union of India (2015) on sections of the Information Technology Act of 2000, so I have tried to summarise a variety of views of experts in this article. The Shreya Singhal order is said to be unprecedented at least for the last four decades and also precedent setting as its lucidity, some believe, will cause a ripple effect in opposition to a restrictive understanding of freedom of speech and expression, and an expansiveness around reasonable restrictions. Let us examine each of the three sections that the bench dealt with.

The Section in Question

Section 66A of the IT Act was introduced in a hastily-passed amendment. Unfortunately, the language used in this section was a pastiche of outdated foreign laws such as the UK Communications Act of 2003, Malicious Communications Act of 1988 and the US Telecommunications Act, 1996.¹ Since the amendment, this section has been misused to make public examples out of innocent, yet uncomfortable speech, in order to socially engineer all Indian netizens into self-censorship.²

Summary: The Court struck down Section 66A of the IT Act in its entirety holding that it was not saved by Article 19(2) of the Constitution on account of the expressions used in the section, such as "annoying," "grossly offensive," "menacing,", "causing annoyance." The Court justified this by going through the reasonable restrictions that it considered relevant to the arguments and testing them against S66A. Apart from not falling within any of the categories for which speech may be restricted, S66A was struck down on the grounds of vagueness, over-breadth and chilling effect. The Court considered whether some parts of the section could be saved, and then concluded that no part of S66A was severable and declared the entire section unconstitutional. When it comes to regulating speech in the interest of public order, the Court distinguished between discussion, advocacy and incitement. It considered the first two to fall under the freedom of speech and expression granted under Article 19(1)(a), and held that it was only incitement that attracted Article 19(2).

Between Speech and Harm

Gautam Bhatia, a constitutional law expert, has an optimistic reading of the judgment that will have value for precipitating the ripple effect. According to him, there were two incompatible strands of jurisprudence which have been harmonised by collapsing tendency into imminence.³ The first strand, exemplified by Ramjilal Modi vs State of UP⁴ and Kedar Nath Singh vs State of Bihar,⁵ imported an older and weaker American standard, that is, the tendency test, between the speech and public order consequences. The second strand exemplified byRam Manohar Lohia vs State of UP,⁶ S Rangarajan vs P Jagjivan Ram,⁷ andArup Bhuyan vs Union of India,⁸ all require greater proximity between the speech and the disorder anticipated. In Shreya Singhal, the Supreme Court held that at the stage of incitement, the reasonable restrictions will step in to curb speech that has a tendency to cause disorder. Other experts are of the opinion that Justice Nariman was doing no such thing, and was only sequentially applying all the tests for free speech that have been developed within both these strands of precedent. In legal activist Lawrence Liang's analysis, "Ramjilal Modi was decided by a seven judge bench and Kedarnath by a constitutional bench. As is often the case in India, when subsequent benches of a lower strength want to distinguish themselves from older precedent but are unable to overrule them, they overcome this constraint through a doctrinal development by stealth. This is achieved by creative interpretations that chip away at archaic doctrinal standards without explicitly discarding them."⁹

Compatibility with US Jurisprudence

United States (US) jurisprudence has been imported by the Indian Supreme Court in an inconsistent manner. Some judgments hold that the American first amendment harbours no exception and hence is incompatible with Indian jurisprudence, while other judgments have used American precedent when convenient. Indian courts have on occasion imported an additional restriction beyond the eight available in 19(2)-the ground of public interest, best exemplified by the cases of K A Abbas¹⁰ and Ranjit Udeshi.¹¹ The bench in its judgment-which has been characterised by Pranesh Prakash as a masterclass in free speech jurisprudence¹²-clarifies that while the American first amendment jurisprudence is applicable in India, the only area where a difference is made is in the "sub serving of general public interest" made under the US law. This eloquent judgment will hopefully instruct judges in the future on how they should import precedent from American free speech jurisprudence.

Article 14 Challenge

The Article 14 challenge brought forward by the petitioners contended that Section 66A violated their fundamental right to equality because it differentiated between offline and online speech in terms of the length of maximum sentence, and was hence unconstitutional. The Court held that an intelligible differentia, indeed, did exist. It found so on two grounds. First, the internet offered people a medium through which they can express views at negligible or no cost. Second, the Court likened the rate of dissemination of information on the internet to the speed of lightning and could potentially reach millions of people all over the world. Before Shreya Singhal, the Supreme Court had already accepted medium-specific regulation. For example in K A Abbas, the Court made a distinction between films and other media, stating that the impact of films on an average illiterate Indian viewer was more profound than other forms of communication. The pessimistic reading of Shreya Singhal is that Parliament can enact medium-specific law as long as there is an intelligible differentia which could even be a technical difference-speed of transmission. However, the optimistic interpretation is that medium-specific law can only be enacted if there are medium-specific harms, e g, phishing, which has no offline equivalent. If the executive adopts the pessimistic reading, then draconian sections like 66A will find their way back into the IT Act. Instead, if they choose the optimistic reading, they will introduce bills that fill the regulatory vacuum that has been created by the striking down of S66A, that is, spam and cyberbullying.

Section 79

Section 79 was partially read down. This section, again introduced during the 2008 amendment, was supposed to give legal immunity to intermediaries for third party content by giving a quick redressal for those affected by providing a mechanism for takedown notices in the Intermediaries Guidelines Rules notified in April 2011. But the section and rules had enabled unchecked invisible censorship¹³ in India and has had a demonstrated chilling effect on speech¹⁴ because of the following reasons:

One, there are additional unconstitutional restrictions on speech and expression. Rule 3(2) required a standard "rules and regulation, terms and condition or user agreement" that would have to be incorporated by all intermediaries. Under these rules, users are prohibited from hosting, displaying, uploading, modifying, publishing, transmitting, updating or sharing any information that falls into different content categories, a majority of which are restrictions on speech which are completely out of the scope of Article 19(2). For example, there is an overly broad category which contains information that harms minors in any way. Information that "belongs to another person and to which the user does not have any right to" could be personal information or could be intellectual property. A much better intermediary liability provision was introduced into the Copyright Act with the 2013 amendment. Under the Copyright Act, content could be reinstated if the takedown notice was not followed up with a court order within 21 days.¹⁵ A counter-proposal drafted by the Centre for Internet and Society for "Intermediary Due Diligence and Information Removal," has a further requirement for reinstatement that is not seen in the Copyright Act.¹⁶

Two, a state-mandated private censorship regime is created. You could ban speech online without approaching the court or the government. Risk-aversive private intermediaries who do not have the legal resources to subjectively determine the legitimacy of a legal claim err on the side of caution and takedown content.

Three, the principles of natural justice are not observed by the rules of the new censorship regime. The creator of information is not required to be notified nor given a chance to be heard by the intermediary. There is no requirement for the intermediary to give a reasoned decision.

Four, different classes of intermediaries are all treated alike. Since the internet is not an uniform assemblage of homogeneous components, but rather a complex ecosystem of diverse entities, the different classes of intermediaries perform different functions and therefore contribute differently to the causal chain of harm to the affected person. If upstream intermediaries like registrars for domain names are treated exactly like a web-hosting service or social media service then there will be over-blocking of content.

Five, there are no safeguards to prevent abuse of takedown notices. Frivolous complaints could be used to suppress legitimate expressions without any fear of repercussions and given that it is not possible to expedite reinstatement of content, the harm to the creator of information may be irreversible if the information is perishable. Transparency requirements with sufficient amounts of detail are also necessary given that a human right was being circumscribed. There is no procedure to have the removed information reinstated by filing a counter notice or by appealing to a higher authority.

The judgment has solved half the problem by only making intermediaries lose immunity if they ignore government orders or court orders. Private takedown notices sent directly to the intermediary without accompanying government orders or courts order no longer have basis in law. The bench made note of the Additional Solicitor General's argument that user agreement requirements as in Rule 3(2) were common practice across the globe and then went ahead to read down Rule 3(4) from the perspective of private takedown notices. One way of reading this would be to say that the requirement for standardised "rules and regulation, terms and condition or user agreement" remains. The other more consistent way of reading this part of the order in conjunction with the striking down of 66A would be to say those parts of the user agreement that are in violation of Article 19(2) have also been read down.

This would have also been an excellent opportunity to raise the transparency requirements both for the State and for intermediaries: for (i) the person whose speech is being censored, (ii) the persons interested in consuming that speech, and (iii) the general public. It is completely unclear whether transparency in the case of India has reduced the state appetite for censorship. Transparency reports from Facebook, Google and Twitter claim that takedown notices from the Indian government are on the rise.¹⁷ However, on the other hand, the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY) claims that government statistics for takedowns do not match the numbers in these transparency reports.¹⁸ The best way to address this uncertainty would be to require each takedown notice and court order to be made available by the State, intermediary and also third-party monitors of free speech like the Chilling Effects Project.

Section 69A

The Court upheld S69A which deals with website blocking, and found that it was a narrowly-drawn provision with adequate safeguards, and, hence, not constitutionally infirm. In reality, unfortunately, website blocking usually by internet service providers (ISPs) is an opaque process in India. Blocking under S69A has been growing steadily over the years. In its latest response to an RTI (right to information)¹⁹ query from the Software Freedom Law Centre, DEITY said that 708 URLs were blocked in 2012, 1,349 URLs in 2013, and 2,341 URLs in 2014. On 30 December 2014 alone, the centre blocked 32 websites to curb Islamic State of Iraq and Syria propaganda, among which were "pastebin" websites, code repository (Github) and generic video hosting sites (Vimeo and Daily Motion).²⁰ Analysis of leaked block lists and lists received as responses to RTI requests have revealed that the block orders are full of errors (some items do not exist, some items are not technically valid web addresses), in some cases counter speech which hopes to reverse the harm of illegal speech has also been included, web pages from mainstream media houses have also been blocked and some URLs are base URLs which would result in thousands of pages getting blocked when only a few pages might contain allegedly illegal content.²¹

Pre-decisional Hearing

The central problem with the law as it stands today is that it allows for the originator of information to be isolated from the process of censorship. The Website Blocking Rules provide that all "reasonable efforts" must be made to identify the originator or the intermediary who hosted the content. However, Gautam Bhatia offers an optimistic reading of the judgment, he claims that the Court has read into this "or" and made it an "and"-thus requiring that the originator must also be notified of blocks when he or she can be identified.²²

Transparency

Usually, the reasons for blocking a website are unknown both to the originator of material as well as those trying to access the blocked URL. The general public also get no information about the nature and scale of censorship unlike offline censorship where the court orders banning books and movies are usually part of public discourse. In spite of the Court choosing to leave Section 69A intact, it stressed the importance of a written order for blocking, so that a writ may be filed before a high court under Article 226 of the Constitution. While citing this as an existing safeguard, the Court seems to have been under the impression that either the intermediary or the originator is normally informed, but according to Apar Gupta, a lawyer for the People's Union for Civil Liberties, "While the rules indicate that a hearing is given to the originator of the content, this safeguard is not evidenced in practice. Not even a single instance exists on record for such a hearing."²³ Even worse, block orders have been unevenly implemented by ISPs with variations across telecom circles, connectivity technologies, making it impossible for anyone to independently monitor and reach a conclusion whether an internet resource is inaccessible as a result of a S69A block order or due to a network anomaly.

Rule 16 under S69A requires confidentiality with respect to blocking requests and complaints, and actions taken in that regard. The Court notes that this was argued to be unconstitutional, but does not state their opinion on this question. Gautam Bhatia holds the opinion that this, by implication, requires that requests cannot be confidential. Chinmayi Arun, from the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi, one of the academics supporting the petitioners, holds the opinion that it is optimism carried too far to claim that the Court noted the challenge to Rule 16 but just forgot about it in a lack of attention to detail that is belied by the rest of the judgment.

Free speech researchers and advocates have thus far used the RTI Act to understand the censorship under S69A. The Centre for Internet and Society has filed a number of RTI queries about websites blocked under S69A and has never been denied information on grounds of Rule 16.²⁴ However, there has been an uneven treatment of RTI queries by DEITY in this respect, with the Software Freedom Law Centre²⁵ being denied blocking orders on the basis of Rule 16. The Court could have protected free speech and expression by reading down Rule 16 except for a really narrow set of exceptions wherein only aggregate information would be made available to affected parties and members of the public.

Conclusions

In Shreya Singhal, the Court gave us great news: S66A has been struck down; good news: S79(3) and its rules have been read down; and bad news: S69A has been upheld. When it comes to each section, the impact of this judgment can either be read optimistically or pessimistically, and therefore we must wait for constitutional experts to weigh in on the ripple effect that this order will produce in other areas of free speech jurisprudence in India. But even as free speech activists celebrate Shreya Singhal, some are bemoaning the judgment as throwing the baby away with the bathwater, and wish to reintroduce another variant of S66A. Thus, we must remain vigilant.

Notes

1 G S Mudur (2012): "66A 'Cut and Paste Job,'" The Telegraph, 3 December, visited on 3 April, 2015, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1121 203/jsp/frontpage/story_16268138.jsp

2 Sunil Abraham (2012): "The Five Monkeys and Ice Cold Water," Centre for Internet and Society, 26 September, visited on 3 April 2015, http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-deccan-chronicle-sep-16-201...

3 Gautam Bhatia (2015): "The Striking Down of 66A: How Free Speech Jurisprudence in India Found Its Soul Again," Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy, 26 March, visited on 4 April 2015, https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/the-striking-down-of-sect...

4 Ramjilal Modi vs State of UP, 1957, SCR 860.

5 Kedar Nath Singh vs State of Bihar, 1962, AIR 955.

6 Ram Manohar Lohia vs State of UP, AIR, 1968 All 100.

7 S Rangarajan vs P Jagjivan Ram, 1989, SCC(2), 574.

8 Arup Bhuyan vs Union of India, (2011), 3 SCC 377.

9 Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum, personal communication to author, 6 April 2015.

10 K A Abbas vs Union of India, 1971 SCR (2), 446.

11 Ranjit Udeshi vs State of Maharashtra,1965 SCR (1) 65.

12 Pranesh Prakash (2015): "Three Reasons Why 66A Verdict Is Momentous"/ Times of India/(29 March). Visited on 6 April 2015, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/all-that-matters/Th...

13 Pranesh Prakash (2011): "Invisble Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen," The Centre for Internet and Society, 14 December, visited on 6 April 2015, http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/invisible-censorship

14 Rishabh Dara (2012): "Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet," The Centre for Internet and Society, 27 April, visited on 6 April 2015, http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/chilling-effects-on-free-expres... .

15 Rule 75, Copyright Rules, 2013.

16 The Draft Counter Proposal is available at http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/counter-proposal-by-cis-draft-i...

17 According to Facebook's transparency report, there were 4,599 requests in the first half of 2014, followed by 5,473 requests in the latter half. Available at https://govtrequests.facebook. com/country/India/2014-H2/ also see Google's transparency report available at http: //www.google. com/transparencyreport/removals/government/IN/?hl=en and Twitter's report, available at https:// transparency.twitter.com/country/in

18 Surabhi Agarwal (2015): "Transparency Reports of Internet Companies are Skewed: Gulashan Rai," Business Standard, 31 March, viewed on 5 April 2015, http://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/transparency-re... .

19 http://sflc.in/deity-says-2341-urls-were-blocked-in-2014-refuses-to-reve...

20 "32 Websites Go Blank," The Hindu, 1 January 2015, viewed on 6 April 2015, http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/now-modi-govt-blocks-32-websites/a...

21 Pranesh Prakash (2012): "Analysing Latest List of Blocked Sites (Communalism and Rioting Edition)," 22 August, viewed on 6 April 2015, http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/analysing-blocked-sites-ri... . Also, see Part II of the same series at http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/analyzing-the-latest-list-of-bl... and analysis of blocking in February 2013, at http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/analyzing-latest-list-of-b...

22 Gautam Bhatia (2015): "The Supreme Court's IT Act Judgment, and Secret Blocking," Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy, 25 March, viewed on 6 April 2015, https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/the-supreme-courts-it-act...

23 Apar Gupta (2015): "But What about Section 69A?," Indian Express, 27 March, viewed on 5 April 2015, http://indianexpress. com/article/opinion/ columns/but-what-about-section-69a/

24 Pranesh Prakash (2011): DIT's Response to RTI on Website Blocking, The Centre for Internet and Society, 7 April, viewed on 6 April 2015, http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/rti-response-dit-blocking ). Also see http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/analysis-dit-response-2nd-... and http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/reply-to-rti-applicat...

25 http://sflc.in/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/RTI-blocking-final-reply-from-...

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-and-political-weekly-sunil-abraham-april-11-2015-shreya-singhal-and-66a