Centre for Internet and Society

The Unsocial Network

praskrishna — 2011-08-19T06:47:33Z

Has social media become a threat to democratic states even as it serves as a vehicle against totalitarian regimes? Its abuse during the London riots has reopened the question.

Power of the the people is a double- edged sword. Power to the people is positively divisive. Especially, when the people become a mass, masked mob on the internet, using the power of proliferation of social networking sites to support, express – and, sometimes, incite. As was evident in the recent Tottenham riots, which have cast a shadow over BlackBerry Messenger and Twitter because of the way they have been used by ‘goons in the hood’ to beat the police. While BlackBerry messages appealed people to arm themselves with hammers to loot stores and bring cars along to carry the stolen goods, many tweets were posted to unite rioters.

Have social networks become a Frankenstein’s monster, which is being abused by anti-social elements for their nefarious ends? Media reports in London said that eight people in Cheshire had been arrested as suspects for encouraging rioting via the social media. Can social networks become a real threat to democratic states, even as they serve as vehicles for revolutions against totalitarian regimes? Should they be subjected to state scrutiny? “If social media shows a negative tendency, as was evident with the riots spreading to other parts of England, then it is symptomatic of an actual problem on the ground. A problem which has not been addressed by the state. The solution lies in solving that problem, social media is only an indicator,” says Anivar Aravind, IT consultant and commentator.

When it comes to social networking media, people’s messages are conveyed without censorship – as opposed to being edited before being delivered to the public in conventional media such as newspapers, magazines and even television, Aravind points out. Which is why social networking should be treated no differently than any other form of communication, says Jonathan Crossfield, social media expert and community manager at Ninefold, a cloud platform provider in Australia.

"There are checks and balances in the legal systems of most democracies that allow appropriate investigation. For example, being able to subpoena phone records in a criminal investigation, while preserving the rights of the user as much as possible," says Crossfield. WHILE, reportedly, police in London have vowed to track down those suspected of stirring violence through Twitter, they mainly blamed BlackBerry Messenger. "Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But, it can also be used for ill,” British Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament. But, there is no reason social networking should be treated more harshly or subdued in a graver way than any other form of communication, says Crossfield, as they these are not the real threat to the state. "It’s important to remember that social networks are neutral -- just a medium to connect people. The paper you write on is not at fault for the words you use," he says, "If any state, democratic or otherwise, decides to categorise social networks as a threat, what it really means is that they feel threatened by what people are saying and the ideas that are being discussed among them. And that leads to censorship, not democracy." But not just during civil unrest, BlackBerry encrypted messaging service was used by terrorists during 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai to communicate as other services were blocked by the state. Since then, the Indian government has been urging Research-In-Motion (RIM), the maker of BlackBerry, to provide them with messages in a readable format or stop services.

"It is legal to intercept a communication made on a social media in India under the Telegraph Act and the IT Act, which is partially a limitation on privacy," says Sunil Abraham, executive director, Center for Internet and Society. But, Abraham adds, this censorship should not be generalised and the group concerned needs to be targeted and it should not target any specific ethnic group for what their peers have done.

"This has nothing to do uniquely with social networking. Any technology can be used for both good and bad purposes. Totalitarian regimes can use social networking to establish their agendas, while the same platform can be used by the protesters," says Balaji Parthasarathy, professor at International Institute of Information Technology-Bangalore. It can also be used, as was seen during the recent blasts on July 13 in Mumbai, in helping friends and family of victims when cellular networks had been jammed for security reasons. The Twitter tag ‘#here2help’ was one messaging vehicle that urged hundreds of netizens to help victims stranded after the blast. Which is why, says Parthasarathy, if social networking or even a telephony service poses serious threats to a democratic state, there should be clear-cut guidelines from the government.

This article by Ayan Pramanik and Shayan Ghosh was published in Mail Today on August 14, 2011. The original story can be read here [page 28]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/unsocial-network

Hazare 'clicks' with city techies

praskrishna — 2011-08-19T06:48:14Z

These days revolutionaries, crusaders and even rioters use social networking to further their cause. After the Arab Spring and the London riots, social networking is now playing a key role in Anna Hazare's ongoing anti-corruption campaign. Bangalore techies are in demand to run the show.

Amid a demonstration on Wednesday in support of Anna at Bangalore's Freedom Park - a jail converted into a public space - a bunch of techies were seen busy working.

They were giving a blow-by-blow account of the local show online. India Against Corruption (IAC), the citizen's movement of Anna Hazare has one of its hubs in this city. Five techies with corporate jobs are the local contact points. They belong to a group of "like-minded people", who in December 2010 started 'Saaku' (meaning 'enough' in Kannada), a state-wide campaign against corruption.

True to Bangalore style, a main activity of Saaku is a website - one that exposes acts of corruption. "We wanted to do something in the face of mounting corruption," said Anand Yadwad, 38, a member of the core team.

Now it is part of IAC. It is a California-based NRI who handles the main IAC web page, activists said.

Their main Facebook page has been 'liked' by over 320,000 people. A Google email group, pages in local languages - including in Kannada - and a Twitter feed are slowly gaining ground too. Bangalore is a hub for similar initiatives that are not necessarily part of the Anna Hazare bandwagon. A website launched by the NGO Janaagraha - ipaidabribe. com aims to "uncover the market price of corruption". People post stories about their close encounters with the corrupt kind - paying GBP 50 for customs clearance, Rs 900 to a broker for getting a learners' driving licence and so on.

There is yet another website that actually deals with issues concerning far-away Chhattisgarh.

CGNet Swara is dubbed as a mobile community radio. Adivasis and landless labourers of Chattisgarh can dial in their stories onto a server based in Bangalore. The users can dial and listen to them in local dialects - health workers demanding bribe, labour contractors withholding part of the minimum wages and so on. Though it is not envisaged as an anti-corruption platform, stories of anomalies, including in the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act feature frequently on Swara. "We get such complaints maybe once in two days," said Shubhranshu Choudhary, a former BBC journalist based in Delhi who runs the show.

In effect, these three initiatives take three distinct approaches.

"Saaku takes an approach of incremental engagement in a campaign," said Sunil Abraham, the head of the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalorebased research group. First you can 'like' them on their Facebook page, then give a missed call, engage in local meetings and become a volunteer. "It means using the technology selectively, but driven by the people's needs and limitations," Abraham said.

Meanwhile ipaidabribe. com takes a more quantitative approach to understand the extent of bribery. CGNet Swara involves definite political risks as the complaints tend to be specific and sometimes connected with human rights issues - especially in a state like Chhattisgarh, Abraham said.

Meanwhile Bangaloreans who designed earlier campaigns call for a mix of media. "With India's infrastructure divide, unless we combine spaces like community radio with social network, campaigns cannot be successful," said Ashish Sen, president of AMARC Asia Pacific, a community broadcast forum. Namma Dhwani, a community radio project in Bangalore's neighbouring district Kolar, has gone live on local protests against corruption five years ago - with good impact. "Now with the spread of mobile telephony, the use of radio and audio becomes more meaningful," Sen said.

Maybe Delhites can look forward to listening to Anna FM!

Watch out! Private security is is the new booming industry

The new sunrise industry in Bangalore is private security. Morning trains bring thousands of athletic men, including former defence personnel, from nearby towns like Kolar Gold Fields for security duty.

And they are not just involved in watch-and-ward. These days the police teach them basics of disaster management and some of them moonlight (or sunlight after a night job) as receptionists for a while.

To celebrate their work, Karnataka Security Services Association (KSSA) plans to celebrate August 21 as ' Security Day'. There will be a procession by 1500 security guards and awards will be given for outstanding service. Central Association of Private Security Industry will follow up with a national day from next year, said Flight Lieutenant (retired) K P Nagesh, the president of KSSA. According to KSSA figures there are seven million private security guards in India with five lakh in Karnataka, mostly in Bangalore.

And the industry is growing at 35 to 40 per cent annually. Still there are issues, such as ensuring minimum wages, job security and insurance, according to the association.

The late-running Bangalore Metro rail project has recently displayed a notice outside one of its stations: "Press and Photography not allowed." A local reporter was stopped by the security guard last week and promptly shown the notice.

While photography might be prohibited at sensitive installations, even defence and space establishments never specifically stop reporters. They stop everybody! They say it is just a way to keep media glare away while the metro work is running late.

Chief Minister D V Sadananda Gowda has assured the aggrieved local media personnel that he would look into the matter. "Give me a week's time," he said on Monday.

Local chappals that are now travelling the world

Kolhapuri chappals, the ethnic footwear patronised by the erstwhile royalty of Kolhapur in Maharashtra are largely made in north Karnataka villages. In border villages like Athani in Belgaum district, many families are engaged in their production using traditional methods.

Tanned with vegetable dyes and handcrafted, the sandals have a certain macho appeal. The low-end models are affordable at Rs 250 a pair or even less. So apart from the royalty, the local wrestlers and farmers also wore them.

However, there is no record of them being used as a tool for political protests. (Don't get ideas now!) Recently a team of local women visited an international shoe fair in Dusseldorf, Germany. As local reports suggest, the chappals were a runaway hit. Toehold Artisan's Collaborative that organises local women's groups made $ 85,000 last fiscal from exports. The figure is set to rise - to a projected figure of $ 150,000.

Flying high indeed.

This article by Max Martin was published in India Today on August 18, 2011. The original story can be read here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/hazare-clicks

Govt wants to monitor Facebook, Twitter

praskrishna — 2011-08-09T09:21:55Z

The Union home ministry has written to the department of telecom asking it to "ensure effective monitoring of Twitter and Facebook".

Milind Deora, minister of state for communications and information technology, said in written reply to a question on Friday in the Rajya Sabha that DoT has received a letter from MHA to ensure monitoring of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter in order to "strengthen cyber security paraphernalia".

He said that in cases where the data is encrypted, the department works with all concerned parties to obtain lawful access to it.

Citing security a reason, India in the recent months has sought more surveillance and monitoring from internet service providers as well as companies like Research In Motion, which sells BlackBerry phones capable of encrypted emails and messaging.

In April the government notified a new set of IT rules, virtually making intermediaries like internet service providers and web hosts and websites like Facebook and Twitter responsible for any wrongdoings on their networks. The rules were widely criticized by privacy activists.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of Centre for Internet and Society said these "blanket surveillance practices" are counterproductive.

"People advocating greater surveillance don't understand how the web works. In some cases, if there is evidence, targeted monitoring can be done but if governments wants to go through each tweet and every status update, it's just waste of money and resources. Agencies involved in monitoring can do better work by focusing on core issues. This will also save ordinary law-abiding citizens from unnecessary harassment," said Abraham.

According to their policies, Twitter and Facebook don't share any private information available on their servers without valid court order or subpoena. Twitter had said in the past that even if there was a court order, it would first inform the users in question before sharing information related to them.

This article was published in the Times of India on August 8, 2011. The original can be read here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/govt-to-monitor-facebook-twitter

Nothing unique about this identity

praskrishna — 2011-08-09T09:12:55Z

Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking peeping tom to install your window blinds, opined, not long ago, the American poet and novelist John Perry Barlow once. The statement attains significance in the context of Unique Identification (UID) project which is being touted as a milepost in inclusive politics. Liberalisation evangelists see UID project as the most virtuous thing that can ever happen to the Indian people who find themselves excluded from the system.

So, their ingenious solution is a 12-digit Aadhaar number — a super identity — to help the common man in opening a bank account or ordering a cylinder refill. This is, besides, the existing identities like ration card, the driving license, PAN card and passport to mention a few.

Prima facie, it may all appear euphemistic initiative; for some even very bright and attractive. For, its proclaimed purpose supposedly is to deepen the democratic process.

However, when one talks to civil rights activists who’ve gone hammer and tongs against the project, one will realise the truthfulness of Shakespeare’s observation that ‘a fair exterior may hide a corrupt mind!’

This becomes evident from the fact that the UID project has become the biggest industrial collector of personal information which should frighten up any person still in sensibilities.

The project has already proved disastrous since the unfolding events prove its advocates have not applied much thought to the dangers posed by centralised data collection considering India’s heterogenic population.

In fact, head of Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) Nandan Nilekani had maintained UID enrolment was voluntary.

However, Chief Minister Oommen Chandy some two months back asserted his government would make UID mandatory unlike his predecessor V.S. Achuthanandan.

"Even in this basic thing, there’s so much confusion. But, the truth is that it’s voluntary. You can’t be coerced into it", confirms a prominent anti-UID campaigner Usha Ramanathan.

She alleged personal information passed onto UIDAI passes through various outsourcing layers compromising safety. It recently happened in Bangalore where a delivery boy demanded a customer’s fingerprint while delivering gas refill!

"Why should anyone give it to an unknown person? It shows the level to which your personal information could get disseminated", she says.

UID, in fact, is supposed to be foolproof. However, again in Bangalore, miscreants could easily fake an Aadhar number in the name of none other than Nandan Nilekani himself!

The fraud came to light when miscreants offered franchisee for UID enrolment for `2.5 lakh.

"Fake UIDs rackets confirm there’s no monitoring. So, how can UIDAI protect your information?" wonders Usha. Nandan Nilekani wants to enroll 60 per cent Indian population by 2014 into UID. However, it’s fast proving a chimerical target as the process involving agency-UIDAI-de-duplicating agency has started taking its toll.

"Initially, Aadhaar number was promised within a week. Now, it’s taking anywhere between three to six months", pointed out executive director, Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) Sunil Abraham.

The project faces problems on cash transfer whose aim is to dismantle public distribution shops (PDS) which once done would put the farmer and customer at the mercy of market for their selling/procurement needs.

For, the farmer won’t be assured of a minimum support price (MSP) while for the customer there is no guarantee that the price would hold good till such time his account gets credited. Further, experts warn the Aadhar number-linked cash transfer will compromise safety. “Cash transfer using bio-metric is not safe. If it were otherwise, ATMs would’ve gone for it. Why didn’t they do it?” asks Sunil Abraham.

Interestingly, a group of students recently did a research on the efficacy of PDS. The research covering nine States cautioned prime minister Manmohan Singh that PDS was better than cash, except in Bihar.

Professor Sridhar Krishnaswamy W.B. University of Jurisdical Sciences fears the Corproates could link one’s Aadhar number to bank account to judge his or her behavioural pattern.

"It’s not right. Instead of resorting to blanket surveillance, government should go in for targeted surveillance," Sunil said.

This article by T. S. Sreenivasa Raghavan was published in the Deccan Chronicle on August 5, 2011. The original can be read here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/nothing-unique-about-identity

Tired of tele-marketing calls? Act on privacy right: Experts

praskrishna — 2011-08-09T09:00:58Z

Annoyed with unsolicited calls from insurance and banking companies? Under the proposed Right to Privacy Act, such calls would be considered a violation and the company responsible penalised up to Rs 5 lakh. The draft Right to Privacy Bill says that no person with a business in the country can collect or disclose any data relating to any individual without his/her consent.

Doing so will be a punishable offence. Speakers at a seminar here on Saturday organised by the Citizen consumer and civic Action Group (CAG), were unanimous in their call for the Right to Privacy Act coming into force soon. R Revathi, an associate professor at Dr Ambedkar Law University, said the matter of privacy was very tricky. "Recently, a man who came to donate blood for a friend tested positive for HIV. The hospital got to know he was going to be engaged soon and told his fiance? after which the marriage was called off," she said. "The man was not a patient at the hospital but his personal information was made public in the interest of a larger good. These are some of the challenges expected while implementing the bill," she added.

Others said there was no specific law in the Constitution to safeguard the individual's privacy. Privacy, they said, could be classified into physical and informational privacy. While the former was about the intrusion of physical space, the latter included digital and non-digital data that is personal in nature.

The article was published by the Times of India on August 7, 2011. The original can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/tired-of-tele-marketing-calls

When Knowledge Isn’t Written, Does It Still Count?

praskrishna — 2011-08-09T08:53:23Z

“MAKING fun of Wikipedia is so 2007,” a French journalist said recently to Sue Gardner, the executive director of the foundation that runs the Wikipedia project.

And so Ms. Gardner, in turn, told an auditorium full of Wikipedia contributors and supporters on Thursday in Haifa, Israel, the host city for the seventh annual Wikimania conference, where meetings and presentations focus on the world’s most used, and perhaps least understood, online reference work.

Once routinely questioned about its reliability — what do you mean, anyone can edit it? — the site is now used every month by upwards of 400 million people worldwide. But with influence and respect come responsibility, and lately Wikipedia has been criticized from without and within for reflecting a Western, male-dominated mindset similar to the perspective behind the encyclopedias it has replaced.

Seeing Wikipedia as The Man, in so many words, is so 2011.

And that’s a problem for an encyclopedia that wants to grow. Some critics of Wikipedia believe that the whole Western tradition of footnotes and sourced articles needs to be rethought if Wikipedia is going to continue to gather converts beyond its current borders. And that, in turn, invites an entirely new debate about what constitutes knowledge in different parts of the world and how a Western institution like Wikipedia can capitalize on it.

Achal Prabhala, an adviser to Ms. Gardner’s Wikimedia Foundation who lives and writes in Bangalore, India, has made perhaps the most trenchant criticism in a video project, “People are Knowledge,” that he presented in Haifa (along with its clunky subtitle, “Exploring alternative methods of citation for Wikipedia”).

The film, which was made largely with a $20,000 grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, spends time showing what has been lost to Wikipedia because of stickling rules of citation and verification. If Wikipedia purports to collect the “sum of all human knowledge,” in the words of one of its founders, Jimmy Wales, that, by definition, means more than printed knowledge, Mr. Prabhala said.

In the case of dabba kali, a children’s game played in the Kerala state of India, there was a Wikipedia article in the local language, Malayalam, that included photos, a drawing and a detailed description of the rules, but no sources to back up what was written. Other than, of course, the 40 million people who played it as children.

There is no doubt, he said, that the article would have been deleted from English Wikipedia if it didn’t have any sources to cite. Those are the rules of the game, and those are the rules he would like to change, or at least bend, or, if all else fails, work around.

“There is this desire to grow Wikipedia in parts of the world,” he said, adding that “if we don’t have a more generous and expansive citation policy, the current one will prove to be a massive roadblock that you literally can’t get past. There is a very finite amount of citable material, which means a very finite number of articles, and there will be no more.”

Mr. Prabhala, 38, who grew up in India and then attended American universities, has been an activist on issues of intellectual property, starting with the efforts in South Africa to free up drugs that treat H.I.V. In the film, he gives other examples of subjects — an alcohol produced in a village, Ga-Sabotlane, in Limpopo, South Africa, and a popular hopscotch-type children’s game, tshere-tshere — beyond print documentation and therefore beyond Wikipedia’s true-and-tried method.

There are whole cultures, he said, that have little to no printed material to cite as proof about the way life is lived.

“Publishing is a system of power and I mean that in a completely pleasant, accepting sense,” he said mischievously. “But it leaves out people.”

But Mr. Prabhala offers a solution: he and the video’s directors, Priya Sen and Zen Marie, spoke with people in African and Indian villages either in person or over the phone and had them describe basic activities. These recordings were then uploaded and linked to the article as sources, and suddenly an article that seems like it could be a personal riff looks a bit more academic.

For example, in his interview with a South African villager who explained how to make the alcoholic drink, morula, she repeatedly says that it is best if she demonstrates the process. When the fruit is ready, said the villager, Philipine Moremi, according to the project’s transcript of her phone conversation, “we pry them open. We are going to show you how it is done. Once they are peeled, we seal them to ferment and then we drink.” The idea of treating personal testimony as a source for Wikipedia is still controversial, and reflects the concerns that dominated the encyclopedia project six years ago, when arguably its very existence was threatened.

After a series of hoaxes, culminating in a Wikipedia article in 2005 that maligned the newspaper editor John Seigenthaler for no discernible reason other than because a Wikipedia contributor could, the site tried to ensure that every statement could be traced to a source.

Then there is the rule “no original research,” which was meant to say that Wikipedia doesn’t care if you are writing about the subway station you visit every day, find someone who has written reliably on the color of the walls there.

"The natural thing is getting more and more accurate, locking down articles, raising the bar on sources," said Andrew Lih, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California, who was an early contributor to Wikipedia and has written a history of its rise. “Isn’t it great we have so many texts online?"

But what works for the most developed societies, he said, won’t necessarily work for others. “Lots of knowledge is not Googleable,” he said, “and is not in a digital form.”

Mr. Lih said that he could see the Wikipedia project suddenly becoming energized by the process of documenting cultural practices around the world, or down the street.

Perhaps Mr. Prabhala’s most challenging argument is that by being text-focused, and being locked into the Encyclopedia Britannica model, Wikipedia risks being behind the times.

An 18-year-old is comfortable using “objects of trust that have been created on the Internet," he said, and "Wikipedia isn’t taking advantage of that." And, he added, "it is quite possible that for the 18-year-old of today that Wikipedia looks like his father’s project. Or the kind of thing his father might be interested in."

Ouch.

A version of this article appeared in print on August 8, 2011, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: When Knowledge Isn’t Written, Does It Still Count?.

This article by Noam Cohen was published in the New York Times on August 7, 2011, the original can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/knowledge-isnt-written

Indian super-cops now patrol the www highway

praskrishna — 2011-08-19T06:48:48Z

There's discontent brewing in the Indian cyberspace. And it has to do with the government blocking content that it deems "objectionable". What has raised hackles of Internet freedom activists is a new set of rules that allow Internet service providers (ISPs) and blogging sites to remove "objectionable" content from the Web.

This Wednesday, in a written reply, minister of state for information and technology Sachin Pilot told the Lok Sabha that the recently notified rules under the IT Act to regulate the use of Internet, "don't give any power to the government to regulate the content"? Pilot added that the rules did not raise issues "pertaining to privacy and violation of freedom of speech and expression."

Are the rules likely to affect you and I? They may have already begun do so. Last fortnight, when surfers went on to popular file-sharing sites to download clips of a new Bollywood release, what they got instead was a screen with the message: This site has been blocked as per instructions of the Department of Telecom.

The fine print

The new rules demand that the intermediary notify users not to publish or use information that is derogatory, abusive, insulting or which violates intellectual property rights or impacts the sovereignty of the nation. In a country that has 81 million Internet users, this can never be easy.

The rules put the onus of intercepting, blocking and removing objectionable content on intermediaries — telecom service providers, search engines, social networking sites and online payment sites — turning them into super-cops of the Web. "Although the Act is an improvement on the previous one, the rules put too much onus on intermediaries," says Dr Subo Ray, President, Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). "The intermediaries have become the judge, the jury and the executioner," says Ray.

In a nation where social mores are in a flux, interpretation of what is objectionable under the new rules is wide and subjective, says technology lawyer Rodney D Ryder. "Content deemed 'disparaging', 'harassing', 'blasphemous' or 'hateful' can be blocked. But who will decide what is disparaging?"

The worst bit about such censorship, says Nikhil Pahwa, editor of Medianama, a portal that discusses issues related to digital media, is its opacity. "It is a distress signal for civil liberties and India's version of Egypt's kill-switch. With the UID, the government would know who I am. With the help of telecom operators, they can track me within 50 metres and with my mobile number, snoop in on my conversations. On top of that, do we need Internet rules that don't have a provision of appeal?"

Ryder concurs: "The regulations do not even provide a way for content producers to defend their work or appeal a decision to remove content. This is against the principles of natural justice."

The rules are a case of deceptive legislative drafting says cyber lawyer Pawan Duggal, chairman of Assocham's cyber law committee. "The provisions hide more than what they disclose. Cosmetically, the new rules says that if you are an intermediary, then you shall not be liable for any third-party data, information or communication link made available or hosted by you. Provided, and this is crucial, you follow a number of stringent conditions."

Duggal says many intermediaries in India are not aware of these conditions. "An intermediary will not be liable for any third-party data made available or hosted by it, provided it complies with the law, exercises due diligence, does not abet, conspire or play an active role in a criminal activity and further, provided that once it is notified of any offending activity, removes or disables access of the said offending content expeditiously. If it fails to fulfil one of the conditions, it is open to criminal exposure and civil exposure upto unlimited damages by way of compensation."

Is it gagging net freedom?

In China and Saudi Arabia, governments routinely censor content and redirect search requests to error pages. In Vietnam, bloggers who criticise the government are sometimes arrested. And in Cuba, there is talk of creating "a national Internet". Still, any talk of comparing India with these restrictive regimes is alarmist and stupid, says Ray of IAMAI.

But over the past few years, the government has been gradually building censorship muscle over the Internet, say activists. In 2006, it blocked Typepad, the blog hosting service and a bulk SMS site.

A right to information plea filed by the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society reveals the government blocked 11 sites between 2008 and 2011 (see box). These range from sites hosting the predictable girl wallpapers and Kamasutra to blogs discussing the freedom of speech.

Yet, in his written reply to the Lok Sabha, Pilot insisted that the rules "do not give any power to the government to regulate the content".

If this sparks any discontent in you about privacy, freedom of speech and civil liberties, think twice before sharing the content on the Internet.

This article by Aasheesh Sharma was published in the Hindustan Times on August 6, 2011. The original can be read here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/indian-super-cops-patrol-www-highway

Better Understanding of the Idea of Privacy Sought

praskrishna — 2011-08-08T07:40:18Z

Understanding the ways in which an individual's privacy is violated will help provide a better definition of privacy in India. At a public conference called ‘Privacy Matters' held at the Madras Institute of Development Studies (MIDS) here on Saturday, speakers underscored the need for discussions surrounding the privacy bill.

Prashant Iyengar from Privacy India said, "In India, we do not have a set view on privacy. There is a lot of articulation around privacy in law, yet we do not have an omnibus concept." He stressed the importance of bringing about discussions around the adequacy of safeguards.

Post 26/11 terror attacks, the country has seen an enhancement of electronic surveillance and the proliferation of databases that collect information from individuals, said Santhosh Babu, Secretary, Information Technology Department.

"The problem arises when these databases are misused for political or other reasons. In a legal framework, we have to figure out what information can be given out, what cannot and what can be misused," he said. He stressed the importance of databases going through a software development lifecycle to make them more secure.

Speaking from a media practitioner's perspective, Sashi Kumar, Chairman, Media Development Foundation, said it is the business of the media to conduct sting operations especially when people in power are obfuscating information. “Sting operations are legitimate when larger public good is at stake. We have to be aware of this when we discuss the privacy bill. It should not protect people in power and keep exposure at bay,” he said. He also stressed that privacy is closely linked with the dignity of the person. R. Ramamurthy, Chairman, Cyber Society of India said, “The definition of privacy varies from what it was twenty years ago to what it is today. A lot has changed since the internet came to India.” The statutes that govern all forms of communication in India should be revamped, he said. Discussions around privacy in relation to telecommunications, financial transactions, consumer rights and basic rights followed. The conference was a collaborative effort between Privacy India, Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group, Chennai and MIDS.

A staff reporter from the Hindu covered the event. The original can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/better-understanding-of-privacy

Converting Indian Slacktivists Takes (Offline) Time

praskrishna — 2011-08-04T09:07:16Z

No matter how much attention an online protest campaign might appear to be getting in terms of likes, fans or retweets, it’s rarely likely to be able to draw even a fraction of its Internet supporters to a street protest. That’s as true in India as anywhere else in the world, it appears.

The New Delhi Slut Walk, also known as Besharmi Morcha (Shameless Protest), publicized itself in good part through websites that generated a lot of media coverage, including on this site, as well as through debates. But it apparently didn’t live up to expectations, some Indian news reports said.

A story in the business daily Mint said over 2,000 people pledged on Facebook to show up. Police put the turnout at 700 people, including 400 police and 200 reporters, but protest organizers put the number of people who were there, including cops and the press, at around 1,000. Mishika Singh, a coordinator for the demonstration, said perhaps 500 people actually did the walk. The campaign said that they got about as many people as they were expecting.

So what does it take to turn "slacktivism" — as some call online support that extends largely to clicking on a petition, forwarding an e-mail or “liking” something on Facebook—into activism?

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society, says "conversion" — getting passive online supporters to graduate to the next step, such as customizing an email to an MP — takes additional time and organizing, and at least some of this must happen offline.

He said the perception among many that the Arab uprisings earlier this year were Twitter-driven was oversimplified and happened in part because it was harder for reporters outside the country to be aware of on-the-ground organizing efforts.

"Social media organizing was more by the diaspora population in order to keep international attention on the issue," he said. “If the Internet was so important, when they blocked Internet sites it would have seriously undermined the offline organizing but it didn't."

With causes that are viewed as more difficult—or that have a higher personal cost to the participant perhaps—conversion can be even more difficult, Mr. Abraham said, saying he wasn’t surprised by the numbers reported at Slut Walk.

"It’s a new cause. It’s not an established organization," he said. "They didn’t have a lot of time."

Mr. Abraham offered the Anna Hazare-guided Indian Against Corruption campaign as one of India’s better online organizing efforts.

"I think the Anna Hazare campaign is so far the most effective” online, said Mr. Abraham. “If you notice they are much more organized in terms of designing the funnel of incremental actions."

He said they had laid out obvious next steps for those willing to do a bit more, like calling an Indian Against Corruption cellphone number to register for updates and information.

"They also have offline activities and meetings in other cities as well," he said.

Yet even on days in April when the India Against Corruption protest Facebook page was racking up 100,000 members, the number of people at the sit-in site in Jantar Mantar in New Delhi during Mr. Hazare’s fast against corruption were roughly a twentieth of that each day.

Still, Mr. Abraham said that politicians probably shouldn’t dismiss online activists, even if they can’t muster the numbers that traditional protesters like farmers groups or trade unions can.

Mr. Abraham suggested that while India’s broadband users may number less than 10% of the population, many of them are probably well-connected—both technologically and politically speaking—and influential on others they communicate with.

"Even a small number on the streets should count as an important political signal,” said Mr. Abraham. “Some of us are more connected than others."

He also said India’s slacktivists didn’t appear to be greater slackers than their counterparts in other countries, noting that getting a person to graduate from thought to action is extremely difficult in most cases.

"If 1,000 people read your newspaper, 100 will say I should write to the editor because I really disagree with the columnist, and one person will actually write," said Mr. Abraham. "Conversion is very low for these kinds of altruistic activities. For a discount sale perhaps you would get more people."

Note: Correcting the statistics about broadband penetration.

This article by Tripti Lahiri was published in the Wall Street Journal on August 2, 2011. The original can be read here.

Photo courtesy Manan Vatsyayana/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/converting-indian-slacktivists

July 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T07:00:26Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Five monographs: Re: Wiring Bodies by Asha Achuthan, Archive and Access by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, Pornography and the Law by Namita Malhotra, The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem – An Inquiry into Technology and Governance by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities by Pratyush Shankar were sent for peer review.

Upcoming Event in CEPT, Ahmedabad

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation [Deadline for submission – 26 July 2011; Participants to be selected by 30 July 2011; Workshop from 19 to 22 August 2011]

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.

The Digital Natives Newsletter

"Links in the Chain" is a bi-monthly publication which highlights the projects, ideas and news of the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" community members. It includes opinion posts by participants from the three workshops — Talking Back (Taipei, 15 – 18 August 2010), My Bubble, My Space, My Voice (Johannesburg, 6 – 9 November 2010) and From Face to the Interface (Santiago, 8 – 10 February 2011) as well as the facilitators, interviews with them, comics and cartoons highlighting current issues affecting the community, as well as current news and discussions happening at the project website, www.digitalnatives.in.

The Digital Dinosaurs [Links in the Chain, Volume 7]
Special Mid Year Edition [Links in the Chain, Volume 8]

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

Featured Research

Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective (Revised Edition 2011) [A G3ict White Paper researched and edited by the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. Editor: Nirmita Narasimhan, Revised edition: May 2011]

Access to Knowledge (previously IPR Reform)

CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime.

Featured

Don't Shoot the Messenger: Speech on Intermediary Liability at 22nd SCCR of WIPO (speech by Pranesh Prakash at a side-event co-organized from 15 to 24 June 2011, by WIPO and the Internet Society on intermediary liability).

Openness

CIS believes that innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration and is committed towards promotion of open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software.

Documentary

People are Knowledge – Experimenting with Oral Citations on Wikipedia (co-produced by CIS in association with the Wikimedia Foundation, on Oral Citations in India and South Africa)

Featured

Opening Government: A Guide to Best Practice in Transparency, Accountability and Civic Engagement across the Public Sector (published by Transparency & Accountability Initiative, CIS contributed the section on Open Government Data).

Internet Governance

Although there may not be one centralized authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cyber crime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:

New Blog Post

RTI and Third Party Information: What Constitutes the Private and Public? [by Noopur Raval]

Events Organised

Socio-financial Online Networks: Globalizing Micro-Credit through Micro-transactional Networked Platforms – A Public Lecture by Radhika Gajalla [at CIS, Bangalore on 8 July 2011]
Internet Surveillance Policy: “…the second time as farce?” – A Public Lecture by Caspar Bowden [at TERI, Bangalore on 27 June 2011]

CIS is doing a project, ‘Privacy in Asia’. It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon. The two-year project commenced on 24 March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Featured

Privacy & Media Law (by Sonal Makhija). The research examines the existing media norms governed by Press Council of India, the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 and the Code of Ethics drafted by the News Broadcasting Standard Authority, the constitutional protection guaranteed to an individual’s right to privacy upheld by the courts, and the reasons the State employs to justify the invasion of privacy.

Comments

Right to Privacy Bill 2010 — A Few Comments (by Elonnai Hickok). CIS has given specific recommendations and specific comments on the Right to Privacy Bill, 2010, which was introduced in the Rajya Sabha by Rajeev Chandrashekhar.

Event Report

Privacy Matters, Guwahati – the event was organised by IDRC, Society in Action Group, IDEA Chirang, an NGO initiative working with grassroots initiatives in Assam, Privacy India and CIS on 23 June 2011.

New Blog Entries

My Experiment with Scam Baiting (by Sahana Sarkar)
When Data Means Privacy, What Traces Are You Leaving Behind? (by Noopur Raval)
Video Surveillance and Its Impact on the Right to Privacy (by Elonnai Hickok)
Consumer Privacy in e-Commerce (by Sahana Sarkar)
An Overview of DNA Labs in India (by Shilpa Narani)
UID: Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear? (by Shilpa Narani)

News & Media Coverage

Indian SMEs still fail to harness the power of Net [Sunday Guardian, 19 June 2011]

Sorry Wrong Number [Telegraph, 3 July 2011]

Aadhaar’s moment of truth [Deccan Herald, 5 July 2011]
The Walls Have Ears [Outlook, issue, 11 July 2011]
Transparent Government, via Webcams in India [New York Times, 17 July 2011]; news also published in other languages in wprost (Polish), ictnews (Vietnamese) and @rret sur images(French)
NYT lauds Oommen Chandy’s 24/7 office webcast [Deccan Chronicle, 19 July 2011]
UID: The World’s Largest Biometric Database [International School on Digital Transformation, 21 July 2011]. Sunil Abraham made a presentation.
Facebook, my boyfriend is lousy [Bangalore Mirror, 24 July 2011]

Portal augurs well for transparency [The Hindu, 25 July 2011]

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CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2011-bulletin

Portal augurs well for transparency

praskrishna — 2011-07-26T15:16:47Z

Data.gov.in will have meta-data, which will facilitate discovery of data and access from portals of ministries, says T Ramachandra. The article was published in the Hindu on 25 July 2011.

The unveiling of an official data access and sharing policy and the commissioning of a data portal (data.gov.in), which is on the anvil, will pave the way for digitally opening up the Central government data to the public.

"The data portal will be having meta-data [data about data], which will facilitate the discovery of the data and access from the portals of respective government departments/ministries. At present, the data policy is likely to cover the Central government and all activities funded by the Government of India," said R. Siva Kumar, CEO of National Spatial Data Infrastructure, and head of Natural Resources Data Management System, Department of Science and Technology.

Governmental data-holding organisations will prepare a negative list of non-shareable sensitive data, weighing the need to restrict public access given such considerations as security and privacy, against the obligation to share it with civil society and the scientific community. Apart from this, access to certain categories of data will be restricted.

The broad guidelines spelt out in the Right to Information Act will be followed and the list will be periodically reviewed. "All data outside the negative list will be proactively disseminated, and an oversight committee will facilitate policy implementation," said Dr. Kumar.

But does this mean that the public have to make specific requests for the unlocking of data-sets? “Data will be available through the data portal, and there will be no specific unlocking required. However, access to certain data may be through registration/authorisation,” he responded.

The sharing of such data might be tied to a pricing policy. "Pricing will be decided by the respective department/ministry. However, standardised parameters will be made available as guidelines for fixing the price," he said.

The draft of the proposed National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy the government published some time ago indicates that the departments themselves can decide whether the data belongs to the ‘open access', ‘registered access,' or ‘restricted access' categories, with the policy neither mandating nor coming up with guidelines on how to do so, said Pranesh Prakash, programme manager, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based NGO.

The CIS has recommended that the policy have the same scope as the RTI Act, and that all ‘public authorities,' as defined under the Act, be covered by it. Only the restricted categories (laid down in Sections 8 and 9 of the RTI Act) should be allowable for ‘restricted access.'

In a study on open government data in the Indian context, the CIS suggested that any policy be oriented towards meeting the requirements of a broad spectrum of citizenry. Specifically, sections that do not get to immediately benefit from advances in information technology. “Data mashing and private sector information products are important goals,” but the government itself should be proactive in creating the applications that show potential uses for the data.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the global body that sets web standards, has said governments, by putting their data on the Internet, facilitate greater transparency, deliver more efficient public services and encourage greater public and commercial use and re-use of government information.

Anil Bairwal, National Coordinator of the Association for Democratic Reforms, which is involved in disseminating election-related data through its website Electionwatch, says there is “huge public interest” in data, and that accessibility was of prime importance. For instance, election-related data was made available by the authorities in the PDF/image file formats. “This forces us to do a manual interpretation of every affidavit, which consumes a lot of time and energy. It would be helpful if this data was available in a portable open format via an online tool.”

Other countries have already made strides in furthering open data. Prominent examples are the U.K. government website, data.gov.uk, and the U.S. government's www.data.gov website, which is key to President Barack Obama's Open Government Initiative.

Read the original article published in the Hindu here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/portal-augurs-well-for-transparency

Facebook, my boyfriend is lousy

praskrishna — 2011-07-25T10:07:37Z

While a sizeable chunk of users do not mind living their life in public, oversharing can have nasty repercussions in real life. This article by Sahana Saran was published in the Bangalore Mirror on 24 July 2011.

A wife wrote a bitchy remark about her mother-in-law on Facebook when her husband was out of town. A happy homecoming turned sour when the husband saw the comment. There was a huge showdown which finally led to divorce.

On the flip side, when Savita and Vinay’s (name changed) baby was about to be born a couple of years ago, the couple’s friend live-tweeted the whole childbirth process and the proud parents didn’t mind.

Oversharing on social networks by young people can have damaging results, say internet experts. Why does it happen?

"These days youngsters hook on to social networking sites, and you cannot blame them for seeking each other’s company because that is how they are at that age. There are more restrictions on children these days because of security and abuse issues which the earlier generation may not have encountered. For example, sleepovers which were much common earlier may now not be readily allowed. Their time outside their house is also monitored. Many schools these days have surveillance cameras or some form of curbs that might restrict students from having a private interaction. That is why they seek such interactions through the internet and social networks. Still in India, there is not really a need to press the panic button saying that they are becoming Facebook addicts," says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, who is an internet behaviour expert.

Sunil quotes an analysis done in Poland to show how much social networking has become a part of young people’s lives. It showed that teenage girls who meet every day in school, go back home and immediately switch on their PCs and start interacting with each other again. And all through the day, they are on Skype and can see every single thing that each one of them are doing in their rooms in their respective homes. Studies done in the Philipines demonstrate how personal life is becoming public. A study by the Institute of Philippine Culture showed that many of those assessed were on Friendster and allow full access to information on their accounts and readily share details of activities, interests and contacts.

Is the situation different in India? Bhavana, a business management graduate in her 20s, says that what she puts up on her social networking account depends solely on her state of mind. But she ensures that messages are not too personal because earlier she had put up posts which backfired.

"Sometime ago we were celebrating my brother’s birthday and some misunderstanding happened during the celebrations and I was heaped with blame by friends and relatives on FB when I tried to justify myself. I was taken aback. Now, I am more careful about posting messages about sensitive topics," she says.

And when you let people know where you are through Google Latitude, you need to watch against saying offensive things.

"There have been instances of people gate-crashing parties following a Twitter or FB post; in China, mobs of people have attacked those whose views they oppose," adds Sunil.

What makes some people, who would never dream of whipping up controversies in the real world, so reckless when they are online?

"Most often, it is a way of being noticed, of getting attention. Everyone wants to have a popular public profile and telling the world about your opinions and your activities is a way of gaining attention. But new forms of communication are being invented every other day and each has an etiquette of its own," says Sunil.

According to Dr Thomas M J, there are two kinds of people who are the net — attention-seeking and anonymous. The anonymous generally never put personal details about themselves on social networks. "But the other group consists of those who are externally controlled. For such people any open media acts as a place to talk about themselves and they love being in that public space. Moreover, social networks give internet users the courage to say whatever they want because they can avoid face-to-face contact. Even if there is a response, it is muted because because it is not direct and they can escape confrontation," says Thomas.

Read the original article published in Bangalore Mirror here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/facebook-my-lousy-boyfriend

UID: The World’s Largest Biometric Database

praskrishna — 2011-07-23T02:04:45Z

At the start of his presentation, Sunil Abraham pointed to two aerial drawings of cybercafes: one where each computer was part of a private booth, and one where the computers were in the open so the screens would be visible to any one. Which layout would be more friendly to women, and why, Abraham wanted to know. Some participants selected the first option, liking the idea of the privacy, while others liked the second option so that the cybercafe owner would be able to monitor users’ activities.

Abraham said he was surprised no one said option one looked like masturbation booths, adding that in May, India passed rules prohibiting the first design option to avoid just such an issue. This is despite a survey conducted of female college students, who liked the idea of privacy in cybercafés that typically are male-dominated.

Cybercafes are just one of the areas impacted by India’s plan for collecting and using biometrics to create unique individual identification cards.

Abraham focused his presentation on activists’ efforts to counter the government’s myths about a unique identification (UID) program.

One campaign image showed two soldiers on the border asking for an east-Asian looking person’s identification. The way to balance, or rectify, the drawing, Abraham said, would be to allow citizens to be able to ask the soldiers for the identification information.

The campaign, “Rethink UID Project,” included several images illustrating various problems with the plan. For example, one said: “Central storage of keys is a bad idea, so is central storage of our biometrics.” As Abraham explained, if storing a copy of your housekey at the police station does not make us feel more secure, then why wouldn’t storing our biometrics with the government also make us a little more scared?

In the Indian scheme, Abraham said, the government says biometrics will be used as an authentication factor in order to prove your identity, but from a computer science perspective, it’s a bad idea because it is so easy to steal biometrics. And, as Abraham pointed out, if your biometrics are stolen, it’s not possible for you to re-secure it—it’s not like getting a new ATM card and password, he said.

If this system of national UID was designed using digital keys instead of biometrics, then we would have a completely different configuration, Abraham said.

Centralized storage is nonnegotiable, and therefore the process of authentification is done through a centralized database, but with digital keys or digital signatures, authentification could be done on a peer basis, so citizen could authenticate border guards and vice versa.

Another image from the “Rethink UID Project” campaign pointed out that “Technology cannot solve corruption.” As Abraham said, problems of corruption in the subsidy system (food, loans, education, employment guarantee act in rural India, etc) won’t be fixed with biometrics. For example, if biometric equipment is installed at fair-price shops, before the shop owner gives the grain, the citizen would have to present biometrics, which would go through a centralized server and be authenticated, then the citizen would get the grain, and ultimately there would be a record saying this particular citizen collected this amount of subsidized grain at this particular time.

But there are a whole range of ways shop owners can compromise the system, Abraham said.

The first way: 30-50 percent of India is illiterate, so shop owner can say the biometrics were rejected by the server and the citizen would not know better. Or, the owner can say there was no connectivity so authentification didn’t go through, or the owner could say there was no electricity so the system won’t work, or the shop owner could give just part of the grain that the citizen is due.

Corruption innovates and terrorism innovates—if technology innovates, so does corruption, as it is not a static phenomenon, Abraham said. You can’t wish away human beings from technological configurations.

One village will have multiple biometric readers.

Abraham said they have proposed an alternative schema: remove readers from the shop, school, hospital, bank, etc., and have only one scanner at the local governance hall. Instead of the citizen becoming transparent to the government, the government should become transparent to the citizen. The shop owners should make transparent which IDs they have given how much grain to, and only if they are going to dispute the ID of a citizen, can they go to the local government administrative office to prove the ID.

Another image from the “Rethink UID Project” campaign said, “The poor and the rich: who do we track first?”

Abraham explained that one problem in India is “black money,” or money for which you don’t pay taxes because the accounts are in fake names in order to store money. Like creating fake bank accounts, he said it also would be easy to create fake biometrics by combining the handprints and eyes of multiple people to get a second fake ID. Also the system could be hacked into and iris images Photoshopped. Ghost ideas also could be created and then sold off. Because the rich will get their IDs behind closed doors, Abraham said, it will be easy for them to get multiple IDs, but the poor will not be able to.

Referring to “tailgating,” or when one ID is card swiped to gain entrance for multiple people, such as swiping one metro card and then two people walking through, Abraham noted that the problem is that the tailgating only is seen as a problem when it’s at the bottom of the pyramid, such as one woman goes to the fair-price shop to collect grain for five or six families so only one person has to lose a day’s wage instead of all five or six losing a day’s wages. Tailgating at the bottom if the pyramid is usually a question of survival, he said.

Thus, another image from the campaign showed a pyramid and said, “Transparency at the top first…before transparency at the bottom.”

The first principle is that expectations of privacy should be inversely proportional to power, so people who are really powerful, like NGOs, politicians, or heads of corporations, should have less privacy, and people who have very little power should have more privacy, Abraham said.

Also, from a business perspective, the nation gets greater return on its investment if surveillance equipment is trained on people at the top of the pyramid to catch big-time corruption, he said.

Most of the panic around the UID is over the transaction database. Beyond a databse storing everyone’s biometrics, another database will track transactions: every time you buy a mobile phone or purchase a ticket or access a cyber cafe or subsidies, thanks to UID, there will a record made in the transaction database, Abraham said.

Abraham said it is important to note that surveillance is not an intrinsic part of information systems, but once surveillance is engineered into information systems, both those with good intentions or bad intentions can take advantage of that surveillance capability.

The UID means there will be 22 databases available to 12 intelligence agencies, he said.

So when a girl enters into a cybercafé, first she will have to provide her UID, and then the café owner will photocopy the card, then the owner has the right to take a photo of the girl using his own camera, then the owner is supposed to maintain browser logs of her computer for a period of one year.

So the question then is how to assure accountability without surveillance?

The first possibility, Abraham said, is partial storage. The transaction database could store half the data, and the central database could store the other half, so the full 360-view of the data would not be available without a court order.

The second solution is a transaction escrow, where every time a record is put into the main database, it will be encrypted using 2-3 keys, and only if 3 agencies cooperate with keys, can the information be decrypted. Thus, it is targeted surveillance, not blanket surveillance.

To conclude his presentation, Abraham divided participants into four groups in order to design surveillance systems for internet surveillance, mobile technologies, CCTVs, and border control.

Sharon Strover spoke on behalf of the CCTV group, saying they ended up with more questions than anything else. They agreed there should be notices when cameras are in use, there should be public knowledge of who is doing surveillance and who has access to the footage, and the data shouldn’t be sold. But the group couldn’t decide which spaces warranted CCTVs and which not.

Abraham then pointed out that the next generation of CCTVs can read everybody’s irises as they pass the cameras—it’s in the lab now, and 2-3 years from the market, he said.

Next, Andy Carvin spoke on behalf of the mobile technologies surveillance group. Whether or not capturing metadata or content as well, the mobile phone company can collect it, but it shouldn’t be able to keep any identifiable information for the person – it should only be able to look at information in the aggregate. The rest of the information should be shipped to a non-governmental organization or government agency specialized in privacy, and 2 keys would be required: one from the judiciary and one from the NGO or governmental agency.

Smári McCarthy reported back for the Internet surveillance group, pointing out that data retention has been useful in criminal cases less than 0.2 percent of the time in one study, and another showed there has been no statistically significant increase in the number of criminal cases solved because of data retention. So, he said, the group concluded there should be no blanket surveillance, only court orders in certain criminal cases that define who will be under surveillance and for how long. Also, they wanted to see a transparency register available so the public could be informed about how many people are under surveillance currently and throughout year and other general information, such as the success rate—how many of these surveillances have led to criminal convictions or similar.

Finally, Summer Harlow spoke on behalf of the border control group, which said scanning of checked- and carry-on luggage is acceptable, but there should be no luggage searches without specific probable cause from intelligence agencies or if the scans pick up weapons or other contraband. Similarly, people could be subject to spectrum scans and drug/bomb sniffing dogs for weapons and contraband, but again they would not be physically searched by border agents without probable cause. Also, people and luggage could not randomly be searched based on the country of their passport or their flight destination or origin.

In summary, Abraham said, surveillance is like salt in food: it is essential in small amounts, but completely counter-productive if even slightly excessive.

Download Sunil's presentation here [PDF, 1389 kb]
Sunil Abraham made the presentation at the Gary Chapman International School on Digital Transformation on 21 July 2011. The original news published by International School on Digital Transformation can be read here
Read the schedule here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/uid-worlds-largest-database

People are Knowledge – Experimenting with Oral Citations on Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T10:26:31Z

The Centre for Internet and Society in association with the Wikimedia Foundation has produced a documentary film "People are Knowledge". The film evolved out of a project on Oral Citations in India and South Africa funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, and undertaken by Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board Member Achal Prabhala as a short-term fellowship, to help overcome a lack of published materials in emerging languages on Wikipedia. New Delhi-based filmmaker Priya Sen has directed the film, with additional assistance from Zen Marie who handled the shooting in South Africa. The film explores how alternate methods of citation could be employed on Wikipedia, documenting a series of specific situations with regards to published knowledge, and subsequently, with oral citations.

The Problem

Imagine a world with every individual having open access to the sum of human knowledge. But there is a problem — the sum of human knowledge is far greater than the sum of printed knowledge. For example, in India and South Africa, the number of books produced every year is nowhere near to the number of books being producing in UK. There is very little citable, printed material to rely on in the indigenous languages of India or South Africa. So it is difficult for the languages of these countries to grow its own Wikipedia. While there are significant media markets for Indian languages within and outside India, there is very little scholarly publishing in any language other than English. On the other hand, South African languages with the exception of English and Afrikaans have had a largely oral existence and only in recent times have started a publishing tradition, which is in nascent stages.

Total Production of Books in UK, South Africa and India as of 2005

UK: 161,000 books / 60 million people
South Africa: 6100 books/48 million people
India: 97,000 books/1100 million people

If we were to measure books produced in 2005 per person per country, the comparison is even more glaring:

UK: 1 book per 372 people
South Africa: 1 book per 7869 people
India: 1 book per 11,371 people

Source: Wikimedia page on Research: Oral Citations. For more details see here

As a result of such disparity, everyday, common knowledge — things known, observed and performed by millions of people — do not enter Wikipedia as facts because they haven’t been written down in a reliably published source. Hence, Wikipedia in countries like India and South Africa lose out on opportunities for growth.

While we are enthused about the rise of “small language Wikipedias”, it may not happen soon. Not with the present rules at least. Even if we were to convince every single person in the South with Internet access to become an active editor on Wikipedia, there is still a problem that they are going to run up against. That problem that currently bedevils everyone working in local languages in Asia and Africa, and nobody seems to have a control over it.

For Wikipedias in languages of the South, citations aren’t a problem when the articles being added are translations (for universally important topics, reliable citations are already there in English and other European languages). Assuming, however, that we all want the sphere of knowledge to be universally expanded — and not merely translated from languages of the North to languages of the South — there are two specific problems with finding citations for important local subject matters.

Published, citable resources may simply not exist. This is not just true of Sub-Saharan African languages (many of which use Latin script, have a relatively recent written history, and small or non-existent publishing markets) but also of several South Asian languages (even though they have non-Latin scripts, a relatively ancient written history and thriving publishing markets in news and entertainment).
Even when published scholarly resources exist, they may be inaccessible and thus effectively rendered invisible to Wikipedians. Libraries and archives in India and South Africa are usually not electronically indexed. Furthermore, they are not always conveniently located, and often impose a massive bureaucratic burden on the user to search, see, borrow from or even enter.

Oral Citations as a Possible Solution

Hindi Wikipedia has over 65,000 articles, Malayalam Wikipedia has about 15,000, and Northern Sotho Wikipedia has about 600. Many of these articles — especially when concerning subjects that are specific to a particular people or place — have no citations whatsoever. Yet, an editor — often several editors — created the articles in question. How? Simply put, and barring laziness and carelessness where citations are available, the basis of fact therein is orally circulated knowledge. Even today, in several parts of the world, people are knowledge. Therefore, an exercise where oral citations are collected and assembled — in a manner not different to that by which print sources are cited on Wikipedia, i.e., with diverse viewpoints, several sources, a rationale for authenticity — might be one way to capture this knowledge in a form that is recognisable to Wikipedia.

Anthropologists have been doing this for years — in the academy, it is called field work. The average Wikipedians certainly don’t have the capacity to replicate the arduous research programme of a doctoral student but they do have common sense and access to basic telecommunication facilities. So oral citations can:

Create externally verifiable authentication for a Wikipedia article that is based on experiential facts, but lacks citations simply because no printed source has recorded these facts to date.
Add to the set of published scholarly resources that document an existing fact, for example, in cases where the published sources are archaic or primarily foreign, and thus complete existing knowledge or correct its biases.

The Experiment

Achal Prabhala worked with Wikipedians across three languages in two different countries — Malayalam (40 million speakers) and Hindi (250 million speakers) in India and Northern Sotho (5 million speakers) in South Africa to see how oral citations might be received in the language communities they can benefit, discuss this idea with Wikipedians at large, not as a final solution but as a first step in understanding how we may expand our definition of reliable sources of knowledge beyond what is published in print, and what benefits such an expansion may bring and show this is an idea that takes hold, to create a set of clearly laid-out initial templates that others can use and build upon. Four collaborators: Shiju Alex, Mayur, Mohau Monaledi and Achal Prabhala, with additional help from Vijayakumar Blathur were finalised. Parts of the experiment were then filmed as an edited documentary.

The Pitfalls

There are numerous potential pitfalls[1] the most glaring of which is the principle of ‘No original research’. Naturally, we’re going to have to find a way to justify our approach, or work around it, or expand its meaning. Several people will welcome it, several people will object on all kinds of grounds, and several others possibly misusing and misinterpreting oral citations (i.e., without care to authenticity, diversity of opinion) in their work on Wikipedia.

However, this is the right thing to do. The problem is real. The solution being presented is a first step, not a final answer. Sure, people might have a problem with it, and sure, there may be heated objections to it; but overall, if it’s the right thing to do, it should be done, however strange it seems and however unsettling it is.

After all, if the status quo had to be respected absolutely, we wouldn’t have Wikipedia.

Note

[1]On a side note, Achal says that the pitfall to the pitfall is the status quo: literally thousands of articles without any citations whatsoever, a problem that no one notices because they’re in languages that the majority of current editors on Wikipedia do not understand – and a problem which is often overlooked by language communities in the south in favour of growth.

For recorded interviews, click here

Watch the movie below:

People are Knowledge (subtitled) from Achal R. Prabhala on Vimeo.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/people-are-knowledge

Privacy Matters, Guwahati — Event Report

praskrishna — 2011-08-26T10:31:08Z

On June 23, a public seminar on “Privacy Matters” was held at the Don Bosco Institute in Karhulli, Guwahati. It was organised by IDRC, Society in Action Group, IDEA Chirang, an NGO initiative working with grassroots initiatives in Assam, Privacy India and CIS and was attended by RTI activists and grass roots NGO representatives from across the North Eastern region: Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Tripura, Nagaland, Assam and Sikkim. The event focused on the challenges and concerns of privacy in India.

Unfortunately many of the scheduled invitees had to drop out owing to developments on the Lokpal issue at the Centre, and simultaneously Guwahati was witnessing unrest following an agitation over land rights that left three persons dead.

Welcoming the participants, Prashant Iyengar, lead researcher for Privacy India, gave an introduction to the objectives of Privacy India, and briefed the gathering about the thematic “Privacy Matters” consultations previously held across the country in Kolkata, Bangalore and Ahmedabad. Mr. Iyengar also gave a background to issues that India is facing in concern with privacy, explaining the many contexts that privacy can be found in, and raising questions such as: Why is privacy important? How can it be maintained with the way technology is encroaching upon our lives? And how can we make privacy laws functional?

"Privacy objectives are to raise awareness, spark civil action and promote democratic dialogue around privacy challenges and violations in India. One of Privacy India’s goals is to build consensus towards the promulgation of a comprehensive privacy legislation in India through consultation with the public, legislators and the legal and academic community."

Prashant Iyengar, Privacy India.

Event Sessions

The structure of the event was one of open discussion, with presentations made by those who wanted to share. Throughout the day, the conversation fell into three main topics including: privacy and the RTI, privacy and the UID, and privacy and surveillance in the context of North East India.

Privacy and the RTI

Prashant Iyengar opened the discussion on privacy and the RTI by highlighting the tension between the need for transparency of the State, and the need to protect the privacy of public figures. For many participants privacy and transparency was a new concept that they had just started thinking about. Participant Rakesh (HRLN, Manipur) spoke on the shortcomings that he saw in the RTI Act noting that though the RTI brings some transparency to society, many citizens still do not understand the extent of their Right to Information as it is protected under the Act. Furthermore, the RTI Act is still not applied equally across the country, and the transparency that the RTI tries to achieve is still in very nascent stages. Lowang, a participant from Aru nachal Pradesh, shared the importance of drawing a line between privacy and transparency when it comes to information related to education and health. Anjuman Azra Begum, a research scholar working on indigenous people rights, noted the irony of the RTI as it is meant to bring transparency to the state, yet all ministers and MLA’s take an oath of secrecy, not transparency. Anjuman also spoke on the fact that the RTI often fails to protect the privacy of sensitive issues, such as sexual balance. She echoed Rakesh’s comment on the inaccessibility of the RTI, sharing that for a common person to exercise his/her rights is a very daunting task. Anthony Debbarmun, a human rights activist from Tripura noted that he felt that the North Eastern states are by and large seen as resource (land) by the centre and has shown no concern for citizens and their well-being. Government is seen as a dictator in this region, hence the question — Transparency for whom?, Privacy for Whom? The distinction between the transparency brought about by the RTI and individual privacy was also made. It was pointed out that the RTI is concerned with transparency of the State, but individual privacy is separate from this concept.

Personal Experiences Shared

Anjuman Azra Begum shared her sister’s experience with the RTI. Her sister had applied for a job in 2008. Their family filed an RTI for details of the procedure, but was denied details by the RTI officer, who said that furnishing details would violate the privacy of other candidates. This example raises questions about when it is appropriate for RTI officers to withhold information in the name of privacy, and what mechanisms can be put in place to ensure that the RTI does not use privacy as a way to deny information. Lowang also shared his experience with the RTI. He had filed an RTI asking for answer sheets because he doubted the appointment of police personnel. He was told that the cost in total would be Rs.2000, when in reality each sheet costs Rs.2 — the misconstruing of facts was another example of how RTI officials restrict access information indirectly. From these examples the concern about RTI officials using privacy as an excuse to deny information was brought to the surface. To highlight the problems with the current implementation of the RTI and the lack of basic knowledge of how to use the RTI Mhao Lotha from the DICE Foundation shared a personal experience of his friend who had filed an RTI against the fishery department, and the RTI official simply shouted at her. L. Rima told a similar story as Mhao Lotha. In her experience the RTI is good in theory, but in practice it has become a commercial platform, where officers pay money to applicants for RTI cases to be taken off.

From the discussion and the shared experiences it was clear that the RTI, although a strong law on paper, still faces many challenges in implementation that a privacy law could also face, and that the fact that if more privacy is brought into the RTI, it will become yet another way for the State to avoid disclosing information.

Questions to Consider

Can a privacy law be made to be functional in the same way that the RTI is functional?
In terms of the RTI who should have more privacy? Who should be more transparent? Can NGOs be held accountable under the RTI?
What mechanism should be established to enforce the balance between privacy and transparency?

Privacy and Security/Law Enforcement in the North East of India

Another important discussion held during the conference was the practices of law enforcement in the North East, security, and privacy. Because the North East is in a state of armed conflict several laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, Sedition Act and provisions in the IPC give immunity to security forces. This has led to gross violation of citizens’ privacy by law enforcement agencies — as the acts give large amounts

of power to law enforcement agencies with little or no accountability, and the acts are often misused. Furthermore, the security laws that exist in the North East explicitly prohibit access to individual personal information. For example, in the Assam Police Manual, which is followed by police in the North East — no papers can be given out to the public except to the investigation officer — this includes personal information such as medical records and post-mortem reports. Anjuman shared an example of how this rule violates individual privacy. In her example, a victim was not allowed access her own medical report, but her medical records were being circulated among police, doctors, and media. This example highlights how privacy and the right to information can go hand in hand as it was the victim’s right to access her own medical file, and at the same time getting access to her own medical file is an act of personal privacy protection.

Personal Experiences Shared

Participants shared how individual privacy is often violated by the army, as it is allowed to enter and search any space without warrant, if there is any type of “suspicion”. They also shared how phone tapping and random monitoring is a common practice by both the army and civil police. For example, one day the police recorded a conversation by Director of the Police, Wireless who was giving a lecture on how to lead an effective agitation. The transcript was handed to the high court and the director punished. Other examples include policemen frisking women in public, newspapers publishing police frisking women in public, and law enforcement agencies compelling pregnant women to give birth in open in front of people. The discussion surrounding privacy and security/law enforcement highlighted an important way in which privacy is violated in the North East. The unregulated action of law enforcement acts as a very real and dangerous way in which individual privacy is violated on a daily basis.

Questions to Consider

Can privacy legislation regulate the acts of law enforcement agencies?
Will privacy legislation be implemented differently in the North East because of the armed conflict?
Will a privacy law supersede other laws such as the AFSPA?

Privacy and the UID

During the conference the discussion also briefly focused on the UID and privacy. It was shared that there had yet to be UID consultations in the North East of India. The only information individuals had about the UID was that it was going to allow individuals to access BPL benefits more easily.

Questions around the UID included: why is the UID needed for citizens living within their own country? How will the UID impact and help families who send their children to gather rations from the ration shops? What is the connection between the UID and the expected privacy law? What is the connection between the UID and intelligence agencies? What would UID mean to people living in border areas?

Conclusion

Privacy as a Fundamental Right

In the closing discussion Prashant Iyengar shared different examples of privacy in Indian case law, and the various ways in which the Supreme Court has defined privacy as a right that is implicit in the right to life. The participants discussed what privacy means to them, and what they thought a right to privacy should entail. Among the points raised, it was brought up that privacy should be a right that is legally protected for sovereign individuals. The law should also include parameters and limitations in order to protect an individual’s autonomy. Furthermore, privacy should be understood and linked to the concept of human rights and individual rights. From the closing session, and the above sessions many themes and questions pertaining to privacy came out that will need to be addressed when considering the way forward for a privacy legislation including:

Property rights and privacy
Privacy rights of minorities
Privacy and the UID
Privacy and law enforcement agencies
Privacy as a fundamental right
The interplay of privacy law and traditional law

Download the Event Report here [PDF, 178 kb]

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