Centre for Internet and Society

'Attempts to censor the web ill-advised'

praskrishna — 2012-06-17T07:11:39Z

Amid concerted government attempts to censor the internet and the recent blocking of file-sharing websites due to a court order based on a petition by producers of a Tamil film, speakers at a discussion on Saturday felt that there was a fear of freedom of expression among those affected by it, primarily the powerful.

Article by Krish Fernandes published in the Times of India on June 3, 2012

At the discussion on 'freedom of expression and privacy: Proposition' held at Goa University, senior journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta felt the increasing attempts at online censorship were a consequence of the government being unable to formulate coherent responses to the widening of the limits to freedom of expression on the internet.

He was of the view that all stakeholders should be consulted before any legislation in this regard.

Vickram Crishna of Privacy International spoke about "the fear of freedom of expression". While stating that the internet access had jumped due to the increased usage of smartphones, he observed that "there were concerted moves to make these things (censorship) happen in India".

"What use is access, if we don't have freedom of expression?" Crishna questioned.

Geeta Seshu of The Hoot was of the opinion that the world was also seeing the rise of powerful web players such as search engines and social networks with no obligations to permit free speech.

Chinmayi Arun of the National University of Juridical Sciences echoed this view. She felt freedom of speech and expression were vulnerable because they receive very little protection from non-state factors. She felt surveillance may soon become as serious a threat to free speech as censorship.

Advocate Apar Gupta felt there are better safeguards against banning books, while web content bans see almost no safeguards.

Touching on the ban on file-sharing sites, Lawrence Liang of Alternative Law Forum felt private bodies such as ISPs were being given powers of the state.

Anja Kovacs of Internet Democracy Project was critical of the government instructing internet service providing companies to setup servers in the country. The internet as we know it will stop to exist if we have server requirements in all countries, she said.

Frederick Norohna of publishing house Goa 1556, Siddhart Narrain and Danish Sheikh of the Alternative Law Forum, Paromita Vohra of Devi Pictures and Werner Souza also spoke on the occasion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/attempts-to-censor-the-web-ill-advised

Poor Guarantee of Online Freedom in India

praskrishna — 2012-06-17T04:18:26Z

The debate over the "Intermediaries Guidelines" as part of the Information Technology Act, 2000 in Parliament brought focus to the issue of censorship and lack of accountability of governing bodies vis-à-vis the internet in the country. This cannot be divorced from the larger questions related to the threats to freedom of expression from both the state and various societal actors today.

This article by Geeta Seshu was published in the Economic & Political Weekly, Vol XLVII No. 24, June 2012.

An annulment motion against the Information Technology (Inter-mediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011 moved by Member of Parliament (MP) P Rajeev of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the Rajya Sabha, was the first serious attempt by internet freedom activists to get the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000 discussed and reviewed by the country’s lawmakers.

Not unexpectedly, the motion, specifically against the rules governing intermediaries – clause (zg) of subsection (2) of Section 87 read with subsection (2) of Section 79 of the >IT Act, 2000 – was not carried. However, the discussion that preceded it at least demonstrated the concerns of parliamentarians about what internet freedom activists have termed the “draconian” provisions of the IT Act.

It is about time, really, that parliamentarians sit down to review what they very quickly acquiesced to in December 2009. It is also about time that the debate over the provisions of the IT Act be conducted in the public domain, instead of in closed-door meetings with expert groups and committees comprising a narrow set of stakeholders favoured by the government or its various wings.

The discussion in the Rajya Sabha largely centred around the vague and sweeping terminology of the range of content that anyone could take objection to. P Rajeev said that while he supported the regulation of the internet, he was not in favour of its control. The rules were ultra vires the IT Act, he said. Echoing his concern, leader of the opposition Arun Jaitley of the Bharatiya Janata Party, D Raja of the Communist Party of India and N K Singh of the Janata Dal (United) – to name just a few – also said that the internet was different from other media and censoring it was untenable.

Finally, union minister for information technology, Kapil Sibal, was forced to give an assurance to the house that he would call a meeting of MPs, industry and all stakeholders and implement whatever consensus emerges after a discussion on the specific words members had objections to.

There was no mention from the minister on a host of other problem areas in the rules as they are currently framed, including the very sweeping definition of an “intermediary” itself (any entity which on behalf of another receives, stores or transmits any electronic record – which means internet service providers, web hosting providers, search engines, online payment sites, cybercafes and bloggers too). No mention either of the rules for intermediaries to takedown notices within 36 hours of receiving a complaint, irrespective of whether these are fair and reasonable. No mention of whether the rules need to provide procedures for hearing and adjudicating complaints before any content is taken down.

The IT Guidelines

In several ways, the rules have gone way beyond what was laid down in the IT Act, but they also add considerably to the original reasonable restrictions laid down under Article 19 (2) of the Constitution of India. Some of the terms that can invite objections under the guidelines are:

(a) Belongs to another person and to which the user does not have any right to; (b) grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophiliac, libellous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically objectionable, disparaging, relating or encouraging money laundering or gambling, or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatever; (c) harm minors in any way; (d) infringes any patent, trademark, copyright or other proprietary rights; (e) violates any law for the time being in force; (f) deceives or misleads the addressee about the origin of such messages or communicates any information which is grossly offensive or menacing in nature; (g) impersonate another person; (h) contains software viruses or any other computer code, files or programmes designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer resource; (i) threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order or causes incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence or prevents investigation of any offence or is insulting any other nation.

With this wide-ranging and entirely arbitrary set of potential violations, the possibility of misuse is also immense. In its comments submitted in response to the draft rules, Privacy India and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) pointed out that Sections 79(1) and (2) of the amended IT Act itself did provide for exemptions for third party liabilities of intermediaries, something that the rules have now virtually set aside.[1]

Other comments submitted by these organisations about security and privacy of cybercafe users deal with minors and with the general architecture of cybercafes. In the first instance, the organisations expressed concern that undue restrictions on the use of the internet by minors (photo identity cards, accompanied by adults, etc) would hamper their access to the internet and would actually discourage poorer children from using the internet.

In the second instance, the detailed restrictions on the layout of the cybercafés – the height of cabins and the directions of the screens, etc, would, they felt, be intrusive and violate the privacy of internet users in cybercafes. Besides, vulnerable sections like sexual minorities or HIV positive patients may even be open to identity theft, they feared.

The discussion on the rules unfortunately did not come close to addressing these fears. While the lawmakers generally accepted the importance of regulation of the internet and electronic communication, there is still very little clarity on exactly how this must be done, the extent to which regulation must take place and the agency that will be entrusted with this task.

The IT Act, 2000 was first passed in an era when the country was transitioning to an electronic age. E-commerce was uppermost in the minds of policymakers, their eyes firmly fixed on the new economy. But soon enough, it was clear that technology was developing rapidly and an expert committee was constituted to revise the act and suggest amendments that would incorporate technological changes.

Lack of Accountability

In the wake of the 26 November 2008 attack in Mumbai, national security and intelligence were powerful emotional catchwords and few questioned some of the sweeping provisions laid down by the rules under the IT Act. While the annulment motion focuses on the pernicious nature of the guidelines for intermediaries, this is only one amongst a series of rules that seek to change the very manner in which Indians can access and use the internet. Other rules relate to decrypting, monitoring and blocking of communication, data security and privacy (Section 69: interception, monitoring and decryption of information, Section 69 A: blocking, Section 69 B: monitoring of traffic data or information) and of course, the complete absence of checks and balances for the powers given to authorities like Computer Emergency Response Team India (CERT-In).

In fact, there has been little or no review of the responsibility vested in an agency like CERT-In, which describes itself as the nodal agency to oversee the security of the nation. Conflating security concerns with content that may be objectionable to some is one thing but also providing this agency with the powers to block sites without even the creators of these sites getting to know about it is another.

Most of our attention today is on the censorship rampant on the internet in India. Most recently, there have been several instances of internet sites being blocked and takedown notices sent to bloggers. In the last few months, we have had the arbitrary blocking of the website cartoonsagainstcorruption.com which was run by Kanpur-based cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, the arrest of Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mohapatra and the controversial move last year by the Indian government to get internet service providers to remove so-called objectionable content on Facebook, Orkut and Youtube, apart from other sites. A complaint against these sites by journalist Vinay Rai followed soon after, though it strangely did not invoke provisions of the IT Act, preferring to cite alleged violations under the Indian Penal Code.

Trivedi did not even know that his site was blocked till some friends called him to tell him that they could not access his site. After an exchange of emails with his webhost, the portal “Big Rock”, he was informed that the site was suspended because it contained cartoons that showed disrespect to national emblems. A complaint had been received by Mumbai’s cybercrime cell by a Mumbai-based advocate, R P Pandey. The Kanpur resident also learnt later from newspaper reports that another case, this time under charges of sedition, were lodged against him in Beed district of Maharashtra.

While this method of embroiling someone in cases in far-flung geographical areas is not new (the complaint by the Indian Institute of Planning and Management against New Delhi-based Caravan magazine in Silchar, Assam is a good case in point), Trivedi quickly moved the content on his site onto another blogging platform, also got together friends and supporters to launch “Saveyourvoice”, an online and offline campaign, with a cheeky celebration of All Fool’s Day on 1 April 2012 with a greeting to the minister Kapil Sibal “for his foolish attempts to try censoring internet” and another campaign – “Freedom in a cage” – at Jantar Mantar, Delhi, in April 2012.

Other internet freedom activists have got together to secure information on censorship. Last year, a right-to-information (RTI) application by the CIS revealed that 11 websites were blocked on orders from the department of information technology. A writ petition against the IT Act has been filed in the Kerala High Court and the Software Freedom Law Centre, which was instrumental in campaigning for the annulment motion in the Rajya Sabha, has launched an online petition against the IT Act rules that refers to government authority to censor facebook posts, monitor emails and skype conversations, access private information and mine sensitive personal data.[2]

Governments the world over are exercised about the need to impose restrictions on online freedom and a good indication is the bi-annual Google Transparency Report that monitors the number and categories of requests sent by different governments to take down content. In the last report for the period January to June 2011, the report recorded requests to remove 358 items and 68 content removal requests, 58% of which were fully or partially complied with. In addition, there were government requests to remove Youtube videos that were protests against local leaders or used offensive language against religious leaders, besides 236 communities and profiles from Orkut which were critical of a local politician.

Interestingly, while content removal requests for the Orkut profiles remained as Google maintained it did not fit its own community standards or local law, Google chose to “locally” restrict the videos that may incite enmity between communities. With minor variations, this is a stance adopted by other online companies, like Facebook and Twitter, with the latter coming out with a policy earlier this year that it would remove content that appeared to violate local laws.

In the struggle to keep the internet free and protect communication from surveillance and blocking by governments, it would be naive to expect commercially-driven internet companies to put up much of a stand. Most of these stakeholders have agreed with lawmakers that the internet does need regulation. On their part, the Indian government, which has flexed its desire to regulate the internet, has also been sensitive to criticism of its role in censoring online freedom. Other stakeholders – the vast community of users of the internet, bloggers, website hosts, creators and producers of online videos, file-sharers, software developers, etc, are only engaged in a race to protect their content and shift it to more amenable sites every time they run into trouble.

Threats to Freedom of Expression

However, it must be noted that the censorship of online media is but a reflection of the curbs on freedom of expression in general. The attacks on freedom of expression in “offline” media, the attacks on journalists and the deaths of eight journalists since 2010,[3] the alarming regularity with which we are witnessing a ban on books and cinema, art or theatre, the increasing intolerance of dissenting or differing opinions in society, the abject fear of free and independent debate and discussion and the role of the government in actively furthering this intolerance are suggestive of a dangerous trend.

Almost all these instances are marked by the clear absence of any due procedure in addressing the content that becomes objectionable to someone or some sections of society, instead arbitrarily and speedily removing this content from the public domain. Whether it is the withdrawal of Rohinton Mistry’s book Such a Long Journey, a prescribed textbook by Bombay University, midway through the academic year, or that of recent issue of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbook on the Constitution of India, institutional redressal mechanisms were simply not given a chance.

The woeful absence of similar redressal mechanisms for so-called objectionable content under the rules of the amended IT Act only exacerbates this situation further.

Notes

[1].http://privacyindia.org/2011/03/10/comments-on-the-information-technology-guidelines-for-cyber-cafe-rules-2011/
[2].www.softwarefreedom.org
[3].The Free Speech Hub, which has been tracking violations of freedom of expression as part of a project from the media-watch site, The Hoot (www.thehoot.org), has this list: Hemchandra Pandey (July 2010), Bimala Prasad Talukdar (September 2010), Sushil Pathak (December 2010), Umesh Rajput (January 2011), J Dey (June 2011), Ramesh Singhla (October 2011), Chandrioka (February 2012) and Rajesh Mishra (March 2012).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/poor-guarantee-of-online-freedom-in-india

Medical Privacy Invite

praskrishna — 2012-06-15T14:27:50Z

The event is being held in Poona on June 30, 2012.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/medical-privacy.pdf

Connecting People Apart - Events Series

praskrishna — 2012-06-15T11:32:44Z

Post-Media Lab is organising an event series at Lüneburg/Berlin from June 20 to June 23, 2012. Nishant Shah will be speaking at this event.

This was published in Mute on June 11, 2012

Events registration (free) and details here - Contact info@postmedialab.org

20 June

Opening presentation – ‘Talk to Me’ with Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits (RIXC) with a contribution by Nishant Shah (Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore). Reception and drinks.
Venue: Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg. 19:30-22:00
Event booking (free)

21 June

‘What Would the Community Say?’ – A public consultation on regional sustainability and participation projects with Nishant Shah (Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore) in cooperation with DialogN.
Venue: Freiraum, Lüneburg. 13:00-15:00
Event booking (free)

McKenzie Wark book launch and presentation, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International.
Venue: b-books, Berlin. 21:00-23:00
Event booking (free)

22 June

The Community Complex, A Post-Media Lab conference
Participants: Johannes Paul Raether (Basso), McKenzie Wark (The New School, New York), Nishant Shah (Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore), Marcell Mars (MaMa, Zagreb), Tatiana Bazzichelli (transmediale/reSource), Clemens Caspar Mierau (Spackeria/c-base), Pod (CiTiZEN KiNO/XLterrestrials, Berlin/San Francisco), Graswurzel TV, foebud e.v. (Bielefeld), Tactical Technology Collective (Berlin and Bangalore), Freifunk (Berlin).
Venue: Denkerei, Berlin. 13:00-20:00
Event booking (free)

After conference event: Performative screening - CiTiZEN KiNO (#16): Technotopia / Dystopia : A Social Garden-i-fication Is Elsewhere!
Venue: c-base, Berlin. 22:00
Event booking (free)

23 June

Live Stream/Media Lounge: ‘From Waste to Resource. Recovering Sustainable Attitudes’
Venue: Kulinarisches Kollektiv, Berlin. 17:00-20:00
Event booking (free)

The Post-Media Lab is part of the Lüneburg Innovation Incubator, a major EU project within Leuphana University of Lüneburg, financed by the European Regional Development Fund and co-funded by the German federal state of Lower Saxony.

Full programme details

Events booking (free) – http://pml.eventbrite.co.uk Contact info@postmedialab.org

Opening presentation - ‘Talk to Me’ with Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits (RIXC) with a contribution by Nishant Shah (Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore)

Wednesday, 20 June, 19:30-22:00
Venue: Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg
Reception and drinks

Everyone wants someone to talk to. Nowadays, scientists have performed various experiments in order to verify the old assumption that talking to plants makes them grow better. This is a prototype for an interface, which allows talking to plants remotely via the internet. We invite everyone to participate in a collaborative experiment by talking to growing plants using an online remote interface.

‘What Would the Community Say?’ - A public consultation on regional sustainability and participation projects with Nishant Shah (Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore) in cooperation with DialogN (Lüneburg)

Thursday, 21 June 13:00-15:00
Venue: Freiraum, Lüneburg

Nishant Shah will pass on and upon reflect experiences about the changing face of citizen action in a post-mediatized world. He will be presenting audio-visual material from studies in India and China – from a 'Global South' perspective – in order to look at the affective circuits of digital technologies and how our current models of development and change fail to address these conditions of being human - because mostly they are targeted at conditions of being a subject. This presentation will be embedded into the discursive context of 'citizen participation' and 'liquid feedback' projects destined for Lüneburg as part of a development region funded for by the EU and EFRE.

Book launch and presentation with McKenzie Wark. The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International

Thursday 21 June 21:00-23:00
Venue: b-books, 14 Lübbenerstr, 10997 Berlin

McKenzie Wark appears at b-books to talk about his book on the life and times of the Situationist International, The Beach Beneath the Street.
McKenzie Wark delves into the Situationists' unacknowledged diversity, revealing a world as rich in practice as it is in theory. Tracing the group's development from the bohemian Paris of the '50s to the explosive days of May '68, Wark's take on the Situationists is biographically and historically rich, presenting the group as an ensemble creation, rather than the brainchild and dominion of its most famous member, Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and the lives of those who made up the movement – including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alex Trocchi and Jacqueline De Jong – Wark uncovers an international movement riven with conflicting passions.
Accessible to those who have only just discovered the Situationists and filled with new insights, The Beach Beneath the Street rereads the group's history in the light of our contemporary experience of communications, architecture, and everyday life. The Situationists tried to escape the world of twentieth-century spectacle and failed in the attempt. Wark argues that they may still help us to escape the twenty-first century, while we still can …

Organised by The Post Media Lab at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. In collaboration with Mute and b-books

The Community Complex - A Post-Media Lab conference

Friday, 22 June 2012, 13:00-20:00
Venue: Denkerei, Oranienplatz 2, 10999 Berlin

13:00-15:00 / Workshop I: Practice
15:00-15:30 / Pause
15:30-17:30 / Workshop II: Privacy
18:00-20:00 / Evening Panel

Whether you want to have something to do with the ‘community industry’ or not, it has something to do with you. Through its burgeoning expansion, our forms of relating, caring, communicating and collaborating, are being transformed, enclosed, templated and put to work. The most affective components of network culture are rapidly being engineered into ‘product’. Just as virtual space is augmented, real space becomes ever more virtualised, securitised and impoverished. The rise of the network-assembled community has coincided with a radical disinvestment of national and municipal communities in the age of austerity. As services are withdrawn, the ‘community’ itself is enjoined to step into the breach. ‘Community’, in the era of networked neoliberalism, has become both a target of governance as well as of business.
Beyond the commercial drive which is ‘connecting people apart’, communities of difference are also flourishing in the post-internet age. Reimagining community is not just the preserve of belligerent nationalisms and Web 2.0 but also a long-standing activity of alternative, artistic and political cultures’ responses to commercialisation and industrialisation, from the 17th century puritans and diggers, the artist communes of the 19th century, through to the political squatter scenes of post-68 generation, the hacklabs of the past years and new movements such as Anonymous. The Community Complex will ask how normative forms of sociality and identification are not only produced but also challenged in today’s mashup of the virtual and real, free and waged labour, computational and affectual, real-time and bio-time, as well as minor and molar imaginings of connection. To achieve this we bring together different perspectives and experiences of critically engaging with the new realities of mediatised ‘community’ and its reimagination.

Participants: Johannes Paul Raether (Basso), McKenzie Wark (The New School, New York), Nishant Shah (Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore), Marcell Mars (MaMa, Zagreb), Tatiana Bazzichelli (transmediale/reSource), Clemens Caspar Mierau (Spackeria/c-base), Pod (CiTiZEN KiNO/XLterrestrials, Berlin/San Francisco), Graswurzel TV, foebud e.v. (Bielefeld), Tactical Technology Collective (Berlin and Bangalore).

After conference event: Performative screening - XLterrestrials and PML-present: CiTiZEN KiNO (#16): Technotopia / Dystopia : A Social Garden-i-fication Is Elsewhere!

22:00-late
Venue: c-base, Rungestrasse 20, 10179 Berlin

As much as society appears to be thoroughly seduced by all the technological empowerment in this crash course information + capture age, the flaws, the cracks and all the discontents are beginning to show. In spite of the tsunami of corporate-feeds, gadget trends and heavily wired agendas, a Social Garden-i-fication of on-the-ground communities is underway and determined to grow by any means or hack necessary!

Citizen Kino is an experimental hybrid of public cinema, theater, laboratory and media self-defense.

Live Stream/Media Lounge: 'From Waste to Resource. Recovering Sustainable Attitudes'

Saturday, 23 June 2012, 17:00–20:00
Venue: Kulinarisches Kollektiv, Lausitzer Str.13 (aka Schweizerei), 10999 Berlin-Kreuzberg

A virtual tour through Re-Use Centres from all over the world
Participating Centres are: SCRAP in Portland, Oregon (USA), ReCircle (Brussels / Belgium), Long Beach Depot For Creative ReUse in Long Beach (California / USA), Mini-Scrapbox (Reepham / UK), The Resource Exchange (Philadelphia /USA), Kunst-Stoffe (Berlin / Germany).

In cooperation with Kunst-Stoffe (Berlin), Drap Art (Barcelona) and Les Petites Gourmandises (Berlin)

Link to the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/connecting-people-apart

Tata Communications embraces the change to IPv6

praskrishna — 2012-06-15T05:56:49Z

The Internet was operational since 1983 and at the time there was no way that one could image as to what extent it will reach. With a rapid growth and after serving nearly 2.5 billion people and 11 billion devices, the Internet is apparently running out of space. This has prompted many global organizations to embrace the change from IPv4 to IPv6 and one of these companies is Tata Communications.

This was published in tech2 on June 7, 2012

In a release, Tata Communications state that a transition does not necessarily mean migration. They add further, "However, a transition does not necessarily mean migration; or in other words, as we transition to IPv6 as the new protocol for digital and electronic communication, it does not mean that we are going to abandon the internet as we know it. In fact, for most of the users, it is going to be a transparent transition, where their devices are going to be able to harness the powers of IPv4 and 6. While there are huge benefits at the back-end, leading to better security protocols and low maintenance, there are a few advantages that the user should also celebrate."

Nishant Shah, Director-Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), along with Tata Communications have listed a few points of how IPv6 may benefit users:
Faster Internet: Because IPv6 will open up a huge range of IP addresses, direct routing of data becomes a possibility. As data does not have to be routed through many servers or nodes within a network, it can reach its destination faster.

More collaborative and shared Internet: With the abundance of IP addresses springing up, there is going to be more scope for multiple devices to be connected online. New platforms of collaborative knowledge production and sharing can be designed to become infinite and inclusive in their scale and architecture.

More connected devices: The inter-operability features of IPv6 ensure that more devices are able to communicate with each other with ease. Tata Communication states, “The science-fiction futuristic dream of a completely connected environment where human and artificial intelligence can work together, using a range of devices, is actually a material possibility with large scale IPv6 implementation. This can also trigger new innovation that helps reconstruct some of our existing devices in new forms and shapes.”

While affordability and the migration to new network infrastructure are the gating factors to this transition, these are diminishing costs and we are looking at more interesting internet architecture as Tata Communications' move towards IPv6. They end by stating, “Perhaps, one of the most reassuring points of this transition is that we do not need to abandon the familiar internet we are already working with; the transition is not a moving on, but a moving to, and in it are the promises of a safe, secure and speedy internet. Global technology organisations like Tata Communications have embraced this change; it’s only a matter of time before others too recognise the need for IPv6 and the huge difference it will make to our lives.”

Let us know your thoughts on various global organizations embracing the change from IPv4 to IPv6 in the comments section below.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/tata-communications-embraces-the-change-to-ipv6

Window on the World

praskrishna — 2012-06-15T05:49:04Z

Subsequent to the publishing of a peer reviewed essay titled Resisting Revolutions: Questioning the Radical Potential of Citizen Action, the Centre for Internet & Society has been listed as one of the global organisations working on issues of participation, citizenship and new technologies along with a list of partner organisations.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan

This issue of Window on the World lists some civil society organizations, networks and research institutes working on issues of participation, citizenship and new technologies.

American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP)

The ACP is a broad alliance of colleges, universities and civic groups, which promotes and develops ‘democracy colleges’ for the twenty-first century. It was launched in the White House convening, ‘For Democracy's Future – Education Reclaims Our Civic Mission’ in association with the Department of Education and the White House Office of Public Engagement.

ACP responds to the civic crisis in America, and the widespread sense of powerlessness. It holds that we must reinvent citizenship for the twenty-first century in the United States and around the world.

ACP develops interest and support for civic agency, including policy, legislation, media and deliberative dialogues. It also highlights several initiatives, which embody principles of civic innovation, full participation, diversity and civic agency.

Arab Forum for Alternatives (AFA)

The AFA is an organization that works for a society in which democratic culture prevails, for a society capable of protecting its rights and defending such rights through a democratic movement. This will be implemented by providing a space for experts, activists and researchers in the field of civil society who are interested in issues related to the reform/change process in the Arab region, and who have alternative visions seeking to put forward in a scientific and practical way aiming to the development of their societies based on justice, democracy and human rights values.

Centre for Internet & Society (CIS)

The Centre for Internet and Society critically engages with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and pedagogic practices, in the field of Internet and Society, with particular emphasis on South–South dialogues and exchange.

Through multidisciplinary research, intervention and collaboration, it seeks to explore, understand and affect the shape and form of the Internet, and its relationship with the political, cultural and social milieu of our times.

Civic explorations programme

Inspired by the knowledge explorations, HIVOS, together with Institute of Development Studies (IDS), ISS and CiS, is turning ‘The changing face of citizen action’ newsletter into a longer term ‘civic explorations’ programme. With this programme, it intends to offer a space to reflect on the changing dynamics of citizen action in a globalizing world, through research and dialogue. Its action plan for 2012 includes three regional knowledge explorations (In Central America, East Africa and South America), the continuation of the newsletter and its involvement in a number of innovative research programmes on civic action.

CIVICUS

CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation is an international alliance of members and partners, which constitutes an influential network of organizations at the local, national, regional and international levels. CIVICUS has worked for nearly two decades to strengthen citizen action and civil society throughout the world, especially in areas where participatory democracy and citizens’ freedom of association are threatened. CIVICUS has a vision of a global community of active, engaged citizens committed to the creation of a more just and equitable world. This is based on the belief that the health of societies exists in direct proportion to the degree of balance between the state, the private sector and civil society.

Community Development Resource Association (CDRA)

CDRA is a South African non-governmental organization, which is a centre for organizational innovation and developmental practice.

It values people's ability to organize, and so shape the world. It fosters and promotes innovative organizational forms and practices that seek to transform power towards a just world characterized by freedom, inclusion and sufficiency.

The essence of its work and services can best be described in four words: searching (collaborative inquiry, research and learning); accompanying (consultancy services that accompany organizations through processes of learning and change); sharing (courses through which they share effective organizational practice); and promoting (courageously standing with others to advocate for new organizational forms and practices that work, and challenge those that do not).

Future citizenship

Future Citizenship is a venture to facilitate access to citizenship projects internationally.

Its initiatives include a network of scholars, seminars, conferences and an e-journal. Future Citizenship hopes this will encourage further cooperation and exchange of ideas and insights between its participants, their students and other interested parties. It also hopes to contribute to a better understanding of the problems confronting modern democracies and its growing numbers of various new citizens. Whether such understanding will contribute to addressing and solving those problems in the spirit of basic human rights could in part determine the future course and well-being of modern democracies, and of new forms of political communities.

Global voices online – The Netizen report

Global voices Online frequently produces ‘The Netizen Report’: a regular overview of recent global developments related to the power dynamics between citizens, companies and governments on the Internet. It is hoped that these regular reports can provide Netizens around the world with useful information about who is seeking to influence and shape the digital platforms and networks we increasingly depend upon, and how. Armed with information, people are in a better position to defend their rights, and to make sure the Internet evolves in a manner that is compatible with free expression and dissent.

Involve

Involve is made up of experts in public engagement, participation and dialogue. It carries out research and delivers training to inspire citizens, communities and institutions to run and take part in high-quality public participation processes, consultations and community engagement. It believes passionately in a democracy where citizens are empowered to take and influence the decisions that affect their lives. Involve has transformed how leading organizations engage, including the OECD, Communities and Local Government, the European Commission, the States of Jersey, the BBC, the UNDP, the Cabinet Office and numerous Local Authorities.

JASS (Just Associates)

JASS (Just Associates) is an International Feminist Organization driven by the partners and initiatives of its regional networks in Mesoamerica, Southern Africa and Southeast Asia. JASS is dedicated to strengthening and mobilizing women's voice, visibility and collective organizing power to change the norms, institutions and policies that perpetuate inequality and violence, in order to create a just, sustainable world for all. Founded as a learning community by a group of activists, popular educators and scholars from 13 countries in 2002, JASS generates knowledge from experience, with the intention of improving the theory and practice of women's rights, development and democracy.

LogoLink

LogoLink, the Learning Initiative on Citizen Participation and Local Governance, is a global network of practitioners from civil society organizations, research institutions and governments created to stimulate and support civil society organizations and networks to engage in citizen participation and social control of public policies at the local level.

LogoLink is engaged in animating a more participatory and inclusive relationship between those who govern and those who are governed. It means, on the one hand, to sensitize and challenge governments to implement innovative and equitable public policies oriented to assuring human rights, and to be more responsive and accountable towards the needs and concerns of citizens. On the other, it means to support citizens and civil society organizations to create participatory spaces, hold their governments accountable and exercise social control.

Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS)

MKSS is a people's organization and part of the growing non-party political process in India. The MKSS works with workers and peasants in the villages of Central Rajasthan. It was set up by the people of the area in 1990 to strengthen participatory democratic processes, so that ordinary citizens could live their lives with dignity and justice. The organization was born out of a struggle for community land held illegally by a feudal landlord. The subsequent struggle for minimum wages made it evident to the people, that transparency and accountability of systems of governance are basic to access any right. It became clear that access to relevant information is a fundamental tool for ensuring transparency and accountability of the government, and of all bodies that affect public interest.

mySociety

mySociety runs most of the United Kingdom's best known democracy Websites. It works with the public, private or third sector, and organizations which try to adapt to the new world of citizens empowering themselves through the Internet. mySociety has helped them by building sites, consulting or helping them to make plans. mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project, which builds Websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the Internet most efficiently to improve lives.

Participation, Power and Social Change (PPSC)

The PPSC team at IDS works in partnership with diverse collaborators from around the world to generate ideas and action for social change. Through research, innovation and learning in rights-based and participatory approaches, it works with people to identify and implement alternative approaches to social change that respond to local situations and bridge operational practice with research and policy change. The team's work intends to help tackle the power inequalities that create crises and sustain poverty and injustices through the suppression of alternative or marginalized voices. Citizenship DRC – resources: http://www.drc-citizenship.org/

Participation research centre

The Participation Resource Centre is a collection of over 5,000 documents, many of them unpublished and practitioner-based, about participatory approaches to development. They include research reports, training manuals, workshop reports and critical reflections on Participation. Information about each document can be searched online.

The Centre particularly promotes Participatory Methodologies, sharing practical examples from development initiatives around the world in the form of case studies, guides and manuals.

The collection is held at the IDS, University of Sussex and incorporates the collection of the International Institute for Environment and Development.

Politeia

Politeia – Participation for Citizenship and Democracy in Europe – is a network of institutions and organizations throughout Europe. The general aim of the association is to promote active democratic citizenship in countries of Europe and, more specifically, political and social participation of citizens and their organizations.

The goals of Politeia are the creation of a structure that will set civic participation and education higher on the European and national agenda, the strengthening of the capacities of the partner organizations by exchanging methods and practices and a stronger presence in the European NGO scene by focusing on the promotion of European citizenship through participation.

Twaweza

Twaweza means ‘we can make it happen’ in Swahili. It is a ten-year citizen-centered initiative, focusing on large-scale change in East Africa. Twaweza believes that lasting change requires bottom-up action. It seeks to foster conditions and expand opportunities through which millions of people can get information and make change happen in their own communities directly and by holding governments to account.

Compiled by Remko Berkhout and Laura Fano Morrissey

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/window-on-the-world

Securing E-Governance in Ahmedabad

praskrishna — 2012-06-15T04:09:20Z

This is the brochure of the event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/securing-e-governance-programme.pdf

The War for India's Internet

praskrishna — 2012-06-14T09:12:34Z

Why is the world's biggest democracy cracking down on Facebook and Google? Rebecca Mackinnon's article was published in Foreign Policy on June 6, 2012.

"65 years since your independence," a new battle for freedom is under way in India -- according to a YouTube video uploaded by an Indian member of Anonymous, the global "hacktivist" movement. With popular websites like Vimeo.com blocked across India by court order, the video calls for action: "Fight for your rights. Fight for India." Over the past several weeks, the group has launched distributed denial-of-service attacks against websites belonging to Internet service providers, government departments, India's Supreme Court, and two political parties.

Street protests are being planned for this coming Saturday, June 9, in as many as 18 cities to protest laws and other government actions that a growing number of Indian Internet users believe have violated their right to free expression and privacy online. A lively national Internet freedom movement has grown rapidly across India since the beginning of this year. The most colorful highlight so far was a seven-day Gandhian hunger strike, otherwise known as a "freedom fast," held in early May on a New Delhi sidewalk by political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi and activist-journalist Alok Dixit. Trivedi's website was shut down this year in response to a police complaint by a Mumbai-based advocate who alleged that some of Trivedi's works "ridicule the Indian Parliament, the national emblem, and the national flag."

Escalating political and legal battles over Internet regulation in India are the latest front in a global struggle for online freedom -- not only in countries like China and Iran where the Internet is heavily censored and monitored by autocratic regimes, but also in democracies where the political motivations for control are much more complicated. Democratically elected governments all over the world are failing to find the right balance between demands from constituents to fight crime, control hate speech, keep children safe, and protect intellectual property, and their duty to ensure and respect all citizens' rights to free expression and privacy. Popular online movements -- many of them globally interconnected -- are arising in response to these failures.

Only about 10 percent of India's population uses the web, making it unlikely that Internet freedom will be a decisive ballot-box issue anytime soon. Yet activists are determined to punish New Delhi's "humorless babus," as one columnist recently called India's censorious politicians and bureaucrats, in the country's media. Grassroots organizers are bringing a new generation of white-collar protesters to the streets to defend the right to use a technology that remains alien to the majority of India's people.

The trouble started with the 2008 passage of the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, whose Section 69 empowers the government to direct any Internet service to block, intercept, monitor, or decrypt any information through any computer resource. Company officials who fail to comply with government requests can face fines and up to seven years in jail. Then, in April 2011, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology issued new rules under which Internet companies are expected to remove within 36 hours any content that regulators designate as "grossly harmful," "harassing," or "ethnically objectionable" -- designations that are open to a wide variety of interpretations and that free speech advocates argue have opened the door to abuse. It is thanks to these rules that the website of the hunger-striking cartoonist, Trivedi, was taken offline. Also thanks to the 2011 rules, Facebook and Google are facing trial for having failed to remove objectionable content. If found guilty, the companies could face fines, and executives could be sentenced to jail time.

Saturday's protesters are calling for annulment of the 2011 rules and the repeal of part of the 2008 act. They are also calling for Internet service companies to reverse the wholesale blocking of hundreds of websites, including the file-sharing services isoHunt and The Pirate Bay, as well as the video-sharing site Vimeo and Pastebin, which is primarily used for the sharing of text and links. Internet service providers were responding to a court order from the Madras High Court demanding the blockage, which is aimed at preventing the online distribution of pirated versions of one particular film. The Internet companies, fearing that they would not be able to catch every individual instance on every possible site they host, instead chose to block entire services along with all of their content -- which had nothing to do with the film in question.

Such "John Doe" orders, named because they are directed against unknown potential offenders in the present and future, are characterized "by their overly broad and sweeping nature," argue lawyer Lawrence Liang and researcher Achal Prabhala, which extends "to a range of non-infringing activities as well, thus catching a whole range of legal acts in their net." More broadly, as Delhi-based journalist Shivam Vij wrote in a recent essay: "The current mechanisms of internet censorship in India -- blocking, direct removal requests to websites, intermediary rules -- are draconian and unconstitutional. They need to be replaced with a new set of rules that are fair, transparent and accessible for public scrutiny. They should not be amenable to misuse by the powers-that-be for their own private interests."

Not only are the rules abused, but researchers find that they are causing extralegal censorship by companies that overcompensate in order to err on the side of caution. Last year, the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society performed an experiment in which it sent "legally flawed" takedown demands to seven companies that provide a range of online services, including search, online shopping, and news with user-generated comments. The legal flaws in the notices were such that the companies could have rejected them without being in breach of the law. Yet "of the 7 intermediaries to which takedown notices were sent, 6 intermediaries over-complied with the notices, despite the apparent flaws in them," reads the Centre for Internet and Society report.

Despite the growing public opposition, a motion to annul the 2011 rules was defeated by voice vote in the upper house of Parliament last month. Yet the criticism was sufficiently sharp that Communications Minister Kapil Sibal announced that he will hold consultations with all members of Parliament, representatives of industry, and other "stakeholders" to discuss the law's problems and how it might be revised. Many of the law's critics, however, are skeptical that this will eliminate the law's deep flaws and loopholes for abuse, especially given the government's failure to listen so far. Comments on the 2011 rules submitted last year by the Centre for Internet and Society were not even acknowledged as having been received by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. "Sibal uses the excuse of national security and hate speech," says the center's director, Sunil Abraham, "but that is not what is happening."

Abraham worries that what is really happening is a government effort at Internet "behavior modification" through a process akin to an experiment involving caged monkeys, bananas, and ice water. Put four monkeys in a cage and hang a bunch of bananas on the ceiling. Every time one of them climbs up to reach the bananas, you drench all of them with ice water. Soon enough, the monkeys will start policing themselves -- attacking anybody who tries to reach the bananas, making it unnecessary for their masters to deploy the ice water. "This is why the government is being so aggressive so early on, with only 10 percent of India's population online," says Abraham. "If you start the drenching early on, by the time you get to 50 percent [Internet penetration], every one will be well-behaved monkeys." Companies will act as private Internet police for fear of legal punishment before the government is called upon to step in and enforce the law. If it works, Indian politicians could have fewer reasons to worry about online critiques or mockery, because companies fearing prosecution will proactively delete speech that could potentially be designated "harassing" or "grossly harmful."

India is not China or Iran, however. Its politicians may be corrupt, and most of its voters may not understand why Internet freedom matters because they've never used the Internet. But it still has an independent press and boisterous civil society that are not going to give up their critiques and protests anytime soon. India also has a strong, independent judiciary, with a record of ruling against censorship and surveillance measures when a strong case can be made that they conflict with constitutional protections of individual rights. "On free speech I have high faith in the Indian judiciary," says Abraham. "There is a good chance to launch a constitutional challenge."

If Google and Facebook lose at their impending trial -- now scheduled for July -- they will most certainly appeal, which activists hope could provide just such an opportunity to prevent the sort of "behavior modification" process that Abraham warns against. Now India's burgeoning Internet freedom movement needs its own reverse "behavior modification" strategy -- imposing consistent and regular doses of political and legal ice water upon India's bureaucrats, politicians, and companies whenever they do things that threaten to corrode the rights of India's Internet users. Saturday's protest is just the beginning.

Sunil Abraham is quoted in this article. Read the original here

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

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

praskrishna — 2012-06-14T08:31:39Z

The next meeting of the two Sub-Groups on privacy issues under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court is scheduled to be held on June 27, 2012 at 11.00 a.m. in the Committee Room No. 228, Yojana Bhawan, Planning Commission.

Members of both the Sub-Groups are requested to send their final write-ups as decided in the last meeting, by June 20, 2012 so that those could be circulated to all concerned for obtaining feedback and for discussions/ deliberations on June 27, 2012.

Shri S. Bose, Under Secretary (CIT & I) communicated this through notice No. M-13040/47/2011-CIT&I.

The notice was e-mailed to the following individuals:

Justice A.P.Shah, Chairman
Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj
Usha Ramanathan
Sunil Abraham
Prashant Reddy
Prof. Arghya Sengupta
Som Mittal
Shri Gulshan Rai
Mala Dutt

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/meeting-of-two-sub-groups-in-delhi

Internet opens doors to trillions more Net addresses with IPv6

praskrishna — 2012-06-14T05:12:25Z

The global Internet industry reached a key milestone on June 6 when a group of Web sites, Internet service providers (ISPs) and router manufacturers banded together to participate in the World IPv6 Launch.

This blog post by Aaron Tan was published in techgoondu. Nishant Shah is quoted in this.

Google, Facebook and Yahoo have flipped the switch to the new Internet addressing system, while ISPs such as Japan’s KDDI and India’s HNS will permanently enable IPv6 for a significant portion of their residential wireline subscribers. Home networking equipment manufacturers will also turn on IPv6 by default in home router products.

The World IPv6 Launch was organised by the Internet Society as part of its mission to ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible for everyone, including five billion people who have yet to connect to the Internet.

“The support of IPv6 from these thousands of organizations delivers a critical message to the world: IPv6 is not just a ‘nice to have’; it is ready for business today and will very soon be a ‘must have’,” said Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer of Internet Society in a statement Wednesday.

Last April, Asia-Pacific became the first region in the world to run out of IPv4 addresses. Europe will deplete its allocation of IPv4 addresses later this year, followed by the U.S. in 2013, and Latin America and Africa in 2014. With IPv6, the Internet can now support over 340 trillion, trillion, trillion addresses compared with 4.3 billion addresses for IPv4.

“Understanding the importance of IPv6, some governments in Asia Pacific have committed to enable IPv6 in their internal networks with set deadlines and, given that they run such large networks, having them on IPv6 is a big step in itself,” said Rajnesh Singh, regional director of the Internet Society’s Asia-Pacific bureau.

The Singapore Government, for instance, has spearheaded an initiative to make e-government services accessible via IPv6. The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) has also started an IPv6 transition programme that offers grants and information for companies that intend to implement IPv6 on their networks.

With the launch of IPv6, consumers can expect to see applications and services that take advantage of IPv6′s features. Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8 operating system will also favour IPv6 connectivity over IPv4.

According to Nishant Shah, research director at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, IPv6 has an in-built security protocol called IPSec, which authenticates and secures all IP data. The data carrying capacity of IPv6 networks is also going to be higher.

“This means that more devices with more features will be able to work seamlessly through these networks. Despite the larger load of information, IPv6 packets are easier to handle and route, just like postcards with pincodes in their addresses are easier to deliver than those without”, Shah said in a joint statement with Tata Communications.

As an example, every aspect of the Beijing Olympics – from security surveillance to managing vehicles and media coverage – was done over IPv6. “The Chinese government, in fact, has already launched a ‘China Next Generation Internet’ project to build IPv6 networks which are going to radically change the face of high-speed internet in the country,” Shah revealed.

With all these benefits, why does IPv6 only command two percent of the world’s Internet traffic? Shah offers two clear reasons:

The first one is that of costs and infrastructure. The IPv6 platforms do not communicate easily with the IPv4 networks. We have the choice of a mammoth transition of all IPv4 websites and networks to new IPv6 protocols. This idea of abandoning IPv4 and moving to a new protocol is not only redundant; it is also futile, because IPv4 is already running the largest network in human history quite efficiently.

What we need are translators which will be able to speak to both the different versions and help our devices work through them seamlessly. Older, more successful technologies have been able to do this. So, television, for instance, whether it receives terrestrial data, satellite images or data transferred via cable, is able to translate and render them into images and sounds which we can consume with ease. However, the translators for the IPv4 – IPv6 are still expensive and we need more resources diverted towards making them affordable.

The second reason is linked to the first. In order for IPv6 to become popular, it needs a minimum threshold of service providers and users riding that network. As long as the deployment remains nascent, there will be no concentrated energy to actually try and make the bridges between versions 4 and 6. While global technology organisations like Tata Communications are ready for the transition, we are going to need a systemic change among all stakeholders to make IPv6 a reality, towards a faster, safer and more robust Internet.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-opens-doors-to-trillions-more-net-addresses

Biz moving to IPv6 but lower costs, support needed

praskrishna — 2012-06-14T05:01:34Z

Organisations such as Cisco Systems, Equinix and Singapore Internet Exchange are all gearing up for migration to IPv6 in time for the World IPv6 Launch day slated on Jun. 6,which involved everything from redesigning their backend infrastructure to assessing their systems’ readiness.

Published in intellasia.net on June 8, 2012

However, one industry player noted that the costs and effort in doing so is one key reason why more companies are not making the transition.

Cisco, for one, told ZDNet Asia that is had been preparing for the migration on Wednesday since the test run was conducted last year. Joshua Soh, managing director for Cisco Singapore and Brunei, pointed out that switching IPv6 on permanently demanded a certain level of production quality and this required a lengthy preparation time.

The first step was to work on its backend IT architecture and design, Soh revealed, adding that their primary goals were to leverage network infrastructure already in place to avoid spending on parallel networks, as well as to ensure production quality and ability to maintain overall service levels.

To meet these goals, the networking giant redesigned their data centre based on the reverse proxy model, in which the proxy server retrieves resources from the server to deliver to a client before returning these resources to the original server.

It also used its Application Control Engine (ACE) load-balancing platform to configure incoming IPv6 sessions to be proxied to the IPv4 tier so that the network will be dual-stacked to include existing ISP (Internet service provider) connections, the managing director explained.

The Singapore Internet Exchange did likewise. According to Yeo See Kiat, its sales and marketing director, the organisation enabled dual-stack networks on their servers for public-facing services, which would enable it to obtain IPv6 streams and turn on the service permanently.

“Meet in the middle” saves cost

Another company making a similar transition to the new Web protocol is Equinix. Its director of network engineering & operations for the Asia-Pacific office, Raphael Ho, told ZDNet Asia that the migration would require existing networks to be upgraded and expanded to support the additional bandwidth and power.

This is especially so for facilities such as the company’s International Business Exchange (IBX) data centers where the volume of interconnection is consistently high, he added.

In order to facilitate the switch, the company used its IPv6 Exchange to simplify the process for its networks to enhance traffic within an IPv6 environment, Ho stated. The central switching capability also helped create a “unicast” peering virtual local area network (LAN).

This “meet in the middle” approach helped reduce costs as it enabled its servers to more efficiently establish IPv6 peering, he explained.

Assess systems’ readiness

Cisco’s Soh noted that after the redesigning of the data centre is complete, the company performed an assessment to determine if existing devices in its demilitarised zone (DMZ) and datacenter networks were capable of supporting the new protocol. It also enhanced its network management systems to support network, devices and application monitoring over IPv6, he added.

At this late stage, the company is conducting system-level testing and quality assurance engineers are going about the functional and performance checks, the executive pointed out. Its last test will be a practice run in which it will switch on the IPv6 service for a few hours to make sure everything works fine, including the content delivery network and ISP services, he said.

Beyond the technical preparations, it also put together a training programme to ensure employees, from the frontline to the network engineers, were equipped with knowledge of the new protocol and skills appropriate for their roles, the executive stated.

No impetus for change

The amount of time and costs reflected in these companies’ migration efforts were cited as one of the main reasons why there are not more companies considering making the switch.

According to a statement issued by Tata Communications and India-based centre for Internet and Society on Wednesday, costs and infrastructure as well as having a minimum number of service providers and users utilising the network were identified as the two main impediments for IPv6 adoption.

One the first obstacle, they said: “IPv6 platforms do not communicate easily with IPv4 networks. This idea of abandoning IPv4 and moving to a new protocol is not only redundant, it is also futile because IPv4 is already running the largest network in human history quite efficiently.”

To make the transition more palatable, they believed “translators”, or technologies able to “speak” in both protocols, are needed. However, these translators are still expensive and there is a need to divert more resources to make these technologies more affordable, the statement noted.

As for the second reason, both Tata and the centre for Internet and Society stated that as long as the deployment of IPv6 remains nascent, there will be no concentrated energy to bridge both protocol versions.

“We are going to need a systemic change among all stakeholders to make IPv6 a reality, toward a faster, safer and more robust Internet,” they said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/biz-moving-to-ip-v-6

An Interview with Nishant Shah

praskrishna — 2012-07-06T05:05:36Z

Jamillah Knowles from BBC Radio interviewed Nishant Shah about Indian Internet issues.

"I think what we need to do is perhaps say that there is something happening with the internet in India and then maybe we can move on to figuring out what is happening to the anonymous because we had a series of challenges on freedom of speech and expression and online space in the country. Just around the end of 2011, the Information and Broadcasting Minister was summoning social networks like Facebook and MySpace and Google and asking for a regime of pre-censorship so that everything you and I write from what we had to breakfast to which lunch and video we like the most ... that all the info needs to be first reviewed by somebody to make sure that it doesn't commute the larger moral thinkabilities of the nation."

Listen to the full interview here

Originally published by Outriders, a BBC Radio 5 live's programme dedicated to exploring the frontiers of the Web.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/interview-with-nishant-shah

Govt websites to get new addresses

praskrishna — 2012-06-11T03:27:19Z

The government today said by December all its websites would switch over to IPv6 — the next generation Web standard that enables the creation of trillions of new Internet addresses and provides higher levels of security.

Click to read the original published by the Telegraph on June 7, 2012. Nishant Shah is quoted.

Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) went live across the globe today, with leading online giants, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Microsoft (Bing), introducing the new standard on their products and services.

Experts said Internet users would not feel any impact because of the shift.

At present, websites run on IPv4, a 27 year-old standard that allows just over four billion unique IP addresses, which are the sequence of numbers used to identify a device.

Each Internet-enabled device — computer, tablet or smartphone — needs its own IP address to connect to the Internet. However, because of the shortage of addresses, many devices have to share them, limiting the ability of the security agencies to track the exact device involved in a security breach.

Networking giant Cisco has predicted that 18.9 billion devices will be online by 2016.

Switching to IPv6 will ensure a unique IP address for each device.

“IPv6 is designed to handle security issues better... All government websites will be IPv6-compatible by December. For the country as a whole, the road map for transitioning to IPv6 is by 2020,” telecom secretary R. Chandrashekhar said.

Internet traffic that moves over to the new protocol is encrypted. Systems in IPv6 ensure that the traffic gets to the correct destination without being intercepted, analysts said.

To ensure a smooth transition and avert an abrupt disruption, both systems (IPv4 and IPv6) will work simultaneously for the next few years.

“The future of our connected networks is IPv6. Not only is it more efficient and faster than IPv4, which we are currently working with, it is also more reliable and secure,” said Nishant Shah, director (research) at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

India has 35 million IPv4 addresses against a data user base of about 360 million.

In addition, with the government targeting 160 million and 600 million broadband customers by the year 2017 and 2020, respectively, the need to move to IPv6 becomes more crucial. Moreover, there is a strong security requirement to provide unique IP address to each individual user.

The IT department has taken various steps, including organising workshops, to encourage state governments to hold pilot projects.

Twenty-seven government websites have been brought under IPv6 platform.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/govt-websites-to-get-new-addresses

Anonymous India’s Takedowns Could Be Counterproductive

praskrishna — 2012-06-18T06:05:13Z

Nikhil Pahwa's blog post was published in Medianama on June 6, 2012.

As I write this, Anonymous India has apparently taken down MTNL’s website, citing the ISPs decision to block sites, without apparently being quite aware why it is doing that. Last night, the collective claimed to have taken down the website of the ISPAI, India’s ISP Association. Last Saturday, there were discussions on the groups IRC to take down the website for the Ministry of Company Affairs. So far, it has taken down websites for the Andhra Pradesh Power Generation Corporation Limited, All Indian Trinamool Congress (AITMC), as well as several websites related to the Mizoram government, apart from accessing and publishing server logs from Reliance Communications.

Anonymous India’s activities do help: they increase awareness of India’s war on the Internet, both by the government through legislation and censorship, and by movie producers and copyright owners through takedown notices and John Doe orders. There still remain citizens online who aren’t aware of why they aren’t able to access legitimate content – last night, someone from the books publishing industry asked me why she wasn’t able to access the video in this post on ‘Designing for the Future Book‘ on her Airtel connection. The video is hosted on Vimeo, which remains blocked in India. Now she knows why.

Anonymous India has also shed light on what all is being blocked by sharing what are allegedly Reliance Communications’ logs on blocks. These logs suggest that ISPs were going beyond the mandate given to them by the courts and the government. It’s also clear that ISPs aren’t protecting the rights of their customers, and are implementing blocks either in a ham-handed manner, or in a manner that suits them or their related companies. They are as much to blame as those getting the orders issued, and so there is undoubtedly some schadenfreude in seeing both government and ISP websites taken down by Anonymous India.

Still, you have to wonder about how the powers that be will react to this situation: no government will show that it is bucking under what it perceives to be cyber terrorism: it’s not just an ego thing; there is also a legitimate fear that if the government is seen as buckling under such attacks, it would lead to cyber attacks whenever there is something that warrants a protest. The attacks by Anonymous could be counterproductive for two other reasons: firstly, because the natural reaction to any kind of attack is to increase spending and changes in laws. While India is already spending on surveillance and identification, cyberattacks will justify these spends, make the case for more, and lead to more changes in government policy.

The second reason is that these attacks could lead to the undoing of a lot of work done by activists for Internet freedom. The Software Freedom Law Center, Centre For Internet and Society, Avaaz, Change.org, The Internet Democracy Project, and many many others have spent many months reaching out to and educating parliamentarians and the lawmakers of the country on issues related to the draconian IT Rules. The IT Rules have resulted in websites and ISPs censoring content online when they have been send unfair and flawed takedown notices, and they need to be changed. The cyberattacks could once again be used by the Home Ministry and those at CERT-IN to justify continuing with such draconian rules, and especially since many MP’s are not aware of the nuances of the potential for misuse; some MPs (I’ve observed) appear to be choosing to be on the fence on this, either on account of lack of interest or lack of depth of understanding.

Activities that bring more information on the blocks to light help strengthen the case for more specificity in court orders by highlighting misuse by copyright owners and ISPs, and also for modification in the IT Rules. Taking down sites weakens it.

Click to read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/anonymous-indias-takedowns-could-be-counterproductive

Watch out for cyber bullies

praskrishna — 2012-06-05T06:08:19Z

It's time to take a closer look at this form of cyber crime in India, writes KV Kurmanath in an article published in the Hindu Business Line on June 4, 2012.

The suicide of Tyler Clementi, the 18-year-old New Jersey student in 2010, had triggered a strong debate on invasion of privacy in the cyber age.

His roommate, an Indian student, captured the boy kissing another man in their hostel using his web camera.

The boy jumped into a river unable to take the humiliation, when the former tried to circulate the clip. Though the court refused to link the recording with the death, it sentenced the Indian youth to 30 days in prison last month.

What Clementi was subjected to is cyber bullying, argued those who campaigned for the Indian student's deportation.

Along with other cyber crimes, cyber bullying is on the rise in India too. The fledgling cyber police wings in different states are being flooded with complaints of invasion of privacy, blackmail and circulating electronic messages that cause annoyance.

Ms Aparna (name changed) was aghast when a close friend called her up about a nude picture of her being circulated on the web. A quick check pointed the needle of suspicion at a friend who she had just spurned. Angered by her rejection, the boy morphed her picture, checked into her email account and sent it to all the people in the contact list.

After finding Facebook not so amusing, Sujatha (name changed) decided to close her account and discussed this with a few friends too. A few days later, she found both her FB and gmail accounts compromised. She also found obscene pictures posted on the same.

Legal Issues

Incidents like these are growing sharply with poor knowledge among users abut how to protect accounts. Sharing one's passwords with others too is proving dangerous.

Prof. Madabhushi Sridhar, a cyber laws expert at NALSAR University, says the crimes cited above come under the bracket of invasion of privacy.

He says Section 66A in the amended IT Act deals with these crimes. Sending any message (through a computer or a communication device) that is grossly offensive or has menacing character; any communication which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing insult, annoyance, criminal intimidation comes under this section. This crime, he says, is punishable up to three years with a fine.

Prof. Sridhar, who has just completed a book on cyber laws, feels that punishments under the IT Act are insufficient. "They should be read with the Indian Penal Code. This will be an effective method to check cyber crimes," he says.

Prof. Sridhar also represents the Institute of Global Internet Governance and Advocacy (GIGA) at the Law University. GIGA conducts research on the Internet and takes up advocacy and training programmes on Internet Governance.

"We already have anti-voyeurism provisions in the IT Act under Sec. 66E," Mr Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of Centre for Internet and Security, says.

This offence is punishable with ‘imprisonment which may extend to three years or with fine not exceeding two lakh rupees, or with both.'

Repeated harassment aka cyber bullying can be addressed using the already over-broad provisions under Sec. 66A. Unfortunately this Section goes too far and can be used to censor legitimate speech.

"Security and privacy awareness in India is very poor. It would be very useful if both the government and civil society was more aggressive in awareness raising and triggering change in behaviour. Unfortunately this is a bit like smoking - even though people are aware of the issues - they engage in risky behaviour online," he says.

Lack of Data

Mr.Pavan Duggal, Chairman of Cyber Law Committee and Cyber laws expert, said there is no specific data on cyber crime in India and the data available with the NCRB (National Crimes Records Bureau) of around 900 cases for overall cybercrime is also doubtful.

"The solution is to make cyber laws more strict as current law under IT Act 2000 is a bailable offence with three years imprisonment and a fine," he points out.

"IT Act 2000 has to be re-amended to specific provisions pertaining to cyber bullying. Further, cyber bullying needs to be made a serious offence with minimum five years imprisonment and a fine of Rs 10 lakh. Unless you have deterrence in law it will be a continuing offence," he observes.

Fortunately, there are some safeguards which can help prevent such acts of cyber offences. In most cases, the acts of bullying or blackmailing are done by someone close to the victims. People should make it a point to keep their Internet identities very safe.

One should not disclose their identities such as passwords or hint questions to anyone – no matter how close they are. Parents should keep an eye on their children who are addicted to the Internet. They should inform and educate their children on the clear and present dangers that lurk on the Net.

They should also teach the importance of respecting others' privacy apart from taking precautions to keep their private space very safe.

(with inputs from Ronendra Singh)

Click to read the original published in the Hindu Business Line. Sunil Abraham is qouted in this article.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/watch-out-for-cyber-bullies