Centre for Internet and Society

Books at a Click

praskrishna — 2016-06-18T17:52:06Z

The OdiaWikimedia community and Bhubaneswar-based Srujanika have come together to make rare science books available online for readers, students & science educators.

The article by Diana Sahu was published in the New Indian Express on January 9, 2016.

Readers can now access rare science books in Odia language at Odia Wikisource, an online library of popular books in the language. The Odia Wikimedia community and Bhubaneswar-based Srujanika have come together to make these books available online for readers, students and science educators. This apart, books of Sahitya Akademi award winning writer Jagannath Prasad Das have been added to the library. Srujanika's co-founder Puspashree Pattnaik recently provided 700 popular science books that were published by the organisation to the Wikimedia community for digitisation. “These books were appreciated by many and even in demand after going out of print. Hence, we thought if these can be shared under free licence then they can reach a wider population. Wikipedia contributors can use these as resources and enhance science content in Odia Wikipedia as well", says Puspashree, a former teacher. She along with her husband Nikhil Pattnaik, a former scientist with the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad, had published several science books as part of their project to popularise the subject among children. With support from Vigyan Prasar in New Delhi, the couple had also documented rare works of science published in books, magazines, periodicals and newspapers from 1850 to 1950 in electronic format, a few years back. Around science 765 articles written over a century have been put on CDs and DVDs according to the names of authors and year of publication. The science books have been digitised by volunteers of the Odia Wikimedia community and the Centre for Internet and Society, a non-profit working for supporting Indian language Wikipedia projects and the communities.

Pushpashree Pattnaik

Similarly, the Wikimedia community has re-licensed 30 books of Das under a free license CC-by-SA 4.0. His books can now be accessed at https://orwikisource.org and anyone can use them for academic or research work. “My tryst with internet started very late. I was introduced to digital books through Srujanika's online version of Purnachandra Odia Bhashakosha - comprising 9,500 pages in seven volumes- which was impossible to handle on the writing table. That made me think how convenient it would be to have Odia books avail. able on the internet. As a beginning. I decided to put my own writings on the internet", said Das. Prior to Das, eminent writers and litterateurs Debi Prasanna Pattanayak, Manoj Panda, Subrat Prusty, Bharat Majhi and organisations like 'Manik Biswanath Smrutinyasa' and Aama Odisha' had come forward to make their books available online for free using Odia Wikisource as a platform. At present, Odia Wikisource has 280 Odia books and all are either under Public Domain or Creative Commons Share Alike licences. A team of 10 active contributors, known as "Uikiali' in Odia, are digitising books of various genres ranging from science writing, fiction to 0dia classics. “Apart from the science writ. ings, we are also working on digitising the biography of Nandini Satpathy which has been published by Ashisa Ranjan Mohapatra of Srimati Nandini Satpathy Memorial Trust,” says Mrutyunjaya Kar, administrator of Odia Wikisource and Odia Wikipedia who has been contributing to the Wikimedia projects in Odia, Hindi, Sanskrit and English for the last four years. Odia Wikisource is a sister project of Odia Wikipedia.

These books were appreciated by many and going out of print. If these can be shared under free licence then they can reach a wider population.
Pushpashree Pattnaik

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/new-indian-express-january-9-2016-diana-sahu-books-at-a-click

Books are a bridge between generations

praskrishna — 2014-05-05T09:27:05Z

Kannada litterateurs stressed on the importance of books and cultivating the habit of reading on the occasion of ‘World Book Day’ on Wednesday.

The article was published in the Deccan Herald on April 23, 2014. Dr. U.B.Pavanaja was a speaker on the occasion.

Speaking on the sidelines of the event, writer Narahalli Balasubramanya said “We should ensure children emulate great minds if we want them to be responsible citizens. This is possible only if we make them read good books.

Today, we are increasingly finding ourselves in the company of corrupt people. It is through books that we can interact with great literary figures such as Bendre and Kuvempu.”

The event was jointly organised by Karnataka Publishers Association, Kendra Sahitya Akademi, Karnataka Lekhakiyara Sangha and Indian Institute of World Culture.

Balasubramanya maintained that the Kendra Sahitya Academy sold books at affordable rates and also gave a funding of Rs 400 crore to the book publishers, annually. “But not many people are aware of books entering market and the works don’t reach people,” he added.

A series of Kannada works written by authors were released on the occasion. Writer Dr Siddalingaiah who released the books said “Books are bridges between our minds and our ancestors’ minds. Every home should have a small library.”

‘Pustaka Bhagya’

“The State government has introduced Anna Bhagya, Ksheera Bhagya and other schemes. Similarly, they should also implement Pustaka Bhagya,” said M V Nagaraj Rao of Shrungara Prakashana.

Technical writer in Kannada U B Pavanaja maintained that in Kannada Wikipedia there was dearth of information on Kannada literary works. “There is enough information about English works but not on Kannada novels and literary publications. The Kannada publishers should strive to feed information and synopsis of each work into the Kannada wikipedia,” he added.

Public Library Department celebrated the occasion by holding a book exhibition and essay competition for children at City Central Library premises on Wednesday.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/deccan-herald-april-23-2014-books-are-a-bridge-between-generations

books

praskrishna — 2014-05-05T09:00:58Z

Books

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/books.png

Bombay Report

praskrishna — 2014-07-18T06:03:48Z

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

Bolstering right to remain private

praskrishna — 2012-10-29T09:00:13Z

The Justice AP Shah panel has done to well to lay down an enforceable roadmap that can strengthen privacy laws in the country. It’s now for the legislature to take the issue to a logical conclusion.

Apar Gupta's column was published in the Pioneer on October 29, 2012.

A haveli courtyard is an apt metaphor for the complexity which is involved in drafting a law on privacy. Though the courtyard gives an appearance of openness, it is limited by the walls, doors and windows which surround it. The architecture represents a mediated understanding of the options which are available to the resident in sharing and limiting information to family and strangers. A somewhat similar project is in the works with the Union Government taking steps towards the enactment of a privacy law.

Privacy law as it is understood at present is usually limited to the odd writ petition filed against the Government by a private individual seeking enforcement of a fundamental right to privacy. Recently, such adjudication has been limited to high-profile individuals, and where there is wide voyeuristic interest. For instance, two recent petitioners include industrialist Ratan Tata and former Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh. Here, it is important to stress that with the state gathering more and more data about individuals through the Unique Identification Authority of India scheme, there is a need to democratise the right by making legal provisions for its enforcement. In making such provisions a balance has to be maintained, where information which serves public interest or gathered through informed consent is not encumbered in the name of protecting individual privacy.

To find this balance, the Government late last year tasked a Committee of Experts chaired by Justice AP Shah to prepare a report on the Privacy Bill. Readers would recall that Justice Shah had authored a judgement which read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, decriminalising homosexual activity. A closer reading of the judgement shows the reliance placed by the court on the privacy right and to reach its determination. With such credentials, the Justice Shah Committee has exceeded the high expectations placed on it, presenting a fair and balanced approach towards a privacy law in India.

At the very outset the report clearly marks its objectives, from which it then commences to study judicial precedent on privacy as well as the experience of foreign jurisdictions. On the basis of this study, it has evolved nine privacy principles which encompass within it distinct aspects of individual privacy. Such a nuanced approach to privacy is certainly welcome given that privacy as a right is often subjective, varying drastically in its appreciation as per civil society, private industry and even Government itself.

Beyond the specific aspects of the privacy right, the report extends the right both to Government as well as private industry. This is a sign of the times, best put by Pranesh Prakash, policy director, Centre for Internet and Society, when he says that citizens reveal more data about themselves to social networking websites than they would to the Government under torture!

Another significant aspect is the proposed co-regulatory regime which the report suggests. And, experience has taught us that a right without an effective remedy to enforce it counts for a little more than a black letter on paper. In this respect, the report proposes a sectoral regulator which has supervision over State level privacy commissioners. In addition to this, the report also proposes a system of self-regulation where industry-specific standards may be proposed and then sanctioned by the privacy commissioners. However, contrary to the present approach of tribunalisation, the report suggests that recourse to civil courts for aggrieved persons should always be kept open.

Though the origins of the privacy rights may be antiquated, widespread consensus suggests that the modern practice and substance of privacy law owes its beginning to an article published in the fourth volume of the Harvard Law Review. The article, authored by Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren drawing a physical justification for what seemed like a novelty back then, stated that the law regarded a man’s house as his castle.

Sadly, the right has not seen a proper development in India, mainly due to the absence of an overarching legislation as well as a lack of understanding of its proper contours. At least in this respect, the report marks a significant development in the drafting of a comprehensive privacy legislation in India. A haveli, a house or a castle — the Justice Shah panel has provided a useful blueprint to the legislature to build an effective and balanced statute to safeguard individual privacy.

(The writer is a partner in a Delhi-based law firm and visiting faculty at the National Law University, Delhi)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/daily-pioneer-columnists-oct-29-2012-apar-gupta-bolstering-right-to-remain-private

bollywood

praskrishna — 2012-04-10T09:00:33Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/M2.jpg

Bodhisattwa

praskrishna — 2019-09-22T23:43:27Z

Bodhisattwa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/Bodhisattwa.jpg

Bobby Kuhnu

praskrishna — 2011-03-31T09:52:12Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/publications/it-act/copy_of_bobby.jpg

Bobby Kuhnu

praskrishna — 2011-03-31T08:45:37Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/publications/it-act/bobby.jpg

Board and Society Members

praskrishna — 2024-06-26T08:11:38Z

The Centre for Internet and Society was established in 2008 with Sunil Abraham, Nishant Shah, Achal Prabhala, Lawrence Liang, Atul Ramachandra, Subbiah Arunachalam, and Vibodh Parthasarathi as the founding Society members; and Sunil Abraham, Achal Prabhala, Lawrence Liang, and Atul Ramachandra as the founding Board members. Please find below the lists of the members who have served on the CIS Society and Board since. The information in this page reflects the membership status, of Society and Board, as of March 31, 2024.

Members of Board and Society during 2023-24

Members of Board and Society during 2022-23

Members of Board and Society during 2021-22

Members of Board and Society during 2020-21

Members of Board and Society during 2019-20

Members of Board and Society during 2018-19

Members of Board and Society during 2017-18

Members of Board and Society during 2016-17

Members of Board and Society during 2015-16

Members of Board and Society during 2014-15

Members of Board and Society during 2013-14

Members of Board and Society during 2012-13

Members of Board and Society during 2011-12

Members of Board and Society during 2010-11

Members of Board and Society during 2009-10

Members of Board and Society during 2008-09

Members of Board and Society during 2023-24

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Nikhil Narendran	President	T. Vishnu Vardhan	Chief Functionary
Vikram Hegde	Secretary	Nikhil Narendran	Member
T. Vishnu Vardhan	Treasurer	Vikram Hegde	Member
Prof. Lakshmi Arya	Member	Anubha Sinha	Member
Prof. Radhika Mamidi	Member	Arindrajit Basu	Member
		Pranav M B	Member
		Dr. Rekha Jain	Member
		Shyam Ponnappa	Member
		Prof. Subbaiah Arunachalam	Member
		Dr. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan	Member
		Sunil Abraham	Member
		Tanveer Hasan	Member
		Pranesh Prakash	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2022-23

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Dr. Asha Achuthan	Member	Dr. Asha Achuthan	Member
Nikhil Narendran	Member	Nikhil Narendran	Member
Vikram Hegde	Member	Vikram Hegde	Member
		Anubha Sinha	Member
		Arindrajit Basu	Member
		Pranav M B	Member
		Dr. Rekha Jain	Member
		Shyam Ponnappa	Member
		Prof. Subbaiah Arunachalam	Member
		Dr. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan	Member
		Sunil Abraham	Member
		T. Vishnu Vardhan	Chief Functionary
		Pranesh Prakash	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2021-22

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Dr. Rekha Jain	Chairperson	Dr. Rekha Jain	President
Mr. Amber Sinha	Secretary	Dr. Amit Mitra	Member
Dr. Amit Mitra	Member	Dr. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan	Member
Dr. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan	Member	Mr. Amber Sinha	Member
Mr. Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member	Mr. Arindrajit Basu	Member
		Mr. Shyam Ponnappa	Member
		Mr. Sunil Abraham	Member
		Mr. T. Vishnu Vardhan	Member
		Mr. Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member
		Prof. Subbaiah Arunachalam	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2020-21

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Dr. Rekha Jain	Chairperson	Dr. Rekha Jain	President
Mr. Amber Sinha	Secretary	Dr. Amit Mitra	Member
Dr. Amit Mitra	Member	Dr. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan	Member
Dr. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan	Member	Mr. Amber Sinha	Member
Mr. Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member	Mr. Arindrajit Basu	Member
		Mr. Shyam Ponnappa	Member
		Mr. Sunil Abraham	Member
		Mr. T. Vishnu Vardhan	Member
		Mr. Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member
		Prof. Subbaiah Arunachalam	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2019-20

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Sunil Abraham	President	Amber Sinha	President
T. Vishnu Vardhan	Treasurer	T. Vishnu Vardhan	Treasurer
Pranesh Prakash	Member	Sunil Abraham	Secretary
Shyam Ponnappa	Member	Shyam Ponnappa	Member
		Dr. Rekha Jain	Member
		Dr. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan	Member
		Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member
		Arindrajit Basu	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2018-19

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Sunil Abraham	President	Sunil Abraham	President
Pranesh Prakash	Treasurer	Pranesh Prakash	Treasurer
Shyam Ponnappa	Member	Shyam Ponnappa	Member
T. Vishnu Vardhan	Member	T. Vishnu Vardhan	Member
		Jayna Kothari	Member
		Hans Varghese Mathew	Member
		Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
		Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member
		Kavita Philip	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2017-18

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Jayna Kothari	President	Jayna Kothari	President
Nirmita Narasimhan	Secretary	Nirmita Narasimhan	Secretary
Pranesh Prakash	Treasurer	Pranesh Prakash	Treasurer
Shyam Ponnappa	Member	Shyam Ponnappa	Member
Sunil Abraham	Member	Sunil Abraham	Member
T. Vishnu Vardhan	Member	T. Vishnu Vardhan	Member
		Hans Varghese Mathew	Member
		Kavita Philip	Member
		Lawrence Liang	Member
		Nishant Shah	Member
		Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
		Sumandro Chattapadhyay	Member
		Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2016-17

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Sunil Abraham	President	Sunil Abraham	President
Nirmita Narasimhan	Secretary	Nirmita Narasimhan	Member
T. Vishnu Vardhan	Treasurer	T. Vishnu Vardhan	Treasurer
Kavita Philip	Member	Kavita Philip	Member
Nishant Shah	Member	Nishant Shah	Member
Shyam Ponnappa	Member	Shyam Ponnappa	Member
		Hans Varghese Mathew	Member
		Jayna Kothari	Member
		Lawrence Liang	Member
		Pranesh Prakash	Treasurer
		Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
		Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2015-16

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Sunil Abraham	President	Sunil Abraham	President
Nirmita Narasimhan	Secretary	Nirmita Narasimhan	Member
T. Vishnu Vardhan	Treasurer	T. Vishnu Vardhan	Treasurer
Kavita Philip	Member	Kavita Philip	Member
Nishant Shah	Member	Nishant Shah	Member
Shyam Ponnappa	Member	Shyam Ponnappa	Member
		Hans Varghese Mathew	Member
		Jayna Kothari	Member
		Lawrence Liang	Member
		Pranesh Prakash	Treasurer
		Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
		Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2014-15

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Sunil Abraham	President	Sunil Abraham	President
Nirmita Narasimhan	Secretary	Nirmita Narasimhan	Member
T. Vishnu Vardhan	Treasurer	T. Vishnu Vardhan	Treasurer
Kavita Philip	Member	Kavita Philip	Member
Nishant Shah	Member	Nishant Shah	Member
Shyam Ponnappa	Member	Shyam Ponnappa	Member
		Hans Varghese Mathew	Member
		Jayna Kothari	Member
		Lawrence Liang	Member
		Pranesh Prakash	Treasurer
		Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
		Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2013-14

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Lawrence Liang	Chairman	Lawrence Liang	Member
		Sunil Abraham	President
		Nishant Shah	Treasurer
Jayna Kothari	Member	Jayna Kothari	Member
Kavita Philip	Member	Kavita Philip	Member
Subbiah Arunachalam	Member	Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member	Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2012-13

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Lawrence Liang	Chairman	Lawrence Liang	Member
		Sunil Abraham	President
		Nishant Shah	Treasurer
Jayna Kothari	Member	Jayna Kothari	Member
Kavita Philip	Member	Kavita Philip	Member
Subbiah Arunachalam	Member	Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member	Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2011-12

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Lawrence Liang	Chairman	Lawrence Liang	Member
		Sunil Abraham	President
		Nishant Shah	Treasurer
Jayna Kothari	Member	Jayna Kothari	Member
Subbiah Arunachalam	Member	Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member	Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member
		M.K. Narasimha Rao	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2010-11

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Subbiah Arunachalam	Chairman	Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
		Sunil Abraham	President
		Nishant Shah	Treasurer
Atul Ramachandra	Member	Atul Ramachandra	Member
Lawrence Liang	Member	Lawrence Liang	Member
Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member	Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member
		Achal Prabhala	Member
		M.K. Narasimha Rao	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2009-10

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Subbiah Arunachalam	Chairman	Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
		Sunil Abraham	President
		Nishant Shah	Treasurer
Atul Ramachandra	Member	Atul Ramachandra	Member
Lawrence Liang	Member	Lawrence Liang	Member
Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member	Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member
		Achal Prabhala	Member

Members of Board and Society during 2008-09

Members of Board	Position	Members of Society	Position
Sunil Abraham	President	Sunil Abraham	President
Achal Prabhala	Vide-President	Achal Prabhala	Member
Lawrence Liang	Secretary	Lawrence Liang	Member
		Nishant Shah	Treasurer
Atul Ramachandra	Member	Atul Ramachandra	Member
		Subbiah Arunachalam	Member
		Vibodh Parthasarathi	Member

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/people/board-and-society-members

Bloomberg.pdf

praskrishna — 2015-04-03T06:17:33Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/Bloomberg.pdf

BlogFest2012

praskrishna — 2012-12-04T05:03:38Z

BlogFest2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/Technology.png

Blog Entries of Maesy Angelina

praskrishna — 2011-11-25T08:56:06Z

Maesy works in the Blank Noise project. She has produced ten blog posts.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/maesy-angelina.pdf

Blocking Twitter: How Internet Service Providers & telcos were caught between tweets and tall egos

praskrishna — 2012-08-25T07:36:04Z

Long derided as 'dumb pipes' to the Web, Internet service providers (ISPs) are discovering these days that insult is being increasingly followed up by injury.

Joji Thomas Philip and Harsimran Julka's article was published in the Times of India on August 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

In the fight between netizens who spare no effort at lampooning the powers that be and alarmingly frequent government flashes of rage at comments that can range from the mildly disrespectful to downright defamatory, telcos and ISPs find themselves much like the grass in the age-old Swahili saying "When two elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers".

The latest reminder of the hard place they find themselves in came earlier this week when news first broke that the government had asked for some accounts on social media site Twitter to also be part of websites and Internet pages it wanted blocked by ISPs. The news triggered a wave of outrage across cyberspace, with many users venting their rage at the first entity they associate the web with - their ISP, which in many cases is also their telecom operator.

"We acted immediately to the government's orders, but ended up being targetted and criticised wrongly only because we acted first," explained one official, who sought anonymity for himself and the company to avoid offending bureaucrats.

It's a common feeling. Telcos and ISPs are increasingly finding themselves in a 'Damned if you do, Damned if you don't' predicament these days, having to walk a tightrope between government orders and a restive netizenry.

And government orders can range from the super-urgent to arbitrary to sometimes ill-conceived. Very often, its 'one ban fits all' makes little allowance for differences between social networking sites and regular websites.

Executives in telecom companies recounted the instance when the government on August 18 ordered a ban on bulk SMSes and restricted text messages to five per day as part of efforts to combat the large-scale migration of people of north-eastern origins from other states to their home provinces fearing reprisal attacks.

"Within an hour of the directive, we started getting calls seeking compliance," said a top executive with a leading telco. But as the Centre was demanding compliance reports, operators were busy trying to decipher its notification, which read: "(a) Block bulk SMS (more than 5) for the next 15 days in the entire country across all states/UTs (b) Block bulk MMS (more than 5) and all MMS with attachment more than 25 KB for the next 15 days in the entire country across all states/UTs."

Shoot first, talk later

Telecom operators were nonplussed by the notification. Did it apply only to senders of bulk text messages who use this facility for commercial purposes? Or, did it mean customers could not send SMSes to more than five people simultaneously?

"When we sought clarification, the explanation was completely different and took a new dimension. It was five text messages per day per customer," said the regulatory head of a GSM operator, requesting anonymity as he did not want to offend the government.

Mobile phone companies then approached the department of telecom explaining that they did not have any technology with which they could impose a five SMSes a day limit for postpaid users. "The home and telecom ministries had not even realised that a facility did not exist before issuing the directive," said the marketing head of a leading telco.

In this case, the government accepted the operator's arguments and relented, but still told the companies not to highlight the limitation. "This time around, our arguments were accepted. Going by past instances, some operators had feared that the government would slap a hefty penalty for non-compliance without considering what we had to say," the marketing head said.

Industry officials say the tendency of 'shoot first, talk later' among bureaucrats and ministers long used to having their orders followed, especially when it came to the world of social networking which very few of them had any idea about, meant that it was safer to obey first and correct later.

"We don't even do any application of mind to the government's notices on requests. We wholesale block them. We can't even question the government's requests. A notice is a law in effect. Violation means a potential penalty which can go up to the cancellation of my licence and thus end to my business," said the head of a Delhi-based ISP that serves business users.

Executives with several ISPs and telcos say most often, court orders, government notifications and directives are not in public domain, and these result in angry consumers assuming that their service provider is up to some mischief.

ISPs say public clarifications by the government would go a long way in addressing the issue. "There has to be transparency. The government should have proactively disclosed the names of the websites it wanted blocked. The persons and intermediaries hosting the content should have been notified and provided with 48 hours to respond as required by the IT Act," said Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society, a research organisation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-aug-25-2012-blocking-twitter

Blocking online content: Google gets more requests than govt

praskrishna — 2011-11-03T10:45:25Z

Allowing a peek into what kind of information is requested to be blocked online and by who, the Department of Information Technology (DIT), in response to an RTI (Right to Information) query, has provided some intriguing details, says Pallavi Polanki in this article published in Firstpost.com on 2 November 2011.

DIT lists names of bureaucrats, police officers and one politician who requested blocking content online as well as the websites they identified.

In all, 68 individual items were requested to be blocked under the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking Access of Information by Public) Rules 2009, to the DIT, which is the only authority mandated by the Information Technology Act 2000, to order blocking online content.

Speaking to Firstpost, Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, who requested for the information under the RTI Act — and has posted it on a blog analysing the information received from DIT — said, "Information from a previous RTI application uncovered what all websites were officially blocked by the DIT, while this one uncovers what all website blocking requests the DIT received."

No prizes for guessing; pornographic sites topped the list of websites requested to be blocked. Mumbai’s Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) listed 60 adult content sites in his request. However, the DIT doesn’t seem to have accepted the officer’s request. The sites remain accessible.

Haneef Ali, Andhra Pradesh State President of the Bharatiya Janata Minority Morcha, is the only politician on the list. He requested the blocking of a blogpost, the title of which translates to "insult against Islam".

Up to four requests were made for blocking of political content, two of which came from Tamil Nadu.

The secretary, Public (Law and Order) Department requested for the website tamil.net.in to be blocked and the principal secretary, IT Department, requested a blog to be shut down. Only the first request seems to have been accepted.

Also, in the line of political fire was a Wikipedia entry for Sukhbir Singh Badal. The principal secretary, IT Department, Punjab, requested the Wikipedia entry with the address ‘en.wikipedia.org/Wiki/Sukhbir Singh Badal’ to be blocked. However, Wikipedia does have an entry for the deputy chief minister of Punjab with a slightly tweaked address.

Not surprisingly, Mumbai’s Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) wanted a YouTube video ( identified in Prakash’s blog as a video of Bal Thackeray’s speech) to be blocked. Click on the link and a message from YouTube reads: "This video has been removed because its content violated YouTube’s Terms of Service. Sorry about that."

A betting site betfair.com was sought to be shut down by a senior inspector from Mumbai’s cyber crime cell. No luck. The site remains up and running.

Finally, Maharashtra’s Commissioner sent in two requests: Both are running.

Now for the interesting part: Prakash states that the data provided by the government "seemingly conflicts with the data released by the likes of Google (via its Transparency Report)."

According to Google’s Transparency Report, released on 25 October, Google received requests for 358 individual items to be removed from its different services between January and June 2011. And 407 such requests were made in 2010.

Information provided by DIT, however, shows that only requests for 68 items (64 websites, one blog, and three specific web-pages) from eight separate requests were made to it. Of these, only three were for Google’s services (two for Blogger and one for YouTube), points out Prakash.

While only DIT has the authority to order blocks, Google data shows that requests to ‘remove content’ far outnumber the requests made to DIT, suggesting that Google is receiving these requests directly from law enforcement agencies.

"The only explanation for this is that an order to ‘block for access… or cause to be blocked for access by the public’ is taken to be different from an order for removal of content… That would mean that while blocking is regulated by the IT Act, forcible removal of content is not. Thus, it would seem that forcible removal of online content is happening without clear regulation or limits,"states Prakash. (emphasis added).

Prakash makes the case that when law enforcement agencies send requests to companies like Google to remove content they are "operating outside bounds set up by the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure as also the Information Technology Act."

He adds that companies tend to comply with such ‘requests’ even when they are not under legal obligation to do so because it might appear to them to "violate their own terms of service (which generally include a wide clause about content being in accordance with all local laws), community guidelines."

"This way, the intention of Parliament in enacting Section 69A of the IT Act — to regulate government censorship of the Internet and bring it within the bounds laid down in the Constitution—is defeated," states Prakash.

This article has been republished from Firstpost.com. The original can be read here. You can read Firstpost’s continuing RTI coverage here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/blocking-content-google-gets-more-requests