Centre for Internet and Society

In Parts of India, Internet Shutdowns Are a Fact of Life

Megha Bahree — 2019-05-27T15:43:53Z

Fears of a censored internet are rising, as the government cites fake news and unlawful content in blocking internet access.

The article by Megha Bahree was published in Top10 VPN on May 21, 2019. Gurshabad Grover was quoted.

In 2017, Faakirah Suraiya Irfan, a lawyer and mental health counselor in the northern Indian state of Kashmir, was online with a patient when the internet went down. In the restive state the government frequently, and without any warning, shuts down the internet, so it was not an unusual occurrence. But for Irfan, who was employed by women’s career networking platform Sheroes to offer online counseling services to its members, the interruption couldn’t have come at a worse time. She was in the midst of talking a patient out of suicidal thoughts.

“At that point when you lose the network, you just lose the person,” said Irfan. “I’m talking, and I’m in a flow and trying to get them to open up but then in the middle of that the internet is shut down.”

Irfan quit her job after a year because “the work was through the internet and [owing to the frequent network shutdowns] it just wasn’t working.”

Internet, interrupted

In the last couple of years India has seen a phenomenal increase in the number of people coming online thanks to an explosion of cheap data and affordable smartphones. With more than 500 million people online, it has the second largest number of internet users in the world, after China.

But that growth has been accompanied by the usual sins of abuse, including a rise in online trolls and the spread of fake news. New Delhi has responded with a heavy hand. It has implemented internet shutdowns, banned apps and blocked hundreds of websites. Unsurprisingly, all of this has led to increasing fears of censorship in the world’s largest democracy.

India leads the world in the number of internet shutdowns, with over 100 reported incidents in 2018 alone, according to the latest Freedom On The Net report. The study tracks internet freedom in 65 countries, covering 87 percent of the world’s internet users, and addresses internet access, freedom of expression, and privacy issues. The report followed events between June 2017 and May 2018 and India came in as “partly free” with a score of 43 out of 100.

“There’s a censorship process underway in India,” said Apar Gupta, a lawyer and executive director of Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), an organization that works to defend net neutrality, freedom and privacy. “There’s a complete lack of transparency on what’s being done, why and who’s doing this.”

Shutdown throughout elections

India has just concluded the world’s largest general election with over 900 million people eligible to vote. But ongoing internet shutdowns prevented many people from accessing information as they prepared to cast their ballot.

Over the voting period of April 11 to May 19, the states of Rajasthan, West Bengal and Kashmir reported mobile internet shutdowns. News agency UNI reported that in April, authorities in parts of north Kashmir suspended internet services of all cellular providers in the region as it went to poll. This came two days after a shutdown in another region in Kashmir. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), a legal services organization that aims to protect digital freedom and which tracks internet shutdowns across the country, found there have been 30 shutdowns in the state so far this year, and 40 across the country.

“There’s a complete lack of transparency on what’s being done, why and who’s doing this.” – Apar Gupta

Shutdowns have a couple of provisions in law, says Gupta. One was passedin 2017 and empowers both the federal and the state government to suspend telecom services, and by extension, internet services. The other – which prohibits public gatherings – dates back to when the British ruled the country. The law was initially used to prevent Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the leader of India’s independence struggle, from organizing protest marches and now is regularly used to restrict internet access. The latter is more frequently used as it allows even local authorities to issue orders for shutdowns without a review process, says Mishi Choudhary, legal director of SFLC.

IFF’s Gupta says these shutdowns “disturb the constitutional protection for free expression.” He adds: “Such a disproportionate action beyond legal doctrine practically disrupts daily life to a severe degree and causes immense hardship. It provokes anxiety among families who talk to each, causes business losses and reduces the political freedom in a country.”

History of services suspended

In India, internet shutdowns began somewhere around 2012, picked up pace from 2015 and peaked in 2018. According to the New Delhi think tank Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, the internet was shut down for a total of 16,315 hours between 2012 and 2017, costing the economy approximately $3.04 billion.

Shutdowns can be partial—when a specific class of websites are blocked, like all internet messaging sites—or complete when the entire internet is cut off. Kashmir has the dubious honor of the highest number of shutdowns at 155 to date, according to the SFLC.

The longest shutdown in the country occurred in Kashmir in the summer of 2016 after a local rebel was killed that July. Mobile internet services were suspended for 133 days. While internet services on postpaid connections were restored by November, users with prepaid connections got their internet access back only in January 2017, nearly six months after they had been cut off.

The second longest suspension of internet services took place in Darjeeling in eastern India in June 2017 during a local secessionist agitation. Initially, just the mobile internet services were shut off but within a couple of days, the broadband services were cut off as well, according to SFLC’s tracker. Ultimately there were no internet services in Darjeeling for a total of one hundred days.

In both cases, it wasn’t clear who ordered the shutdown, as reflected in local media reports. Typically, shutdowns happen without any warning and in most cases the only explanation offered is that services were suspended “as a precautionary measure to maintain law and order”.

In a country where internet usage has risen dramatically in the last few years, the shutdowns have been “a blunt instrument to bring the digital economy to its knees and deprive the citizens the freedom to communicate,” says Choudhary.

In the summer of 2016, mobile internet in Kashmir was shut off for four months.

India’s data explosion

It was a new telecom entrant that drastically changed the dynamics of the country’s internet access, and brought vast numbers of people online.

In September 2016, Reliance Industries, which is owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, launched 4G network Jio. The network allowed subscribers to use internet plans to make calls, send text messages or browse the internet, and it jump-started the business by offering its services for free initially. Once it started charging for data, its rates were incredibly cheap. A year later it offered low-cost 4G handsets for a refundable security deposit of $22. In 2018 it offered a 4G phone for a third of that price. The strategy helped it gain millions of users, and encouraged the transition from feature phones to smartphones, giving users easy access to the internet.

“The internet shutdowns are a blunt instrument to bring the digital economy to its knees.” – Mishi Choudhary

Rajakumari Dayamenti, a native of Sabantongba village in the north eastern state of Manipur, was one such user. Before Jio set up a cellphone tower in her village, Dayamenti plugged a 10-meter-long USB extension cord into a Huawei modem that she stuck on her rooftop, creating her own mini tower to get online.

Cheap data and the millions of new users also ensured the rise of apps, with entertainment becoming one of the biggest drivers. Users in the big Indian cities have flocked to the same apps as their peers across the globe, including Apple Music, Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp. In the smaller cities, however, consumers have turned to more local and regional social networking apps like ShareChat and to apps that offer free content like Wynk, Gaana and Hotstar, Star India’s mobile and digital entertainment platform. For news, users turn to Facebook as well as UC News and Dailyhunt.

Disrupting daily life

Lateef Mushtaq, a native of Kashmir who is pursuing an undergraduate degree in technology in Delhi, has experienced internet disruptions countless times, he says. Mushtaq was on a two-week internship in Kashmir last July with state-owned telecom company BSNL to measure internet speeds in different areas when the internet was shut down. The company had to extend the internship to six weeks so he could complete the project.

More recently in February he was home and was scheduled to take an exam online when a suicide bomber blew up a convoy of vehicles carrying security personnel, killing at least 40 in an area called Pulwama. India blamed archenemy and the neighboring state of Pakistan, which denied the allegations.

In the midst of escalating tensions between the two nuclear armed neighbors, the internet speed in Mushtaq’s area was reduced to 2G. But he still had to take his exam, a frustrating experience as he found that the same page was being reloaded after he would submit his responses instead of moving forward to the next set of questions.

“I was submitting my answers, but it kept going back to the previous page,” he says. “I kept answering the same questions again and again.” Mushtaq couldn’t finish the paper and scored 63 percent on it. He says he could’ve done much better.

“In Delhi the internet is never shut down so when it happens to me now, I feel like I’m locked down in a single room without access to the world,” he says.

Finding any available network

While mobile phone services are disrupted frequently, the government occasionally spares the state-run BSNL as the armed forces also use this service. Mushtaq has in the past tried to get a BSNL broadband connection but without success. These connections are prized possessions and Kashmiri teenagers develop hacking skills early in an effort to ride on any broadband network when the government shuts their mobile services down.

“If we hear about a house with broadband, we try to crack the password,” admits Mushtaq. Networks that are secured on WiFi Protected Access (WPA) security standard are easy to crack and there are several apps on the Google play store that help with that, says Mushtaq.

When it’s just some sites or apps have been blocked, Mushtaq and his friends have turned to virtual private networks (VPNs) or proxy services to find a way around the blocks, he says.

Internet shutdowns have cost India’s economy approximately $3.04 billion

But during a complete shutdown none of these workarounds do the trick, as Musthtaq found last year. He had to drive to another part of Kashmir where the internet was still working to check his score for an important entrance exam. Once he got the signal on his phone, he pulled up and sat on the roadside waiting for the website to load.

Similarly, during the 100-day shutdown in Darjeeling, Nirmal Tamang drove his daughter on his motorcycle more than 40 miles to another city where the internet was working so she could fill forms online to apply for undergraduate studies.

Battling ‘unlawful’ content

Rumors or provocative messaging on social media and instant messaging platforms have often been cited as reasons to order internet restrictions.

One critical issue involved the spate of mob attacks in India in the past couple years, fueled by widely circulated messages such as reports of strangers abducting children.

According to an analysis by IndiaSpend, a data journalism website, between January 1, 2017, and July 5, 2018 33 people were killed and at least 99 injured in 69 reported cases of mobs attacking people they suspected were planning to abduct children. In all the cases, the charges turned out to be baseless, with 77 percent of the reports based on fake news that had spread through social media.

With at least 200 million users in India, WhatsApp was one of the mediums through which these rumors spread, and in the aftermath of the violence, came to be a poster child for fake news.

New Delhi responded by asking the platform to take responsibility for the messages circulating on it, stating: “Such a platform cannot evade accountability and responsibility especially when good technological inventions are abused by some miscreants who resort to provocative messages which lead to spread of violence.” It added, “WhatsApp must take immediate action to end this menace and ensure that their platform is not used for such mala fide activities.” (In response, last July WhatsApp introduced a limit in India on the number of times a user could forward a message to five. It has now imposed that limit on the rest of the world as well.)

Since then, the Indian government has proposed rules that would force internet companies to remove content from their platforms. In late December, it issued a draft policy of rules intended to curb the misuse of social media and stop the spreading of fake news.

Apar Gupta likens the government’s proposal to “Chinese style censorship that would weaken free expression”

Under the policy, the government has proposed an amendment to Section 79 of India’s IT Act, which would require internet companies to take down content deemed inappropriate by authorities. And if a company receives a complaint from a law enforcement agency, it would be required to trace and report it within 72 hours and to disable that user’s access within 24 hours. Should this amendment go through, it would effectively break the end-to-end encryption that secures user communications on platforms like WhatsApp.

Another recommendation in the draft policy says that internet companies will have to purge their platforms of “unlawful” content. However, the policy doesn’t clearly define what makes something “unlawful”, raising concerns that the clause could be easily abused by authorities to remove any content they wish.

Internet companies and privacy advocates say the new measures, if implemented, pose a threat to free speech and would encourage censorship.

It’s “plainly unconstitutional,” says Gurshabad Grover, policy officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, a nonprofit organization. “By mandating online platforms to detect and remove “unlawful content” through automation, the draft rules shift the burden of judging whether content is legal from the state to private organizations. They will only lead to a great chilling effect on speech, and a regime of online censorship regulated by private parties,” he says.

IFF’s Gupta likens the proposal to “Chinese style censorship that would weaken free expression standards” and his organization has asked for a complete rollback of the proposal.

Website censorship on the rise

Large-scale disruptions and intentional slowdowns are not the only tools employed by the government to exert control over the internet. Specific websites and apps are also sporadically blocked.

In April 2017, in the wake of massive student protests in Kashmir, the state government banned access to 22 social media apps including Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, Skype, Telegram and WeChat, for a month.

Two experts at the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner said the restrictions had “a significantly disproportionate impact on the fundamental rights of everyone in Kashmir,” and that they “fail to meet the standards required under international human rights law to limit freedom of expression.”

Another crackdown targeted the country’s 827 porn websites. In India it is not illegal to watch porn privately and the country has the dubious honor of being the world’s third-biggest porn watching country. Unsurprisingly, the ban didn’t fully succeed.

Within days of the government order, Pornhub, one of the biggest adult content sites, had launched a mirror website for India with an altered web address. Other workarounds in use included VPN or proxy services such as hide.me, hidester, and whoer.net. As per a TorrentFreak report, the search for VPNs shot up in the days after the ban. Users also switched to different browsers such as Alibaba’s UC Browser or the Opera browser where the banned sites could still be accessed.

Privacy advocates say the government’s amends to internet policy, if implemented, would encourage censorship.

Most recently, an Indian court banned China’s Beijing Bytedance Technology Co.-owned music and video app TikTok which had been downloaded by nearly 300 million users in India.

The ban came on the heels of a handful of incidences—a 24-year-old man in the southern city of Chennai reportedly committed suicide on being harassed for posting videos of himself dressed as a woman. Soon after, a member of a local political party of Chennai’s home state of Tamil Nadu declared that the younger generation was hooked on TikTok and getting pushed onto the path of cultural degradation. In response, a state minister promised to seek the federal government’s help to ban the app.

A Tamil Nadu court then banned downloads of the app and forbade the media from showing videos from the app, stating: “The dangerous aspect is that inappropriate contents including language and pornography are being posted in the TikTok App. There is a possibility of children contacting strangers directly […] Without understanding the dangers involved in these kinds of Mobile Apps, it is unfortunate that our children are testing with these Apps.”

After TikTok responded that it was experiencing a daily financial loss of $500,000 and 250 jobs had been put at risk, the ban was eventually lifted, at which point the app’s downloads surged.

No reason for some blocks

However, not all website and app bans are justified, explained or commented upon by the government. In August 2018, for example, the country’s telecom minister informed parliament that since January 2016, the Department of Telecom had asked internet service providers to ban 11,045 websites, news agency Press Trust of India reported. Yet the minister didn’t offer any explanations on why these websites had been targeted.

One site that has been blocked on multiple occasions is the Internet Archive, also known as the Wayback Machine. In the past few months, other sites that have been banned include audio streaming site SoundCloud, encrypted messaging service Telegram, and graphic design website Behance, among others. According to IFF’s Gupta, the reasons for the blocks are not disclosed.

Internet service providers have become the de facto enforcers of the government’s digital concerns.

In January, IFF received several complaints from users that they couldn’t access Reddit. The IFF then invited users to fill an online form to share the list of sites and VPNs that they were unable to access. By late March it had received nearly 200 responses from across the country. Reddit frequently appeared, as did several other major platforms including Spotify, Alexa.com, SoundCloud, Telegram and several VPNs. The largest number of complaints came from those who were Reliance Jio customers, followed by Airtel.

An Airtel Spokesperson said that the company “supports an open internet and does not block any content on its network unless directed by the authorities/court in accordance with the applicable law.”

A Jio spokesperson declined to comment.

To save India’s open internet

Gupta calls these “core net neutrality violations,” as internet service providers are legally obliged to provide equal access to all internet content. This, he says, “ultimately results in a very different version of the internet from the global commons and allows the ISPs, even sometimes political interests, to become gatekeepers to access of information.”

While India has net neutrality rules in place – thanks to a massive campaign in 2015 called Save the Internet – the problem, says Gupta, is a lack of enforcement. “A policy fix is required to enforce net neutrality rules,” he says.

In March, IFF relaunched a campaign for an open internet, asking users to report net neutrality violations and sign a petition asking the Department of Telecom and the country’s telecom regulator to introduce a clear enforcement mechanism. Some of these efforts are showing signs of success already, says Gupta, as the regulator is considering issuing a consultation paper on enforcing net neutrality.

Internet service providers have become the de facto enforcers of the government’s digital concerns.

Kushal Das, an India-based member of the Tor Project and a developer at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, says telecom companies like Jio block all VPNs so they retain insights into users’ browsing preferences that can be useful for advertisers.

“If you use a VPN, Jio will not know your taste in food, et cetera,” says Das. But Tor software can bypass these blocks and the number of Tor users in India has shot up three times since October 2017 to roughly 60,000 now, says Das.

“We should be able to ask people in power why blockades are being implemented,” says Das.

Policy points to restrictions

However, the Narendra Modi-led government has been keen to bring in rules for greater control over data and the internet.

In February, the government proposed a draft national e-commerce policy that sees data as “a collective resource” or a “national asset” that the government holds in trust but which can be auctioned off, like a coal mine. The draft also cautioned that this belongs to Indians and cannot be extended to foreigners.

IFF’s Gupta says the fact that the very framework of its drafting has not been made sufficiently public is worrying. “It may all seem very dull and dry but … any platform changes, any changes to government policy in India will reflect in demand in Europe and America eventually,” he says, due the large internet user base in India.

For now, in the days after a general election, all these policy proposals are on hold and it’s not clear how soon a new government would turn its attention to internet policies.

The one thing that activists can take some relief in is the fact that the government has acknowledged at least some of the internet shutdowns in the country were implemented without sufficient cause. In December, the Department of Telecom, in response to a request for information filed by IFF, said that “frequent internet suspension orders were being issued by various State governments… even in situations where it is not warranted.” It added that it had asked all state governments to “sensitize concerned officials/agencies” against such actions.

It’s anyone’s guess how long that pause will last.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/top-10-vpn-megha-bahree-may-21-2019-in-parts-of-india-internet-shutdowns-are-a-fact-of-life

Open Data and Land Ownership

sumandro — 2019-05-22T11:32:18Z

In this chapter of the recently published volume on State of Open Data, Tim Davies and Sumandro Chattapadhyay discuss how the lessons from the land ownership field highlight the political nature of data, and illustrate the importance of politically aware interventions when creating open data standards, infrastructure, and ecosystems. State of Open Data, edited by Tim Davies, Stephen B. Walker, Mor Rubinstein, and Fernando Perini, is published by African Minds and International Development Research Centre, Canada.

State of Open Data: Website and Book (Open Access)

Chapter on Open Data and Land Ownership: Zenodo (PDF)

Key Points

- Global availability of land ownership and land deals data is patchy, but, when available, it has been used by individual citizens, entrepreneurs, civil society, and journalists.

- Over the last decade, a number of responsible data lessons have been learned. These lessons can provide guidance on how to balance transparency and privacy and on how to draw research conclusions from partial data.

- In spite of large donor investments in land registration systems, few resources are currently made available to enable open data related to these projects. There are untapped opportunities as a result.

- Lessons from the land ownership field highlight the political nature of data, and illustrate the importance of politically aware interventions when creating open data standards, infrastructure, and ecosystems.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/open-data-and-land-ownership

Youths come forward to augment Assamese Wikisource project

NE NOW NEWS — 2019-05-21T16:03:43Z

Assamese Wikisource is a sister-project of Assamese Wikipedia, where Assamese books with expired copyrights are available.

The blog post was published in NE NOW NEWS on May 17, 2019.

In order to take the Assamese Wikisource project forward, few young men and women of the state involving in different fields, recently gathered in Guwahati to attend a workshop.

Assamese Wikisource is a sister-project of Assamese Wikipedia, where Assamese books with expired copyrights are available. The project owned by Wikimedia Foundation was launched in 2013.

A total of 14 volunteers from across the state participated in the workshop hosted by Centre for Internet and Society-Access to knowledge (CIS-A2K) in a city hotel.

Two experts–Jayanta Nath from Kolkata and Tito Dutta from Bangalore–were present as trainers for the workshop, say organisers.

The two-day event was coordinated by Gitartha Bordoloi, a physician based in Silchar and the administrator of Assamese Wikipedia and Wikisource.

“Wikisource sources hosts books, plays, lyrics, letters etc which are available in open source,” says an organiser.

PDF or similar files are added to Wikisource which are then converted to unicode form so that every information becomes searchable on the internet.

In addition to books that are hitherto copyright free, new books can also be donated by authors and can be added to the field.

Everyone can access and contribute to this collaborative project. Presently, Assamese Wikisource stands at ninth position out of eleven Indic languages. This can be due to less Wikisource projects and also lack of contributors.

In addition to the basic navigation on Wikisource, the participants learnt searching and uploading public domain works, using OCR to get the texts, correcting errors and creating final product for the readers, he says.

As a part of the workshop, the participants fully digitised three old Assamese books within a few hours. They also discussed the future aims, perspectives and goals of Assamese Wikipedia and Wikisource.

As a result of their persistent efforts, works of Srimanta Sankardev and Madhabdev, Lakshminath Bezbaroa, Jyotiprasad Agarwala, Rajanikanta Bordoloi, Hiteshwar Barbarua and some others are now available on Assamese Wikisource.

With the target of digitizing the books by an author in every one or two months, the volunteers have mulled to digitize the works of Padmanath Gohain Baruah, a luminary of Assamese literature.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/northeast-now-may-17-2019-youths-come-forward-to-augment-assamese-wikisource-project

"Aadhaar Reduced Agency in Citizens and Empowered Those in Positions of Authority"

Martin Moore — 2019-05-21T15:33:01Z

In the space of one election cycle, authoritarian governments, moneyed elites and fringe hackers figured out how to game elections, bypass democratic processes, and turn social networks into battlefields. Facebook, Google and Twitter – where our politics now takes place – have lost control and are struggling to claw it back. As our lives migrate online, we are gradually moving into a world of datafied citizens and real-time surveillance. The entire political landscape has changed, with profound consequences for democracy.

The article by Martin Moore was published by NewsClick on May 20, 2019. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Written by Martin Moore, Democracy Hacked: Political Turmoil and Information Warfare in the Digital Age, is a compelling account of how democracy is being disrupted by the tech revolution, and what can be done to get us back on track. The following are excerpts from the chapter "Survellaince Democracy" of the book.

Tembhli, a remote rural village in northern Maharashtra, about 250 miles north of Mumbai, is rarely visited by high-powered politicians or prominent dignitaries. But on Wednesday, 29 September 2010, it found itself hosting not just the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, but the president of Congress, Sonia Gandhi; the chief and deputy chief ministers and the governor of Maharashtra; and the head of the recently established Unique Identification Authority of India, Nandan Nilekani. It was this last figure, the least well known of the distinguished group, who was the reason behind the visit, and who would subsequently play the most important role in its aftermath. Nilekani and the politicians were there to give out the first ten ‘unique identifiers’ to residents of Tembhli. These ten people received their own twelve-digit number, a number that would, from that day forward, distinguish each of them from every other Indian citizen, and indeed – combined with their biometric data – from every other citizen in the world. “With this,” Sonia Gandhi said, “Tembhli has got a special importance in the map of India. People of Tembhli will lead the rest of the country. It is a historic step towards strengthening the people of our nation.”

Governments of all stripes are prone to exaggerated rhetoric, but in this instance, Gandhi was proved right when she proclaimed that “starting from this tiny hamlet, the scheme will reach more than a billion people of this country.” Despite the change of government in 2014, by April 2016 a billion Indians had been allocated their unique identifier. By 2018 the number had exceeded 1.1 billion, out of a total population of just over 1.3 billion. It was, in the words of a Harvard Business School report, a “hugely ambitious project”, “the largest-scale project of its kind in the world”. Aadhaar, as the project was called, was “unique in its scale and ambition”.3 Each Aadhaar identifier included not just a twelve-digit number, but all ten fingerprints, iris scans from both eyes, and a photograph of each person’s face (with the potential for facial recognition later). By combining the number with one element of biometric data, the government believed, it could ensure that every Indian citizen had a single, verifiable, machine-readable identity. With this verifiable identity a citizen could open a bank account, receive welfare or pension payments, pay tax, apply for a driving license, or receive healthcare, regardless of literacy. In a country known for its administrative torpor and tortuous bureaucracy, where – in 2013 – only forty per cent of children’s births were even registered, such a scheme had the potential to let India leapfrog other democratic countries into the digital era, and make government not just digitally enabled but digitally empowered.

Yet this, for critics of the scheme, was one of its many flaws. “Aadhaar marks a fundamental shift in citizen–state relations,” Pranesh Prakash from India’s Centre for the Internet and Society wrote in the Hindustan Times, “from ‘We the People’ to ‘We the Government’.” Civil society activists objected to the government’s enhanced power, and the relative unaccountability of the body running Aadhaar, headed by Nandan Nilekani until 2014. “In effect,” tech developer and activist Kiran Jonnalagadda wrote, “they are beyond the rule of law.” Others had practical objections.

Biometric identification often did not work. A database of this size and importance was bound to attract hackers. Leaks were inevitable. Indeed, the Tribune newspaper in January 2018 revealed that it had been able to buy a service, for 500 rupees (less than $10), that gave it access to any of up to one billion Aadhaar details. Yet such objections were written off as ‘scaremongering’ and Aadhaar critics as “activists of the upper crust, upper class, wine ’n cheese, Netflix-watching social media elite”. On top of which, despite an Indian Supreme Court judgment in August 2017 that affirmed the fundamental right of Indians to privacy, by early 2018 Aadhaar had achieved such momentum as to appear unstoppable. If the government was able to navigate the various legislative challenges to the scheme, then there was also a queue of other nations keen to adopt something similar.

[…]

As the government pushed Aadhaar towards every interaction the state had with the citizen, evidence mounted of failures in the system.

In the north-eastern state of Jharkhand, an eleven-year-old girl died of starvation after her family stopped receiving their government food ration. Their ration card, the Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy reported, “was not linked to Aadhaar”. The centre also reported on data, taken from the government’s websites, showing that in Rajasthan, where receiving rations was dependent on Aadhaar authentication, between a quarter and a third of people with ration cards did not receive rations between September 2016 and July 2017. In some ration shops, after having spent hours trying and failing to get their fingerprints read by the biometric machines, people lost their temper and smashed the machines on the ground.

Across India there were reports of machines not recognizing fingerprints, or only recognizing them after multiple attempts. Old people’s prints turned out to be more difficult to read, as were those of manual workers and fishermen. Since the system presumes guilt rather than innocence, the burden of proof lies with the citizen, not with the state. To claim a ration, apply for a scholarship or buy a train ticket, you have to prove who you are before receiving it. The obligation lies with the citizen to prove she is not a fraud. Even if she is not, and the failure is not with her but with the system, she pays for the system’s failure, not the government. To dispute a decision made by the machine means going to the nearest large town – often many miles away – and convincing an official that the problem is with the machine or the digital record, not with you. It is not surprising that some people wrecked Aadhaar machines in their rage.

While the system was found to reduce agency in citizens, it empowered those in positions of authority. Central government was able to make public services conditional on authentication by Aadhaar (despite repeated court rulings that Aadhaar be voluntary, not mandatory). This conditionality could then be extended to the level and type of public services available to individuals. In fact, it had to be for many services – distinguishing pensioners from non-pensioners, for example. Yet in this conditionality, there is plenty of scope for harm and abuse. In 2017 the independent media site Scroll.in reported a rising number of HIV-positive patients who were dropping out of treatment programmes because they were required to use their Aadhaar numbers and were fearful of their condition becoming public.

Equally, while Aadhaar itself did not provide any information about caste, ethnicity, religion or language, once it was linked to other databases, most notably the National Population Register, then it became possible to identify people by group. Formal group identification by the state has an ignominious history. During the apartheid era in South Africa, the penultimate number on the South African identity card indicated race. In the Rwandan genocide in 1994, anyone who had ‘Tutsi’ on their identification was liable to be killed. In Nazi Germany in 1938, every Jewish citizen had ‘J’ stamped on their ID cards and passports. In India, where political and religious divisions are closely intertwined, there is good reason to be anxious about new opportunities for group identification.

Thanks to Aadhaar, companies started to build services using unique identification. A series of ‘trust platforms’ emerged, built on top of Aadhaar, where employers – and others – could access and authenticate people’s identity. A company called TrustID advertised itself as “India’s first, unique and comprehensive online verification platform”. Through TrustID an employer could check whether a potential employee had any criminal or civil convictions, or whether that person had a good or bad reputation (based on a news search and social media profiling). The company even encouraged women to check up on potential husbands they had found via marriage websites. Other international companies integrated Aadhaar into existing services. This is similar to the way in which companies work with platforms like Facebook to profile, and target, individuals based on their personal information – except in this instance doing it via the government. All the same questions about trust, privacy, freedom and power arise, with even greater political potency. The state and private companies are in partnership to track citizens constantly and to gather as much data as they can on them – data that they can then use for commercial or political purposes. This opaque, asymmetrical knowledge of the citizen seems like the reverse of what was intended by democratic transparency, especially in the absence of strong privacy and data protection. “Totalitarian states often do this against the wishes of their citizens,” Pratap Bhanu Mehta, the president of the Centre for Policy Research, writes, yet “in our democracy, our consent is being mobilized to put an imprimatur over more control and arbitrariness.”

In August 2017, the Supreme Court of India came to a unanimous 9–0 decision that Article 21 of the Indian Constitution did guarantee a fundamental right to privacy. As such, it was not lawful for the government to make it mandatory for people to identify themselves using a unique identifier like Aadhaar, except in specific circumstances. To some this looked like a huge blow to the grand project. The Supreme Court decision “raises serious questions about Aadhaar”, lawyer Adarsh Ramanujan argued in India’s Financial Express, and appeared to send “a direction to the central government to create a regime to ensure that privacy rights are not trammelled by other private parties”. The judgment was about privacy broadly, and did not refer to specific cases like Aadhaar, but was seen as the basis from which future challenges to the scheme could be launched. The Modi government, however, appeared to carry on regardless. In October it linked Aadhaar to driving licence applications. By mid-December, the government had made Aadhaar mandatory if citizens wanted to access any of 140 government services.

Nandan Nilekani, who had stepped down as chair of Aadhaar in 2014 in order to become a candidate for the Congress party, railed against those who criticized the scheme. There was, he claimed, an “orchestrated campaign” to malign the system. “I think this so-called anti-Aadhaar lobby is really just a small bunch of liberal elites who are in some echo chamber,” he told an Indian business news channel. Anyway, Nilekani argued, it was too late for the naysayers to stop it. Too many people were now enrolled. It was too integral to the provision of services. Others saw attacks on Aadhaar as political, arguing that Congress was using it for political gain prior to the 2019 election, and that this would backfire. “Aadhaar today is not just a number,” the editor of India’s Economic Timeswrote. “The Congress envisaged it as a means of identity but the Modi government has taken it to a different level. It has become a weapon in the hands of the poor and a powerful tool to fight entrenched black money interests. It is now a symbol of anti-corruption, anti-black money drives, a symbol of efficient allocation of welfare benefits.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/newsclick-martin-moore-may-20-2019-aadhaar-reduced-agency-in-citizens-and-empowered-those-in-positions-of-authority

Project Tiger 2019 Coordinator position open

gopala — 2019-05-27T06:28:38Z

To contribute to support, and coordinate of the work of the Project Tiger, we are looking for a creative, dedicated individual to join the team as a coordinator. Please note that women, especially those from socioeconomically marginalized communities, and women who are returning to work after a hiatus will be given preference.

Project Background

In India, Wikipedia exists in 23 Indian languages. All of these Wikipedias are in the early growth phase having a range of articles from few thousands to 100,000+ articles. The typical size of an Indian language community is only to have around or less than 100 people making 5+ edits every month. While there are many social economic and technical reasons for the size and activity of the Indian language communities, learnings from successful projects in the past have demonstrated that we can provide specific interventions to support these communities.

Many active Indian language Wikipedia editors tend to contribute more actively when they are provided support for contributing equipment and internet expenses. This was evident from the success of the pilot program initiated by the Wikimedia India chapter. The recently launched hardware donation program also had a lot of interest from the Indian region.

Wikipedia communities usually show interest participating in contests and edit-a-thons. Well known examples are Wikipedia Asian Month, Punjab edit-a-thon, Women’s history month.

More than 80% edits of all Wikipedias are made by around 2% editors of the community. While many editing promotion activities aspire to attract new editors who are hard to retain, we can sustain more editing activity by empowering existing active editors.

Combining these insights, we propose to create locally relevant and high-quality content in Indian languages by launching this pilot program which will (a) support active and experienced Wikipedia editors through the donation of laptops and stipends for internet access and (b) sponsor a language-based contest that aims to address existing Wikipedia content gaps.

Responsibilities

The CIS-A2K team is primarily based in the Bangalore office of CIS, and the Project Tiger coordinator, henceforth PTC, will be expected to work out of the same office.

To support and drive outreach of the work being done by the CIS-A2K team, the PTC will be responsible includes but not limited to:

Supporting Project tiger related communication, documentation and coordination
Supporting Project Tiger Chromebook disbursal.
Supporting internet stipend distribution and reimbursement.
Supporting creation and updation of statistics.
Feedback collection and surveys.
Logistics coordination of offline events.

Characteristics of a coordinator

Accountability
Awareness and sensitivity regarding issues of gender and sexuality
Critical appreciation of open knowledge initiatives
Effective communication
Inclusive collaboration
Intellectual curiosity and openness
Respect for diversity
Strong cross-cultural competency

Ability to learn-at-work, especially about the Wikimedia ecosystem

Eligibility criteria

These are the eligibility criteria

Basic criteria

Graduate in any discipline
Fluent in English and excellent communication skills in English and working knowledge (or better) of at least one other Indian language

Technical

Basic understanding of functioning of Wikipedia, and ideally of other Wikimedia projects too

Location and Remuneration

The position is based out of the Bangalore office of CIS.

Monthly remuneration will be decided after selection. Expected monthly remuneration is around INR 28,000. As this is a consultant position, no other benefit is available

Application Process

We invite interested (and eligible) candidates to apply for the position before 7 June 2019 sending us the following documents to tito+ptc2019@cis-india.org (do not miss +ptc2019 part from the email id, it is a filter for us) with “Application for Project Tiger (Coordinator)” as the subject:

Cover letter (2 pages): This should introduce your relevant academic, professional, and other experiences, and describe the kind of work you look forward to do as part of the CIS-A2K team. We strongly recommend reading the Supporting Indian Language Wikipedia Project page[1] on Meta while writing this cover letter, as well as for preparation for the interview to follow (if you are shortlisted for interview).
CV: This should provide details of your academic, professional, and other achievements

Footnotes:

[1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Program

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/jobs/project-tiger-2019-co-ordinator-position-open

Project Tiger 2019 Coordinator position open

gopala — 2019-06-10T15:29:58Z

Project Background

Many active Indian language Wikipedia editors tend to contribute more actively when they are provided support for contributing equipment and internet expenses. This was evident from the success of the pilot program initiated by the Wikimedia India chapter. The recently launched hardware donation program also had a lot of interest from the Indian region.

Wikipedia communities usually show interest participating in contests and edit-a-thons. Well known examples are Wikipedia Asian Month, Punjab edit-a-thon, Women’s history month.

More than 80% edits of all Wikipedias are made by around 2% editors of the community. While many editing promotion activities aspire to attract new editors who are hard to retain, we can sustain more editing activity by empowering existing active editors.

Responsibilities

The CIS-A2K team is primarily based in the Bangalore office of CIS, and the Project Tiger coordinator, henceforth PTC, will be expected to work out of the same office.

To support and drive outreach of the work being done by the CIS-A2K team, the PTC will be responsible includes but not limited to:

Supporting Project tiger related communication, documentation and coordination
Supporting Project Tiger Chromebook disbursal.
Supporting internet stipend distribution and reimbursement.
Supporting creation and updation of statistics.
Feedback collection and surveys.
Logistics coordination of offline events.

Characteristics of a coordinator

Accountability
Awareness and sensitivity regarding issues of gender and sexuality
Critical appreciation of open knowledge initiatives
Effective communication
Inclusive collaboration
Intellectual curiosity and openness
Respect for diversity
Strong cross-cultural competency

Ability to learn-at-work, especially about the Wikimedia ecosystem

Eligibility criteria

These are the eligibility criteria

Basic criteria

Graduate in any discipline
Fluent in English and excellent communication skills in English and working knowledge (or better) of at least one other Indian language

Technical

Basic understanding of functioning of Wikipedia, and ideally of other Wikimedia projects too

Location and Remuneration

The position is based out of the Bangalore office of CIS.

Monthly remuneration will be decided after selection. Expected monthly remuneration is around INR 28,000. As this is a consultant position, no other benefit is available

Application Process

We invite interested (and eligible) candidates to apply for the position before 10 June 2019 sending us the following documents to tito+ptc2019@cis-india.org (do not miss +ptc2019 part from the email id, it is a filter for us) with “Application for Project Tiger (Coordinator)” as the subject:

Cover letter (2 pages): This should introduce your relevant academic, professional, and other experiences, and describe the kind of work you look forward to do as part of the CIS-A2K team. We strongly recommend reading the Supporting Indian Language Wikipedia Project page[1] on Meta while writing this cover letter, as well as for preparation for the interview to follow (if you are shortlisted for interview).
CV: This should provide details of your academic, professional, and other achievements

Footnotes:

[1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Supporting_Indian_Language_Wikipedias_Program

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/project-tiger-2019-coordinator-position-open

CIS-A2K Communication Officer position

tito — 2019-06-04T06:45:28Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) is seeking applications only from prospective candidates who identify themselves as women, for the position of Programme Officer (Communications, the position is also known as Communication Officer), to support its Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) Programme. The job application is open to women only because we feel that a woman communications person will contribute more towards bridging the gender gap in the Wikimedia movement by emphasising on gender-sensitive communication apart from contributing internally for bringing a gender balance in the team.

Context of the CIS-A2K programme

As an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia and Wikipedia’s sister project, we design and implement different projects with an aim to create high quality content and cultivate new contributors to Wikimedia projects. The projects will be premised on themes and seek to create a multilingual repository of knowledge using Wikimedia projects as a knowledge platform. You are encouraged to deeply engage with the CIS-A2K work plan before making the application. You will work cohesively with the Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia India Chapter to meet specific goals of each language community in India. You will be a part of a small team of 5 to 10 doing high visibility and high impact work. Please learn more about CIS-A2K here.

Position summary

As a Programme Officer, your job will be to support the Team’s larger goals -- growth of Indian-language Wikipedias and other Wikimedia projects (hereinafter Wikimedia projects), and the contributor communities (hereinafter Community). Your primary responsibility will be to support the Programme Associates -- that spearhead our on-ground programmatic activities -- with regular communications with the community and the world outside.

The position is full time and will be based in CIS’ Bengaluru office. Programme Officer will work closely with CIS-A2K Team (hereinafter Team) and would report to the Executive Director/any supervisor in Team.

Characteristics of the Programme Officer

High level of commitment: The Programme Officer should believe in the values of CIS and Wikimedia projects, exude enthusiasm for the mission and can powerfully embody and communicate the mission.
Intellectual curiosity and flexibility: Must enjoy tackling difficult, ambiguous problems and able to incorporate new knowledge into how one approaches situations and generates solutions, loves learning from others while expanding intellectual horizons.
Open and transparent: Have a high level of integrity and be comfortable working in a highly transparent fashion, open to input and feedback, a proactive and candid communicator who wants people to know what s/he is doing and isn't afraid to bring others in when things are off-track or when you need help and should able to handle criticism in a mature fashion.
Community builder: It is essential that the Programme Officer sees herself/himself as a partner to and supporter of the Wikimedians who have and will continue to be the leaders in building the Wikimedia projects. The Programme Officer must be willing and able to work with a diverse array of people, many of whom come from non-traditional backgrounds and have a fervent commitment to Wikimedia movement’s community-led nature.
Strong cultural competency: Able to navigate in a global movement and on a global team in addition to navigating the complexity of India.
Partnership developer: Able to initiate, negotiate and operate partnerships that advance the Wikimedia mission in Indic languages and English (as relevant to India) with a wide range of institutions across the public, NGO, universities, philanthropic and private sector.
Willing to travel: The Programme Officer must regularly travel within India to engage with Wikimedia communities and partner with institutions.

Responsibilities

You will be responsible for the overall communications of Team that include storytelling in the form of interviews, blogs, opinion pieces in newspaper/other platforms, regular coverage in both Indian language and English media, and anything beyond.
You will be exploring widely from conventional to new media to spread the stories of the hundreds and thousands of volunteers that make the Indian-language Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects such great knowledge repositories.
Creating original stories of challenges and learning, and successes of Wikimedia community in general and the ones that we closely work with in particular.
Function as an interface between A2K team and the community, and help the team better work collaboratively with the community.
Sharing the work of the community and A2k team in a regular basis in the monthly newsletters and other places.
Providing training on effective communications to the communities in a need basis, and supporting them to independently tell their own stories in their own languages.
Announcement of programmatic activities in the form of announcements, blogs and reports, and microblogging (social media, etc.).

Interviewing Wikimedians under the ambit of the WikipediansSpeak [1] project and beyond, and share the story of the Wikimedia community widely in the media

Required skills

Graduate with a strong track record of success in high performance organisations, preferably in non-profits.
Experience could be during studies or after, primarily in blogging, writing organisation reports, managing social media for organisations, interviewing and covering people’s stories in mainstream media.
Prior experience of working in a collaborative community, preferably and open one like Wikipedia and in online.
Good understanding of the basics of organisational programme design and management.
Strong understanding of the Internet and the forces that underpin the success of Wikipedia. Active participation as a Wikimedia volunteer would be an asset, though not a prerequisite (must be prepared to demonstrate knowledge of how Wikipedia works in interviews).
Experience working in a global, multicultural and diverse team environment will be preferred.
Must be fluent in English and at least in one Indian language.
A good understanding of the cultural and knowledge universe of the Indian language communities.

Location: The position is based out of the CIS’s Bangalore office.

Remuneration: Compensation structure will be determined by the level of expertise, experience and current remuneration.

To apply, please send your resume to Tito Dutta (tito+po2019@cis-india.org) by 4 June 2019. Please do not miss the +po2019 part in the email, that is an email filter for us)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/cis-a2k-communication-officer-position

Wikidata Advisor (Consultant) position open

tito — 2019-05-19T15:32:55Z

The Access to Knowledge team of the Centre for Internet and Society is seeking applications for the position of Wikidata Advisor (consultant), to support its Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) Programme.

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) is seeking applications from prospective candidates for the position of Wikidata Advisor, to support its Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) Programme.

The position will be either based in CIS’ Bangalore office No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru, 560071, or the advisor may be remotely located (must be in India) also.

Position summary

As a Wikidata advisor you will work closely with the CIS-A2K Team on the work-plan to improve and support Wikidata community in India.

Characteristics of a Project Advisor

High level of commitment: The person should believe in the values of CIS and Wikimedia projects, exude enthusiasm for the mission and can powerfully embody and communicate the mission.
Intellectual curiosity and flexibility: Must enjoy tackling difficult, ambiguous problems and able to incorporate new knowledge into how one approaches situations and generates solutions, loves learning from others while expanding intellectual horizons.
Open and transparent: Have a high level of integrity and be comfortable working in a highly transparent fashion.
Strong cultural competency: Able to navigate in a global movement and on a global team in addition to navigating the complexity of India.
Willing to travel: The advisor must regularly travel within India to conduct and support Wikidata workshops and events. This also includes meetings with different institutions, and CIS team meetings.

Responsibilities

A Wikidata advisor's responsibility includes but not limited to:

Supporting Indic Wikidata communities in all possible wiki-ways such as helping in community-planned Wikidata activities,
Conducting national-level/zonal workshops in India
Creating movement resources (such as handbooks, help videos, manuals) based on community needs-assessment
Sharing Wikidata's global best practices among Indian communities,
Wikidata India IRC conducting

Eligibility criteria

The person must have knowledge about Wikidata project, Wikidata activities in India, different Wikimedia projects such as Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia etc
The person must have active involvement on Wikidata and experience
The person must have knowledge at least intermediate level knowledge about Sparql/query creation (required for workshops, and on-Wiki query support
The person must know about/have experience of working with tools like QuickStatement, Mix'n'Match, Tabernacle, OpenRefine and other important tools frequently used on Wikidata

Plus

prior experience of conducting Wikidata-related event (such as data-thon) will be considered a plus.
prior experience of working with database will be considered as a plus

Location: The position is based out of the CIS’s Bangalore office or remote (applicant must be residing in India during the working period)

Remuneration

Remuneration will be decided after selection. Expected monthly remuneration is around INR 32,000. As this is a consultant position, no other benefit is available

Apply

If you want to apply for this position, please send your CV and a letter to tito+wikidata2019@cis-india.org (do not miss +wikidata2019 part from the email id, it is a filter for us).

Your letter/document should narrate your experience and works in details.

Please also write, what makes you interested to apply for the position, and some of your ideas to improve Wikidata projects in India. The last date apply for this position is 31 May 2019. Appointment will be based on expert opinion, and review.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/wikidata-advisor-consultant-position-open

Feminist Information Infrastructure

ambika — 2019-07-09T15:34:21Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/feminist-information-infrastructure

Sunil Abraham - Key Listener Speech at Wikimedia Summit 2019

sunil — 2019-05-04T03:34:15Z

The Wikimedia Summit 2019 – formerly known as "Wikimedia Conference" or "Chapters Meeting" – took place on 29–31 March 2019 in Berlin. Sunil Abraham made a speech at the summit organized in Berlin.

Sunil answers a series of questions at the closing session of the Wikimedia Summit 2019:

What stands out?

Money. Creative Commons revenues are pegged at 2.4 million dollars. Mozilla Foundation gets 24 million dollars. Wikimedia Foundation gets 91 million dollars. So the job of pulling off the "Big Open" or the "creation of the meta movement" or "the movement of movements" is primarily the responsibility of the Wikimedia community given the scale of resources it is able to mobilize. For example, the Open Access movement has lost funding as its key donor Open Society Foundation after supporting the movement for 17 years is unable to support any further. The Wikipedia movement can easily save the global access movement by just allocating 1 million dollar for it.

What concerns me?

Homogenization. Homogenization of time frames, homogenization of process. Should we, for example, stagger the time period for online community consultation on the draft recommendations, so that there is less 'consultation fatigue' By homogenizing the processes at the Summit, it would be risking infantilizing the community. Would this meeting have been more exciting and useful, if Working Groups had the freedom to fork the process, and do what works for them.

What have I learned from my own journey and work?

Working with lawyers for the last 10 years, has led me to appreciate tests over principles. For example, in the open standards movement there is a constant question: is this particular standard an open standard? There, free software acts as the canary in the coal mine: If we cannot implement a standard using free software, then it is not an open standard. Working with lawyers for the last 10 years, has led me to appreciate tests over principles. For example, in the open standards movement there is a constant question: is this particular standard an open standard?There, free software acts as the canary in the coal mine: If we cannot implement a standard using free software, then it is not an open standard.

What have you learned that could be useful for the strategy process?

From the process architect I have learned that we shouldn't focus on solving /this/ particular instance of the problem, we should focus on working on developing processes that solve these problems in the future. So, the emphasis is on process fixes. This is really the bleeding edge of regulatory theory these days. Since we are in Germany, I must mention the name of the German academic Gunther Teubner who developed this concept of reflexive regulation 26 years ago in his article 'Substantive and Reflexive Elements in Modern Law.

What would you suggest to improve the strategy process?

The core of responsive regulation is community consultation processes. However, closing the loop on the consultation process is critical, otherwise participants feel that they have wasted time providing feedback. For example, the Indian telecom regulator first issues a consultation paper. Then solicits the first round of feedback, then solicits a second round of counter comments then they hold round tables, and, finally, they issue the recommendation or the regulation. But when they do that, they make sure they close the loop.They provide reasoned explanations for why suggestions were rejected. This might have to happen at both stages for this strategy development process. The working groups will have to say why they rejected certain pieces of feedback, and also the board will have to explain why they rejected certain recommendations from the working groups.

What would be your wish for this movement?

As we enter adulthood as a movement, it is important that we do not lose our youthful idealism. Idealism at two levels: ambition and vocabulary. Global civil society is broadly divided into two groups. Those who work on tractable problems, like getting rid of polio. And those who work on intractable problems, like saving and developing democracy. When monitoring and evaluation becomes a primary management lens for our movement, it shouldn't make us more and more risk-averse. Let us not focus on the easy problems let us always focus, as a movement, on the hard problems. When it comes to vocabulary, I am not totally sure that phrases like 'product experience', 'target markets', and 'Knowledge as a Service' is the vocabulary of the movement. Maybe, we need to think of two types of vocabulary, External facing vocabulary and internal facing vocabulary.

Watch the Video

Video, via Wikimedia Commons, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Summit_2019_-_Key_listener_Sunil_Abraham.webm.
Author, Anna Rees (WMDE): Uploader: Cornelius Kibelka (WMDE), This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/sunil-abraham-key-listener-speech-at-wikimedia-summit-2019

April 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-09-04T14:36:41Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) newsletter for April 2019.

Highlights for March 2019

The unprecedented growth of the fintech space in India has concomitantly come with regulatory challenges around inter alia privacy and security concerns. Aayush Rathi and Shweta Mohandas have co-authored a report which has analysed the privacy policies of 48 fintech companies operating in India to better understand some of these concerns.
In today’s increasingly digitized world where an increasing volume of information is being stored in the digital format, access to data generated by digital technologies and on digital platforms is important in solving crimes online and offline. One such mechanism for international cooperation is the Convention on Cybercrime adopted in Budapest (“Budapest Convention”). Vipul Kharbanda has provided a deeper analysis on this in his research paper.
CIS has responded to ICANN's proposed renewal of .org Registry. CIS has found severe issues with the proposed agreement. These centre around the removal of price caps and imposing obligations being currently deliberated in an ongoing Policy Development Process. Akriti Bopanna drafted the response.
The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion released a draft e-commerce policy in February for which stakeholder comments were sought. CIS responded to the request for comments.
CIS Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) has submitted its proposal form for the year 2019 - 2020 to the Wikimedia Foundation. CIS thanks all community members who gave valuable suggestions and inputs for drafting this proposal.
In 2017–2018, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and Google collaborated to start a pilot project in India, working closely with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and the Wikimedia Indiachapter (WMIN). This project, titled Project Tiger was aimed at encouraging Wikipedia communities to create locally relevant and high-quality content in Indian languages. CIS-A2K team submitted Project Tiger final report.
The r@w blog features works by researchers and practitioners working in India and elsewhere at the intersections of internet, digital media and society, and highlights and materials from ongoing research and events at the researchers@work programme at CIS. On the r@w blog we featured an essay titled 'The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination' by Divij Joshi, as part of a series on Studying Internet in India (2015); and audio recording of a session titled #ObjectsofDigitalGovernance by Khetrimayum Monish Singh, Rajiv K. Mishra, and Vidya Subramanian which was part of the Internet Researchers Conference, 2017.

Jobs

CIS is hiring:

CIS-A2K Finance Officer: Call for application (Only women candidates).
Internship - applications accepted throughout the year.

CIS and the News

The following news pieces were authored by CIS and published on its website in January:

Delayed Cash Flows and NPAs (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; April 3, 2019).
To preserve freedoms online, amend the IT Act (Gurshabad Grover; April 16, 2019).
Digital Native: Getting through an election made for the social media gaze (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; April 21, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:

Reddit, Telegram among websites blocked in India, say internet groups (Sai Sachin Ravikumar; Business Standard; April 3, 2019).
Data leaks could wreak havoc in India, so why aren’t they an issue this election? (Aria Thaker; Quartz India; April 4, 2019).
Cookies, not the monster you may think (Sweta Akundi; Hindu; April 8, 2019).
TikTok craze a ticking time bomb for city (Gulam Jeelani with inputs from Priyanka Sharma and Ajay Kumar; India Today; April 17, 2019).
Almost every social network has a porn problem—so why is India banning only TikTok? (Ananya Bhattacharya; Quartz India; April 19, 2019).
Child protection and cyber-grooming: Indian court rescinds its own Tiktok ban (Leon Kaiser; Netzpolitik.org; April 24, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

Wikipdedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Project Proposal / Reports

Supporting Indian Language Wikipedias Program/Report (Gopala Krishna A; April 5, 2019).

CIS-A2K proposal to Wikimedia Foundation for 2019-2020 (Ananth Subray; April 15, 2019).

Blog Entries

Wikimedia projects orientation session at Tata Trust's Vikas Anvesh Foundation (Subodh Kulkarni; April 9, 2019).
Indic Wikisource Speak: Sushant Savla (Jayanta Nath; April 10, 2019).
SVG Translation Workshop at KBC North Maharashtra University (Subodh Kulkarni; April 10, 2019).
Content Donation Sessions with Authors (Subodh Kulkarni; April 10, 2019).
Indic Wikisource speak : Ajit Kumar Tiwari (Jayanta Nath; April 11, 2019).

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

Cyber Security

Research Paper

International Cooperation in Cybercrime: The Budapest Convention (Vipul Kharbanda; April 29, 2019).

Privacy

Research Paper

FinTech in India: A Study of Privacy and Security Commitments (Aayush Rathi and Shweta Mohandas; April 30, 2019).

Submission

CIS Response to Call for Stakeholder Comments: Draft E-Commerce Policy (Arindrajit Basu, Vipul Kharbanda, Elonnai Hickok and Amber Sinha; April 10, 2019).

Participation in Events

IETF 104 Prague (Organized by IETF; Prague; March 23 - 29, 2019). Karan Saini and Gurshabad Grover participated in the event.
The Phantom Public: The Role of Social Media in Democracy (Organized by Ambedkar University; New Delhi; April 3, 2019).
(re) conference (Organized by CREA; New Delhi; April 10 - 12, 2019).
Data for Development: Mapping key considerations for policy and practice in India (Organized by Azim Premchand University; April 24, 2019). Arindrajit Basu delivered a talk.

Artificial Intelligence

Participation in Event

Policy Lab on Artificial Intelligence & Democracy (Organized by Tandem Research, in partnership with Microsoft Research and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung; Bangalore; April 2-3, 2019). Shweta Mohandas participated in the event.

Free Speech and Expression

Submission

CIS Response to ICANN's proposed renewal of .org Registry (Akriti Bopanna; April 28, 2019).

Event Organized

Internet Speech: Perspectives on Regulation and Policy ( Organized by CIS; India Habitat Centre, New Delhi; April 5, 2019).

Blog Entry

DIDP #33 On ICANN's 2012 gTLD round auction fund (Akriti Bopanna; April 4, 2019).

Researchers at Work (RAW)

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Announcement

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; April 6, 2019).

Blog Entries

The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination (Divij Joshi; April 21, 2019).
#ObjectsOfDigitalGovernance (Khetrimayum Monish Singh, Rajiv K. Mishra, and Vidya Subramanian; April 21, 2019).

Telecom

Article

Delayed Cash Flows and NPAs (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; April 3, 2019 and Organizing India Blogspot; April 4, 2019).

Participation in Event

BIF conference on “Substitutability of OTT Services with Telecom Services & Regulation of OTT Services (Organized by Broadband India Forum; Taj Mahal Hotel, Mansingh Road, New Delhi; April 5, 2019). Anubha Sinha was a panellist at a BIF conference on “Substitutability of OTT Services with Telecom Services & Regulation of OTT Services”.

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2019-newsletter

Wikimedia Education SAARC conference

Admin — 2019-06-22T09:30:46Z

Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) happy to announce that, Wikimedia Education SAARC conference 2019 programme submissions (proposals) are open from today, 25 April 2019. Deadline for applying for scholarship is 20 May 2019. The conference organized by Christ University in association with CIS-A2K will be held from 20 - 22 June 2019 at Christ University in Bengaluru. The event is being co-organized by Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia & Education User Group.

Education is a core function of the Wikipedia project. Many Wiki chapters, the Wikimedia movement, user groups and affiliates are developing education programs across the globe. Wiki has been used as a teaching resource by many teachers. Students are doing assignments on Wiki and adopting modern technologies. The Wikimedia and Education movements have the same goal - to ensure that knowledge is made accessible to every person across the world.

The CIS-A2K team, for instance, is working with the language department of Christ University and other educational institutions to enrich the content of Indic Wikimedia projects with the help of students. Globally many students and educators are involved in the Wikimedia movement and the Education movement working towards democratising education and increasing accessibility of education materials. We believe that students should not only consume knowledge available on the internet but also be a part of the larger Open Internet movement, and help in creating open knowledge resources. The Wikimedia Education SAARC conference will be the first of its kind conference involving SAARC countries, engaging students, education program leaders, educators and researchers working with the Open Education and free knowledge movement.

This conference will allow us to understand the different efforts made by the communities involved in the Wikimedia Education movement. This will help us to create models, templates and documents that can be replicated in by other institutions or programs. We at CIS A2K were inspired to host such a conference through the course of our work with Christ University. This will be one of the many projects that will be able to use the conference as a platform to showcase their work among the global Wikimedia movement.

Conference Goals

To generate awareness of Wikipedian Education programs and activities happening in Asia by different community members/languages.
Sharing the knowledge and best practices of how to build "trust relationship" with new partners/teachers and how to improve trust in Wikipedia.
Challenges on student retention and how to engage students in the broader Wikimedia movement.
The best method to evaluate and measure the quality of the work done by students.
To introduce tools like the dashboard, across diverse languages, and other tools which will be useful for tracking, assessment, allocation of the topics and others.
Integration of Wiki activities with academic assignments, regular course syllabus.
To bridge the gap and develop a mutually beneficial liaison between Wiki communities and Wikimedia Education stakeholders.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/wikimedia-education-saarc-conference

Reddit, Telegram among websites blocked in India, say internet groups

Sai Sachin Ravikumar — 2019-04-15T10:32:54Z

Discussion board Reddit, messaging service Telegram and comedy site College Humor have been blocked for intermittent periods, say internet groups.

The article by Sai Sachin Ravikumar was published in Business Standard on April 3, 2019. Gurshabad Grover was quoted.

Websites like Reddit and Telegram are being blocked in India by internet service providers, throwing into question the enforcement of net neutrality rules, advocacy groups said on Wednesday.

Restrictions on "torrent sites" that offer free movie and music downloads are routine in India to prevent copyright infringement. Pornography websites are also blocked by court orders seeking to protect children.

But in recent months, websites such as the discussion board Reddit, messaging service Telegram and comedy site College Humor have been blocked for intermittent periods, often for days and only in some regions, baffling internet users.

"It's not making any sense, what's happening," said Apar Gupta, executive director at the non-profit Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF). "A lot of these blocks are also happening in such a way that no notices are displayed." Since January, there have been at least 250 reports of websites blocked on networks operated by Jio, a unit of Reliance Industries, Bharti Airtel and Hathway, the IFF said in a letter to the telecoms department.

Jio and Airtel are among India's top telecom providers.

Some internet users have posted on social media screenshots of pages displaying messages saying a website was blocked to comply with government orders.

When Reuters tried to access CollegeHumor.com on Wednesday a message read: "Your requested URL has been blocked as per the directions received from Department of Telecommunications, Government of India."

An official at the telecoms department, which last year approved rules on net neutrality--the concept that all websites and data on the Internet be treated equally--declined to comment when contacted by Reuters.

Complaints by Indian internet users have covered "most forms of net neutrality violations," IFF's Gupta said.

Nearly 60 per cent of the user reports compiled by the foundation since January involved Jio networks, the IFF's data showed.

A Jio representative did not respond to an emailed request for comment. Hathway did not reply to phone and email requests for comment.

Bharti Airtel said in a statement it "supports an open internet" and does not block content unless directed by authorities. It did not say if it was currently blocking any websites.

Reddit did not respond to an emailed request for comment outside regular U.S. business hours.

Telegram, which has been blocked previously in Russia and Iran, did not immediately respond to a phone message seeking comment.

If websites are blocked based on government or court orders, or internet firms have legal grounds to restrict web pages, they might not violate net neutrality rules, said Gurshabad Grover, a researcher at the non-profit Centre for Internet and Society.

"But in this case we're not entirely sure," he said.

Other sites blocked this year include tax portal Taxscan and legal database Indian Kanoon.

After complaints from Jio's internet users, Indian Kanoon founder Sushant Sharma said he had been told by Jio the portal was blocked for one day last week due to a government order.

"By evening, apparently, that order was taken back," said Sharma, whose website has some 150,000 daily visitors.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-sai-sachin-ravikumar-april-3-2019-reddit-telegram-among-websites-blocked-in-india

Programme Officer - Privacy

amber — 2019-04-15T06:53:44Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is seeking applications for the position of Programme Officer, to undertake public policy research on privacy and related themes. For this position, we will hire one full time researcher, to be based in the Delhi office of CIS, for the duration of one year.

To apply for this position please write to amber@cis-india.org along with a CV, two writing samples and contact details of two references, Interested candidates are invited to send their applications at the earliest — latest by April 30th.

Organisation Profile

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfiguration of social processes and structures through the internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. Through its diverse initiatives, CIS explores, intervenes in, and advances contemporary discourse and practices around internet, technology and society in India, and elsewhere.

Privacy Research at CIS

While privacy has been a key subject of study for digital rights and development organisations in India for the last decade, recent and ongoing legal and policy developments have placed this issue at the forefront of human rights and regulatory research. CIS has conducted extensive research into the areas of privacy, data protection, data security, and was also a member of the Committee of Experts constituted under Justice A P Shah. CIS has also been cited multiple times in the Report of the Committee of Experts led by Justice Srikrishna. CIS values the fundamental principles of justice, equality, freedom and economic development and strongly advocates the right to privacy.

Over the next year, CIS intends to look at several research questions on data protection which may include the global experience with privacy enforcement, need for effective redressal mechanisms, documenting the design of business models and data flows, regulation of social media big data, how data of disadvantaged groups including children may be protected. Additionally, while we now have the Supreme Court’s unanimous and emphatic recognition of the fundamental right to privacy, there is a need for research enquiry into several issues such as a clarification of the scope of the Puttaswamy judgment, unpacking the different dimensions of privacy, how state actions interact with privacy.

The Role

Research and analysis: Literature review, policy design, detailed analysis of research topics
Knowledge management: Staying up-to-date on developments of interest to the project, and sharing/debating these with the team. Contributing to documentary and knowledge management processes
Policy outreach and stakeholder engagement: Supporting the project manager in the dissemination of research findings in innovative formats. Attending, planning and executing events
Writing op-eds, short notes, policy briefs and longer form academic writing for a range of audiences
Presentations and formal discussions: Preparing and delivering presentations to various audiences
Helping manage communications with stakeholders including international experts, regulators and policy makers
Managing interns and team: Managing work outputs with our interns; coordinating research with team members and the project manager

Qualifications and Skills

We are looking for professionals from law, regulatory theory and public policy backgrounds.

We are looking for candidates who are interested in studying the regulatory challenges of notice and consent, state capacity, how business models thwart privacy and the future of privacy post Puttaswamy.

This is a full-time position based out of Delhi. The position is for a duration of one year. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/jobs/programme-officer-privacy-2019

E-commerce_submission_by_CIS.pdf

karan — 2019-04-10T11:34:32Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/e-commerce_submission_by_cis.pdf-2