Centre for Internet and Society

Seminar on Evolution of Communication

Admin — 2019-03-07T14:50:04Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/seminar-on-evolution-of-communication

NETmundial Day 1

achal — 2014-04-24T09:02:49Z

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's speech at the opening of NETmundial in São Paulo was refreshingly free of the UN-speak that characterised virtually every single other presentation this morning. The experience of sitting for five hours in a room where the word "multi-stakeholder" is repeated at the rate of five mentions per minute is not for the faint-hearted; it almost makes you wish for more of the straight-talking tough-love of people like Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt.

Surveillance was mentioned by a few brave souls. Two peaceful, silent - and rather effective - protests broke out during the opening speeches; one, against the data retention clause in Brazil's otherwise path-breaking and brand-new law for civil rights on the Internet, Marco Civil, and another for honouring US NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and urging action against surveillance. Sadly for Brazilian civil society, the Marco Civil protestations went unheard, and Rousseff signed the bill into law in full.

There were lots of speeches. Lots. If you missed them, here's a handy visualisation you can use to catch up quickly: just add some prepositions and conjunctions, and you'll have a perfectly anodyne and universally acceptable bureaucrat/politician keynote address.

The afternoon was given over to assimilating previously received comments on the outcome document and adding new ones from people in the room. Much contention, much continuity, lots of hard work, lots of nitpicking (some of it even useful) and lots of ambiguity; after more consultation - the slog goes on until tomorrow afternoon - the outcome document will be laid to rest. Lunch was excellent: there's a reason the Grand Hyatt São Paulo costs as much as it does.

Our quest to plumb the depths of multi-stakeholderism continued: we thank the kind folks who gave us their time and allowed us to record them.

Q: What does "multi-stakeholder" mean? What is "multi-stakeholderism"?

Multi-stakeholderism to me is the ability to engage with every stakeholder and have them in the room, and have them understand that it is not an equal opportunity for all. I also understand that civil society and academia will never be at the same place as business, which has far more resources, or governments, which have the sovereign right to make laws, or even the technical community, which is often missing from the policy dialogue. There are three things which are important to me: (1) Will I be able to make interventions not just in the dialogue but in the decision making process? For me, that is key. (2) Do I have recourse in a process which might be multilateral or inter-governmental - do I have recourse when international treaties are ratified or signed, because they become binding national laws? and (3) What is it that happens to dissent in a process that is not multi-stakeholder? I think even the ITU (the International Telecommunications Union) has taken cognizance of multi-stakeholderism. So it's not new, but it's also not old or accepted, which is why we contest it. We will never have equal stakeholders. And who gets to represent the stakeholder communities? I don't think power imbalances get resolved, and I think it's a deeply flawed process. It's not perfect. But what worries me is the alternative. So give me a better alternative.
Subi Chaturvedi, Media for Change/ Lady Shriram College (India)

Simply put, multi means many components, and stakeholders are people who have the stakes. So multi-stakeholder means many people who are informed to take the process forward. The process is still on: it's evolving. The idea is that everyone who has an interest should bring it forward, and the dialogue must be balanced. Proof of concept is important - it's not about taking a dogmatic position but a scientific position. Business is concerned about the justification around return on investment.
Jimson Olufuye, Africa ICT Alliance (Nigeria)

Everyone who has a stake in the use and operation of the Internet should have a stake in the way it is managed. I think we shouldn't be considering this as a power game - it's not winner takes all. Decision making should be as much as possible consensual, where no one has a veto power.
Getachew Engida, Deputy Director-General, UNESCO (France)

It is very simple. I think people are complicating matters. It's not a power game. The Internet is fundamentally a global network of interconnected computers. People have become not only consumers of information but providers of information, so the stakes in the media/ICT world are massive. Unprecedented. Therefore, around major issues confronting the Internet, decision making should be as participatory as possible.
Indrajit Banerjee, Director, UNESCO (France)

Additional Links

Watch Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's speech at the opening of NETmundial
Follow Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt on Twitter

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-day-1

The Future of the Internet, Who Should Govern It and What is at Stake for You?

praskrishna — 2014-02-12T11:12:54Z

Internet and Mobile Association of India, Cellular Operators Association of India, Internet Democracy project, Media for Change, SFLC and the Centre for Internet Society is organizing a Multi-stakeholder Dialogue on the future of internet on January 29, 2014 at Multipurpose Hall, India International Center (IIC).

Snehashish Ghosh will participate in the event as a speaker.

Schedule

10.00 - 10.30: Registration
10.30 -13.30: Discussion and Open House
13.30: Lunch

The meeting seeks to address, among others, the following questions:

The issue of governing the internet through a multistakeholder mechanism (including government, business, civil society, academia and the technical community) versus a multilateral one (or an intergovernmental one, including only governments in a decision making role) is leading the global discourse.

What is multistakeholderism? How is it practiced? How is it different from multilateralism or intergovernmental decision making? Why has multistakeholderism assumed such an important role in internet governance?
Moderator – Subi Chutervedi

Several of the arguments are based in a framework document known as ‘Tunis Agenda 2005’.
What is the role of the Tunis Agenda in these debates? Since its formulation 9 years ago, is it still relevant? What does “stakeholders in their respective roles” mean in 2014 and beyond?
Moderator – Subi Chaturvedi

The positions taken by the Government of India at international fora are linked to its cyber security concerns.
Will India’s position of multilateral/intergovernmental governance of the Internet actually address these cyber security concerns?
Moderator – Anja Kovacs

Since the Snowden revelations, mass surveillance by governments has assumed center stage and is driving the recent discourse.
Will a multilateral/inter-governmental mechanism adequately address serious concerns of government surveillance and intrusion into the privacy of internet users and citizens?
Moderator – Anja Kovacs

Innovation, freedom of speech and expression and privacy rights are critical to a free and open internet. How are these impacted under a multistakeholder vis-à-vis a multilateral/inter-governmental mechanism?
Moderator- Chinmayi Arun

Internet governance has both a domestic and a global angle. In 2014, what should be the process of policy making involving stakeholders? Should there be consultation and what should be the process, quality and outcome of such consultation, especially as it relates to Internet Governance?

What process should the government adopt before taking a position internationally and while formulating domestic policy related to internet governance?
Moderator Chinmayi Arun

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/future-of-internet-january-29-2014

Internet Governance and India: The Way Forward

praskrishna — 2014-02-03T10:33:53Z

Snehashish Ghosh is participating in this event organized by the Observer Research Foundation on January 22 in New Delhi.

The Internet Governance Forum’s (IGF) purpose is to support the United Nations Secretary-General in carrying out the mandate from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) with regard to convening a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue. The eighth edition of the Internet Governance Forum started on October 22, in Bali, Indonesia. Representatives of governments, intergovernmental organisations, private sector, technical and academic community and civil society gathered together to discuss Internet governance related issues, under the general theme of “Building Bridges – Enhancing Multistakeholder Cooperation for Growth and Sustainable Development”. Cybersecurity, open internet, freedom of expression, protection of human rights were some of the topics discussed and debated at the three day conference. There was also a mutual consensus amongst the participants on the multistakeholder model for internet governance.

Programme

10.30: Registration/Tea
11.00: Opening Remarks by Mahima Kaul, Fellow-ORF
11.10: Subi Chaturvedi, Assistant Professor Journalism & Communication, Lady Shri Ram College for Women & Founder Trustee Media For Change
11.25: Dr. Anja Kovacs, Director, Internet Democracy Project, New Delhi.
11.40: Dr. Govind, CEO, National Internet Exchange of India, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India.
11.55: Virat Bhatia, Chairman, FICCI Communications & Digital Economy Committee and President, IEA AT&T, SouthAsia
12.10: Question and Answer
12.50: Concluding remarks
13.00: Lunch, ORF Lounge.

Speakers Biography

Subi Chaturvedi, Asstt. Professor Journalism & Communication, Lady Shri Ram College for Women & Founder Trustee Media For Change.

Ms. Chaturvedi strives to promote the role and participation of the youth, women and girls in ICT and the policy dialogue and decision making, along with Improving e-governance and deepening democracy through 'media for change'. She also works on building bridges between different stakeholders in IG and enabling conversations on the national and domestic level on important policy concerns such as cybersecurity, openness, universality, human rights, permission less innovation and freedom of speech and expression online, through roundtables, workshops, public hearings and youth meets (Internet Dialogues) for India.

She also actively participates in domestic as well as International meetings on Internet governance and enhanced cooperation to represent her stakeholder perspective, especially as a women academician and a member of the media and civil society from a developing country and an emerging economy. She often writes opinion and edits pieces for national dailies, journals and provides inputs and commentary to the electronic media to inform the debate and dialogue on Internet Governance policy questions

Dr. Anja Kovacs, Director, Internet Democracy Project, Delhi
Dr. Anja Kovacs directs the Internet Democracy Project, Delhi, where her work focuses on questions regarding freedom of expression, cybersecurity and the architecture of Internet governance as they relate to the Internet and democracy. She is currently also a member of the of the Investment Committee of the Digital Defenders Partnership and of the interim Steering Group of Best Bits, a global network of civil society members. In addition, Anja has worked as an international consultant on Internet issues, including for the United Nations Development Programme Asia Pacific and the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, Mr. Frank La Rue, and has been an IREX Fellow and a Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. Prior to focusing her work on the information society, Anja researched, lectured and consulted on a wide range of development-related issues, including at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, and Ambedkar University, Delhi. She obtained her PhD in Development Studies from the University of East Anglia in the UK.

Dr. Govind, CEO, National Internet Exchange of India, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India

Virat Bhatia, Chairman, FICCI Communications & Digital Economy Committee and President, IEA AT&T, SouthAsia
As Chairman of the FICCI Communications and Digital Economy Committee, Mr. Bhatia currently leads the combined advocacy and policy reform efforts of nearly 150 members - representing leading telecom industry associations, mobile service providers, domestic and long distance service providers, ISPs, internet companies, social media, infrastructure and tower companies, device manufacturers, consultants, legal experts and other related stakeholders in India’s ICT space. He is appointed as a member of the Joint Working Group (JWG) which drafted the “Guidelines on Protection of National Critical Information Infrastructure”, later released by the NSA in June 2013. He serves on the Multistakeholder Advisory Group (MAG) of DeitY for India IGF, and in the past, on the JWG dealing with issues of cyber security.

At AT&T, Mr. Bhatia serves as President, IEA, for the South Asia region. He has responsibility for supporting all of AT&T’s businesses, corporate development activities, new investments and business strategies. He has been involved with the digital economy sector since 1994.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-governance-and-india-the-way-forward

INSAF National Convention on Crisis of Capitalism and brazen onslaught on DEMOCRACY

praskrishna — 2013-12-26T10:18:35Z

Snehashish Ghosh is participating in this event as a speaker.

Ever since the Neo-liberal agenda began to unfold 22 years back, the democratic spaces within Indian polity have been squeezing continuously and the present scenario of run up to 2014 elections is reflecting the state of disarray in parliamentary democracy. The mainstream discourse appears to have deliberately failed in bringing out the intrinsic relationship between ‘capitalism’; its ‘crisis’ and ‘democracy’ to the core of analyzing and understanding the present amnesia in political process.

The characteristics of crony, fictitious, lumpen and speculative Capital that is on the driving seat of contemporary phase of capitalism are mirrored in the operational levels of parliamentary democracy - from governance to electoral process- in the form of corporate influences on policies and decision making, rampant corruption at the pinnacle of power, control of money and muscle-power in politics.

It is, therefore, important to bring out the correlation between the ensuing crisis in global capitalism - including in India - and the impending crisis in our democracy - to the fore. The divergence in the requirements of the neo-liberal phase of capitalism and ‘democracy’ as its analogous political system seems to be the key in explaining the despair engulfing Indian polity at present. The attempts to transform ‘Democracies’ into ‘Corporatocracies’ that we see today, also emanate from this despondency alone.

Last two decades have also seen the institution of ‘State’ posturing itself more and more aggressively against its own people in order to fulfill its obligations to international financial & trade institutions so to serve the interest of global capital. In such a course, it has extensively resorted to adopt the instrument of ‘fabricating’ cases against the voices of opposition to the interests of the global capital.

Though the instrument of ‘fabrication’ is not new to the ‘State Craft’ but this time it is being used in a targeted and selective manner. Not only the existing criminal laws have been used for this purpose but new laws like UAPA and various state ‘security laws’ were created during this period to meet this requirement.

The ‘Indian State’ is also proceeding feverishly to create a surveillance state through various means of ‘electronic surveillance’ using cutting edge technologies to track mobile phones, internet usage, emails etc. at home while colluding with U.S. military and security establishment internationally against other nations. The business of creating and sharing of its citizen’s databases (both demographic & biometrics etc) has been promoted by Indian establishment by subverting the Constitution, existing norms of parliamentary democracy and citizens’ rights.

It is in this context that INSAF has decided to hold its two day National Convention 2013.

Programme Schedule

Day 1: Crisis of Capitalism and brazen onslaught on DEMOCRACY

10.00 10.30	Registration & Tea/Coffee
10.30 11.00	Introduction by Anil Chaudhary
11.00 13.00	Inaugural address by eminent writer and journalist P. Sainath Chaired by Justice Rajinder Sachar
13.00 14.30	Lunch
14.30 17.30	Panel Discussion: Prof. Vibhuti Patel (Director, Centre for Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, SNDT Women's University, Mumbai) Prof. Achin Vanaik (Former Dean of Social Sciences, Delhi University) Prof. Ramesh Dixit (Lucknow, UP)

Day 2: Surveillance state and perils of DEMOCRACY

10.00 10.30	Panel Discussion Dr. Usha Ramanathan (Law researcher and activist, New Delhi) Prabir Purkayastha (Delhi Science Forum) Ms. Subi Chaturvedi (Asstt. Prof. of Journalism Communication, Lady Shri Ram College for Women, Delhi Univ. Founder Hon. Managing Trustee, Media For Change) Snehashish Ghosh (Centre for Internet & Society) Chaired by Ms. Kalyani Menon-Sen (Feminist activist & researcher)
13.00 14.00	Lunch
14.00 16.30	Panel Discussion: Suppressing dissent: Stifling NGOs via FCRA Kabir Dixit (Advocate, Supreme Court of India) Mathew Cherian (Chairperson, Credibility Alliance) Chaired by Sanjay Parikh (Human Rights activist and Advocate, Supreme Court of India)
16.30 17.00	Tea/Coffee

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/insafnational-convention-on-crisis

Taking Stock: Emerging Issues - Internet Surveillance

praskrishna — 2013-11-09T06:31:57Z

This session was held at the IGF in Bali on October 25. Pranesh Prakash made intervention in this session.

Read the original transcript published on the IGF website here.

The following is the output of the real-time captioning taken during the Eigth Meeting of the IGF, in Bali, Indonesia. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the session, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

>> MARKUS KUMMER: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Please take your seat. We are about to start our session on surveillance. We are organising ourselves a bit on the fly. The room is already set for the Closing Ceremony this afternoon, but this makes a little bit of a distant feeling. We're up here and you're far away and there are not that many people in the room so what we intend to do is to move down from the podium for the discussion. We've already set up the Chairs on the first row where the panelists will sit and interact with the audience to make it a little bit more often interactive and positive atmosphere for discussion.

We have originally we have reserved 90 minutes for this session but then we thought maybe more time will be needed so we can move on. We have 3 hours at our disposal but we don't need to fill the three hours. If we run out of steam we can conclude earlier, as some people have indicated already that they have to be leaving, so we take it improvise a little bit. But please leave free the very first, as we intend to move down there.

Before asking our Session Chair to introduce the meeting, I'll make a few preliminary remarks, and I would also like to ask the Secretariat to put up the policy questions.

We have had a process when the mandate of the IGF was renewed to look at IGF improvements. There was a special Working Group set up and the Working Group made recommendations and one of the recommendations was that each situation should address some policy questions that would help shape the discussion, and we would also ask to reach out to the community and we did so. We asked for public input and we got the input and these policy questions we received are available on the IGF website, and they will be made available on the screen.

But for better comprehension, I will read them out and our moderators will bear them in mind.

Okay. On Internet surveillance, the first question was the need to prevent mass surveillance carried out in the guise of targeted surveillance. The second question was balancing cybersecurity and privacy. The third question, principles of open Internet/net neutrality.

Fourth question: One of the emerging issues is on Internet regulation. Regulation versus self‑regulation where the Internet is concerned. How can countries that have questions on Internet regulation versus self‑regulation be aided to work on a level playing field that assist the best industry practices being adopted, best practices that make the Internet and thus countries and institutions safer from harm.

Fifth question: Better channels of cooperation between stakeholders especially in areas such as cybersecurity. 6, agreement on fundamental minimum principles for Internet Governance and multistakeholder cooperation.

7, priorities for the IGF, the Internet community, and multistakeholder governance post‑2015.

And with that I hand over to our session Chair, Dr. Setyanto Santosa, you have the Chair.

>> SETYANTO SANTOSA: Thank you. Good morning, everybody. I hope you enjoy the dinner last night. You can also look at the Balinese dancers, the modern dancer and also the original Balinese dancers.

10 years ago I was the permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Tourism and culture. At that time we had Indonesian tourism. The result was at the time surprise me when a question to the foreign tourists deliver most of them said that what actually the question is what actually was is the strength of Indonesian tourism?

They said, the people. And then following the second question, which part of the people that make you attractive? They say the smile. So at the time, I just realized that Indonesia is a country with the highest smile per capita in the world. And you prove already the last 6 days and you can find the Indonesian people with a smile.

So with this introduction, I don't take much time and the issue also very attractive is as Markus just mentioned, regarding the emerging issues.

So I look to deliver the floor to our moderator. So please, Madam.

>> MARKUS KUMMER: Please introduce yourself.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thank you, Markus. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Anne‑Rachel Inne, the Chief Operations Officer the AfriNIC, the Internet registry for the African region, so we're happy to be here. I will let Jovan introduce himself later on when he takes the floor.

We're happy to be here with you today to moderate this session on emerging issues. As panelists we will have this morning Scott Busby, the Director of Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs in the Bureau of Democracy, Rights and Labor at the United States State Department. Then we will have Ross LaJeunesse. He's the global head, free expression and international policy. The then we're having Jari Arkko, who is an expert on Internet architecture with Ericsson Research, and also the Chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force, which is IETF.

And then we have Johann Hallenborg from the Swedish Government. And our last and not least panelist will be Joana Varon. I'll pass to Jovan now. We actually will have commentators. When we finish presentations here, we'll come down to the floor so that everybody will be seated and we'll hopefully have a more convivial atmosphere than talking down to you there.

We'll have commenters from the floor, Bertrand de La Chapelle, the head of Internet and jurisdiction process in France. We will have Megi Margioyono from Civil Society. Nick Ashton‑Hart from CCIA from Switzerland, and Ambassador Fonseca from Brazil. So thank you very much for joining us all, and I'll pass on to Jovan now.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you, Anne‑Rachel. I'm the Director of DiploFoundation, a Swiss Foundation working on inclusive and effective diplomacy and global governance. First of all, I would like to thank Raul Echeberria and the group that he led which propose this topic to be discussed at the emerging session. And as we know, this topic has already emerged on the various diplomatic agendas worldwide. Therefore it is quite important issues to be addressed during the Internet Governance Forum.

It also is the proof of the relevance of the Internet Governance Forum in talking about issues which are of high importance for international community in general and Internet community in particular. Markus already outlined the main questions that were discussed in the preparation for the session and they will be some sort of architecture of our session.

We will tackle these questions in five main baskets and we'll organise five main baskets in 20 minutes time slot. The first basket will be on the question of infrastructure and basic functionality of the Internet, and we'll have expertise in each basket, both on the floor and in the room.

The second basket will deal with the Human Rights issues, question of privacy protection and the other Human Rights issues related to the Internet surveillance.

The third basket will focus on security, and the situations when surveillance is justified and under what conditions.

Fourth basket will deal with Data Protection and the economic model.

And fifth, the last basket, will wrap up the discussion within the general framework of Internet Governance Forum which is ethics. We will address the question of trust on the Internet and impact of Internet surveillance on trust.

The underlying issues which will be appearing in our discussion are issues of the law enforcement procedures and international law. Therefore, this is a general infrastructure and we plan to proceed with 20 minutes dedicated to each basket after we hear from our panelists introductory remarks, which they will also relate to these five main issues.

I think this is the general entry I would like to invite Scott Busby to provide his introductory remarks on the question of Internet surveillance. Scott, please.

>> SCOTT BUSBY: Thank you, Jovan. Well, I'm very happy to be here as all of us from the United States Government are. We had some drama in our country with our Government shutdown, which put in doubt whether or not we would be able to come here. And I'm pleased to say that even had the shutdown continued through this week, we had approval from the White House and other senior officials in our Government for us to attend the IGF because we recognize how important this Forum is to our own policy, as well as the overall policies relating to the Internet.

The United States comes to the Internet Governance Forum every year to stand by our commitment to an open, interoperable and secure Internet. We recognize the importance of the issue of surveillance to the international community, and are grateful for this opportunity to engage with all of you here today on it.

As President Obama has said, the United States welcomes a discussion about privacy and security, and we are right now intensively having that discussion in the United States, as well with all of you in the international community.

We know that many of you, as well as many people in the world, have questions and concerns stemming from the recent reports about alleged U.S. intelligence practices, and we look forward to engaging with you today on them.

When it comes to those practices, I can say that the United States gathers intelligence of the type gathered by all nations. All Governments are involved in efforts to protect their countries from real threats and harm, and all Governments collect information concerning such threats. As we undertake those practices, we remain committed to protecting the American people, as well as our friends in the international community, and those friends include not only Governments, but the private sector and Civil Society.

This commitment relies on robust intelligence capabilities to identify threats to our National interests, and to advance our foreign policy, which includes our commitment to Human Rights. At the same time, we also acknowledge that such intelligence efforts must be fully informed by our international commitments, our Democratic principles, our respect for Human Rights, and the privacy concerns of people around the world.

Consistent with the terms of open debate and the democratic process, President Obama has initiated an effort to review and reform our intelligence practices, and ensure that they are appropriate in light of our commitments and our principles. In terms of reform, the President has already ordered the Director of National intelligence to declassify and make public as much information as possible about certain sensitive intelligence collection programmes undertaken under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, otherwise known as FISA. Numerous documents including decisions if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have been released as part of this effort.

Furthermore, the President has appointed a group of outside experts to advise him on how, in light of advancements in technology, the United States can employ its technical collection capabilities in a way that optimally protects our National Security, and advances our foreign policy, while taking into account other policy considerations, such as our commitment to privacy and to Civil Liberties.

This group has begun its work and is expected to produce its recommendations by the end of this year. We look forward to those recommendations.

Consistent with our normal practice of not commenting on specific allegations of intelligence activities, I cannot say more than this about such allegations. But I can say a few things generally about our commitment to Human Rights and to an open Internet.

First, I would like to emphasize that the United States does not use intelligence collection for the purpose of repressing the citizens of any country for any reason, including their political, religious, or other beliefs. Thus, for instance, we do not use our intelligence capabilities to persecute anyone for ideas that they express online.

Let me also assure you that the United States takes privacy seriously, both that of Americans and of individuals around the world. That commitment to privacy is reaffirmed in the President's international strategy for cyberspace, which states that, quote, individuals should be protected from arbitrary or unlawful State interference with their privacy when they use the Internet, close quote.

As President Obama has recently said, America's not interested in spying on ordinary people. Our intelligence is focused, above all, on finding the information that's necessary to protect our people, and in many cases protect our allies, close quote.

Furthermore, the United States will continue to uphold its longstanding commitments to defend and advance Human Rights in our diplomacy. This includes preserving the consensus reflected in Human Rights Council Resolution 20/8, that the same rights people have online also apply offline. Sorry, rights that apply offline also apply online.

United States will also stay actively engaged in the Freedom Online Coalition, a group of 21 Governments that works with Civil Society and the private sector in a multistakeholder approach to support the ability of individuals to exercise their Human Rights and fundamental freedoms online. As several people have suggested over the course of this week, this Coalition may be a very good Forum in which to continue the discussion on balancing the need for security with Human Rights, and to identify an appropriate way ahead on these tough issues.

I will be hosting the next Ministerial meeting of the Coalition on April 28th and 29th in Tallinn. We will also continue to advance Internet freedom through our programmes. Since 2008, the United States has committed over $100 million to Internet freedom programmes around the world. We intend to maintain that robust level of support for such programmes. On Internet Governance, the United States remains steadfast in our support for a multistakeholder model that supports international trade and commerce, strengthens International security and fosters free expression and innovation. We strongly believe that proposals to centralize control over the Internet through a top‑down intergovernmental approach which is slow the pace of innovation and economic development and could lead to unprecedented control over what people say and do online. Such proposals play into the hands of repressive regimes that wish to legitimize inappropriate state control of content.

We also believe the current multistakeholder system should be strengthened and sustained, particularly through broader multistakeholder participation from the developing world. Through our programmes, we have sought to make such participation possible.

We are aware that some Governments seek to take advantage of the debate initiated by the recent disclosures to draw attention away from their repression of their citizens, or the need for democratic reforms in their countries. The acts of these Governments include for example arresting opponents for what they say or intimidating them into silence and stealing intellectual property for the benefit of their economies. We therefore want to emphasize how important it is not to let Governments that do not share a commitment to Human Rights and fairness to exploit the current debate to their benefit. We should not allow them to gloss over the very important differences between their Internet monitoring activities and those of countries like the United States that conduct intelligence activities to enable responsible state craft. We hope that the discussion today will reflect the fact that the issue of surveillance is a global one and will take into account the views and practices of everyone around the world. We intend to listen closely so that we can take account the many comments and recommendations from you and ensure that they are incorporated into our own Governmental deliberations. Thank you.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you, Scott. Our discussions will result in useful insights for the process that you indicated started in the United States and I will say reflections are going on all over the world as we will hear from the other interventions. Our next speaker is Ross LaJeunesse from Google, and we'll hear something more about the business perspective.

>> ROSS LaJEUNESSE: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Am I all set to go? Oh, sorry.

Hi, I'm Ross LaJeunesse from Google, and it is a sincere pleasure to be here. There's been obviously a lot of discussion and debate about this issue, and that is of course a very good thing, and it's very necessary. But in order to have a discussion about this, a discussion based on reality and based on facts, I just want to start by providing a few clarifications so that we're all operating from the same understanding.

The first is that Google does not provide direct access for any Government to our data, our servers, our infrastructure and it never has. And you can use any term you like to try and describe that accusation, a back door, a side door, a trap door, anything like it, but the fact of the matter is that we simply don't do it.

We also don't accept large, blanket‑like Government requests for user data. We are subject to the law, so when we receive a Government request for user data, we look at each and every one of them very carefully. We have a team of lawyers at Google whose sole purpose is to do exactly that. They ensure that the request is valid, is legal, follows due process, and is as limited in scope as possible. And very often, we push back, and we sometimes refuse to comply. And you can see this if you go to our transparency report online, which lists the number of Government requests we receive, how many of them we comply with, and we do that around the world wherever we have services.

Now, on the issue of transparency, we believe this is a critical element to the debate. And we're not newcomers to this issue. We've published our first transparency report. We're the first country, first company, in the world to do so about three years ago, because we recognized long before the Snowden revelations that this is a critical part of our responsibility to our users.

Every 6 months we release an updated transparency report that is better and more granular and I'm glad to see that now many companies are doing the same. We're continuing this work by working with NGOs around the world to publish National transparency reports and we've released one in Estonia this year and we've highlighted another in Hong Kong and that work will continue.

So transparency of course isn't a cure‑all but we really believe you can't have a meaningful debate on the path forward, you can't have a debate on this issue, if you don't have the facts, which is why we're suing the U.S. Government right now to get them to reveal more information about the number of National Security requests and demands that they make on companies, and we're also on a separate track supporting key legislation in the United States Congress sponsored by Senator Franken and another Bill by Representative Lofgren to do the same thing.

Now, I want to emphasize that it would be much easier for us and much easier for any company to simply comply with Government requests for user data. But we don't. And we don't do that because we're a company built on the idea that if you put your user first, everything else will follow. We don't do that because we take our responsibility to our users very seriously, and that's both a matter of principle and a matter of good business.

We're very aware that if our users don't trust us, they won't use our products, and they'll go somewhere else. So again, this debate is good and absolutely necessary, but I also want to echo a point made by Scott and made by Mike Harris at the Index on Censorship, which is this: I'm all for holding the United States Government and Western countries to the highest of standards. We need to do that. But I don't want us to do that at the expense of not focusing on other countries, countries where their surveillance programmes are just as bad or worse. Countries where journalists are beaten, bloggers are imprisoned and activists are killed.

The Expression Online Initiative just released a very important report on Azerbaijan where we held last year's IGF and how horrible things have gotten there over the past year. So I'm all for this discussion about the alleged hypocrisy of the United States and Western Governments but let's not do so in a way that discounts or damages the ability of those Governments to continue their otherwise excellent work which they've long done in supporting Internet and journalist freedom, in supporting Human Rights around the world, and let's not attack them to the point where it undercuts their very important support for the multistakeholder model of Internet Governance. Thanks very much.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you, Ross. Our next speaker is Jari Arkko from IETF from Finland but currently Chairing IETF. Jari, please.

>> JARI ARKKO: Thank you. And thank you for the opportunity to talk, and also this is my first IGF and I really enjoyed all the discussions this week so thank you all for that, on this topic and many other topics.

And then onto this topic so obviously, the Internet community, all of us here, care deeply about how much we trust the commonly used Internet services and products that all these services are based on so the reports about large scale monitoring obviously disturb us.

Interception of targeted individuals and intelligence activities have of course been well known but I think many people are concerned about the scale. And if Internet technology itself is vulnerable to wholesale monitoring, that is also a big concern, and we take that very seriously at the IETF, as the people at least partially in charge of technical aspects of the Internet.

But I wanted to put these events in perspective. Maybe you can consider this talk as the "do not panic" message. These are hard times but we can also work on the problem, and we should.

The first observation that I would make is that surveillance is probably a wider problem in the world than what you would believe just by reading the most recent newspaper headlines. If you live in a glass house, be careful of throwing stones, and if it weren't true before, I'm sure there are many intelligence agencies in the world who have a bad case of NSA envy today.

Secondly, surveillance is not a new issue. Even we at the IETF have had to deal with some issues around that historically. In 1994, we articulated the view that encryption is an important tool to protect the privacy of communications, but at the time, big parts of the world considered encryption a dangerous tool and wanted to limit its availability.

In 2002 we decided that the IETF standard protocols must include appropriate strong security mechanisms. At the time various nations wanted to employ weaker security mechanisms. Now we are facing a new situation and once again Internet technology needs to evolve to match today's challenges.

We need to deprecate the encryptions that are considered weak and that is by the way something we do all the time with new information from research community and others. We also need to consider a bigger update to the security of the Internet. On Tuesday I talked about the by default security model. Maybe that's something we can pursue but technology alone is obviously not a solution. Even if we had a perfect communications security system, you would still need to trust the entity you're communicating with.

If the peer leaks your conversation it was not helpful. So let me talk a little bit about some of the other areas of work where some things might be useful.

First, network operations and buildout. We've seen some proposals to build more Internet exchange points and add more connectivity. Those are excellent things for many reasons. They will keep traffic more local. They will increase speed, lower costs and enable local Internet businesses to grow but an Internet that is more densely connected is a good thing.

Second, the open source community. Open source solutions are useful to assure ourselves about the reliability of our tools, whatever they might be. On some areas it may be that we should actually consider doing more than we have than so far so let us all support additional efforts in this area.

And there's more. Research community and analysis of security vulnerabilities, the attention on the matter will surely make it possible to have political and legal discussions. Maybe the transparency we just talked about, that's a good thing.

Finally, I wanted to say that I really do wish that we keep the ideals of the Internet clear in all of our minds, and not compromise them. We still need a global and open Internet, one where we can all work together across borders, with us not fragmenting the Internet and we still need an Internet that is open to innovation and new applications without asking for anybody's permission to create those conversations. And we still need an Internet that is managed and expanded. Thank you.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you, Jari, for this brief introduction. You give us more time for discussion later on. And our next speaker is Johann Hallenborg from the Swedish Government. Johann, please.

>> JOHANN HALLENBORG: Thank you very much. My name is Johann. I work with the Department of International law and Human Rights at the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm. Thank you very much for inviting us and me to this panel. We're happy to accept. We've been engaging with the IGF for many years, and we continue to really support this important institution.

And the reason why we're engaging is partly because we believe that the integration of a Human Rights perspective in the discussions on Internet and Internet's future is crucial. So that is part of the reasons why we're engaging so much in the IGF.

So the ultimate goal is actually to make sure that the promise on securing Human Rights online as well as offline is realized. We cannot forget that last year, we had an affirmation by consensus in the UN in the Resolution 28 that Human Rights, they do apply in the offline environment ‑‑ online environment, as well as offline.

This was also something that the entire community agreed to. The Resolution was put forward by Sweden, the U.S., Brazil, Tunisia, Turkey, and Nigeria, and it received support by 87 co‑sponsors, and then adoption by consensus. We need to remember that this is a great success, and we need to make this reality.

Governments have a duty to respect and protect Human Rights. This is a central part of our obligations. And security is needed to secure individuals' rights and freedoms and also ultimately it is to protect the open and democratic societies in which we live.

But it's important to remember that there is no tradeoff between Human Rights and security. It is not about balancing. It is about securing the respect for Human Rights, but doing it in a way that is secure.

In providing security, the Government will address several aspects. One important aspect is certainly to protect rights and freedoms of individuals from abuse of others. But equally important is to ensure the State itself does not violate rights and freedoms, in other words setting the limits for State power.

This is why the rule of law is so critically important. The Constitutional framework includes rules on legality, transparency and accountability and provides the fundamentals for what the State can do, to what extent it can utilize its powers in order to secure the well being of people.

In providing security, access to electronic communication has become an important tool for law enforcement agencies to combat crime, and for security agencies to improve security to the public. Swedish legislation makes a distinct separation between surveillance of electronic communication by law enforcement agencies on the one hand, and intelligence collection by security agencies on the other.

This separation is critical since the operational mandates and objectives for law enforcement and security agencies are indeed very different. We are now at the point in time where trust in the Internet is challenged. Therefore, to Governments all over the world, it's crucial to strengthen the relationship with Civil Society and the trust with people. Governments simply cannot afford to lose legitimacy.

But to strengthen trust, we must reinforce the principles of rule of law, transparency, and also respect for Human Rights. This is done through a deeper dialogue with all stakeholders. Therefore, initiatives that come out of the Civil Society are important, and should be taken seriously.

The necessary and proportionate principles, they represent such an important initiative, and it deserves attention from us. Therefore, in recent months, we have arranged two consultations in Geneva and in New York with the International Civil Society Steering Committee and other Governments on these issues and principles. And as a result, foreign Minister Carl Bildt at the recent Seoul Conference on Cyberspace last week presented several fundamental principles that should apply to maintain respect for Human Rights when carrying out surveillance of electronic communications and these 7 principles, they are about legality, legitimate aim, necessity and adequacy, proportionality, judicial authority, transparency, and public oversight.

This is now the foundation where we would like to continue the discussions with all. We welcome a continued deeper dialogue with all stakeholders, and we're willing to engage with you. One such example is the work in the Freedom Online Coalition in which we will continue to engage deeply.

I conclude here, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much for giving me the word.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you, Johann. I just realized we breached the diplomatic protocol by putting Joana at the end of the table. Joana Varon from Brazil, please go on.

>> JOANA VARON: Thank you for the invitation. Thank you all of you for being here, hearing us and discussing. What I want to highlight here is that the emerging details of the U.S. National Security Agency, mass surveillance programmes have painted a picture of pervasive mass cross‑border surveillance of unprecedented reach and scope, and a scope that's far wider than any reason that could be related to the enforcement of National Security, nothing to do with real threats or harms.

The scope of approved surveillance was broad as it involved tapping communications of the President of countries like Brazil, which could be considered a friendly nation, and as wide as it assessed sensitive strategic business communications, such as communications from our Royal company. This scenario is not only unacceptable for leaders of states but for all Human Rights defenders. It doesn't matter if this data was used or not. The simple collection of our data and our metadata already represents a complete disrespect to the privacy rights from citizens from all over the world and a disrespect of the provisions internationally agreed on international conventions and Treaties addressing fundamental Human Rights.

And it's also a bit hypocritical as all this surveillance was performed by countries that used to pose themselves as defenders for an open and free Internet, and I'm not saying that in order to promote any polarization between different countries that could be posed as good or evil, but I'm saying that to highlight the need that every country shall assume that we still need to work a lot in order to ensure that Human Rights are protected online and offline.

Significant changes are indeed needed. The scenario that we live now is the scenario in which trust among Governments and in the major ICT and Telecom companies is completely broken but it's time to move forward and I agree with the table here, and we need to think about solutions and engage on how to implement them.

As a response to this scenario, I'm happy to see that Brazil has been proactive and has been taking actions in many different levels, as a Brazilian, I'm happy with that. International scenario we have declared urgency to approve Marco Civil, our Civil Rights based framework for the Internet. Inspired by principles suggested through a multistakeholder mechanism incorporated by or promoted by our Internet Steering Committee, Marco Civil, as it's written today, became a model in terms of both content and process, as it was developed through a wide inclusive process of online and offline consultations and resulted in a draft that protects privacy, freedom of expression, and other digital rights. I think we could all learn about this process to think in international scenario, as well.

Also in the National scenario thinking about long‑term solutions, Brazil is now promoting incentives for research, development, and innovation of our ICT Sector. And particularly for building a mail service with encryption by design. But of course, the Internet is global and is meant to remain global, and we would not address this issue only with National policies.

So what I want to highlight here is that the actions taken at the international scenario. So besides delivering a very strong statement at the UN General Assembly, which highlighted all the principles from CGI.br and all the principles that are now drafted in Marco Civil and which are committed to Human Rights, our President now has proposed for us to engage in a multistakeholder fashion, and to develop a Summit, a Summit that in my view shall be bounded by the principles addressed by the President in her statement at the UN General Assembly.

And this could be an opportunity to address all those issues, and I believe that these issues on surveillance should be addressed in both ways, changing the way the companies are operating in order to ensure transparency, but also protection of these users, for instance, by promoting encryption by design, but on the other hand, states should review their practices.

It's good that the U.S. is willing to reform its intelligence practices, so I take this opportunity to ask the U.S. Government to refer and analyze the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance which have been endorsed to date by over 280 international organisations, and represent an attempt to highlight and address some of these concerns.

These principles provide a framework in which to assess whether surveillance laws and practices are consistent with Human Rights standards in the current digital environment. As Johann has related, they focus on legality, legitimate aim, necessity, adequacy, proportionality, competent judicial authority, and due process. They also consider user notification, transparency, and public oversight.

I welcome the initiative from the Swedish Government to consider these principles, and invite other Governments from all over the world to do the same. As I've mentioned, it's time to reassess our practices in order to be sure they're drawing respect for Human Rights with a deep dialogue with all the States that care for the Internet. Thank you.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you, Joana. Thank you panelists for the initial intervention and I think the underlying point is that we can recognize and all panelists recognize the severity of the problem and the need for some action and solution as soon as possible, because it is affecting activities of Governments, business Sector and all Internet users, and there were a few underlying and interesting points that could trigger some discussion in your reflections.

As Scott mentioned, there is a need to observe international law and the existing rules. There is a need to achieve certain balancing acts between the security and Human Rights but we had later on slightly different view from Johann had it's possible to have win‑win solution and not necessarily to create the balancing act and that could be an interesting point of discussion between about balancing act between security and Human Rights.

Ross rightly indicated the need for evidence based policy making, moving from the general reflections to evidence based on the concrete issues, and transparency. Jari highlighted the importance of not only technological but also policy solutions. Technology is not enough.

Johann also indicated the importance of rule of law, institutional separation between electronic communication agency, if I'm correct, and intelligence agencies. Therefore, this is one aspect that we should tackle today, procedural checks and balances as a structural design that could help us to avoid this situation in the future.

And Joana listed an excellent summary on Human Rights, question of necessity ‑‑ necessary and proportional reaction, and the question of using existing international legal tools. And this is important. We have existing international tool that could be applied to this field, including International Covenant on the Civil and Political Rights, and it was clearly indicated throughout the discussion and it is position of all major players, including the United States, that existing international rules should be observed.

With this quick wrapup and ideas for discussion I pass the floor to Anne‑Rachel.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thank you very much, Jovan. I think we're going to go directly to our commenters from the floor, so I am going to give the floor to Ambassador Benedicto Fonseca Filho from Brazil to respond to some of the ‑‑ do we have microphones somewhere?

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: A microphone is coming, yes.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thank you.

>> BENEDICTO FONSECA FILHO: Thank you very much. I'd like to start by doing something that usually we do in intergovernmental setting at the UN. For example, I served at the UN a few years ago, and we used to initiate our talk by saying we align our statement with the statement that was delivered before by some Regional Group or some larger setting so I'd like maybe to innovate in the context of IGF, and say that I'd like to align my statement with the one that was delivered by Joana Varon on behalf of Civil Society because I think she expressed in a very clear way most of the things I was prepared to say, and so she made my life much easier, so I'd like to align my statement to what she has expressed and also to a large extent as well to what has been stated by the representative of Sweden, we share also the view that it is not inconsistent to pursue Human Rights dimension and examine the surveillance context and the disclosures in the context of enhancing the Human Rights dimension. It's not inconsistent with the fact that we all and some of us we are very firmly committed to Human Rights.

We are not diverting the discussion. We are not ignoring that this discussion could serve the purposes which are not our own, but at the same time, we do not think it is ‑‑ it would be a good thing to, because of this, to ignore the situation, try to improve on the situation we have.

So the 7 principles that were spelled out by Minister Carl Bildt at the Seoul Conference also I'd say very much express the kind of approach we'd like to take in that regard.

Having said that, and referring to the speech that was delivered by our President at the United Nations, at the opening of the general debate of this year's United Nations General Assembly, I'd like to highlight that the protection of Human Rights, privacy, freedom of expression ‑‑ women's rights, and it's those two specific manifestations, are at the core of the concern of President Dilma. She has clearly indicated that from the Brazilian perspective, there is a clear need that at the international level we should devise and launch a process that would lead us as international community to achieve principles and norms that would guide use and operation of Internet. And these should be guided by a vision inspired by the multistakeholderism approach, and also be firmly grounded on Human Rights and other principles she spelled out.

So we see no inconsistency in pursuing these, and not taking into account the larger picture that we want to be very careful about.

And in that sense, it is very important as has been highlighted by Joana, that we view the Summit, we intend to hold in Brazil, as a follow‑up of the speech that was presented by President Dilma and of course we came to this setting, our Minister of Communication came here, and he was mandated by the President to further discussion and collect views, and I would say that without deviating from our main subject, that the Summit in Brazil today will also incorporate other dimensions of discussion, not only focusing on principles and norms, but this is indeed one of the very clear parameters for us for the meeting that will enable to engage in other aspects of the discussion as a result of the consultations we have held here.

But the clear focus on the necessity as international community working in a multistakeholder environment to develop principles and norms is clearly one of the main objectives we have in mind.

And if I can just clarify one point that has been the object of some misunderstanding in the course of this meeting, when President Dilma delivered her speech at the UN, she referred to a multilateral framework, civil framework, with the support, full support and full involvement of Civil Society, private sector and other stakeholders, and later on when we came to this meeting, our Minister was in contact with her, and as a result of the information he provided, she made clear that she meant what she really meant was referring to multistakeholder, not only multilateral.

And I was just reviewing the news from Brazil, and I saw that yesterday, President Dilma referred again to this, and again she used the word "multilateral," so I know this in the heads of Many people will maybe lead to a confusing reflection on the situation, and say: Well, Brazil is a swing state. Doesn't know if it wants to be multilateral, multistakeholder, or what is the situation.

What I would say, that even, first of all, President Dilma, she has interpreted what she has said, and we maintain there's no contradiction what she said in those circumstances. From the point of your Government, and this is a very important thing that has been discussed here in some panels, that we should be very careful about the concept, the language we use.

Sometimes from the point of view of Government, when the word "multilateral" is used, what is meant primarily is that this is, we use in opposition to unilateral, more than meaning it's something to be done on a purely intergovernmental setting. I think this was the meaning she wanted to convey when she delivered the speech at the UN, that we want a framework that would be indeed done by many parties, not only reflecting the view of one single party or a restricted group of parties.

And she explained that this certainly does not convey the idea of excluding any stakeholder, so I would just maybe, and I apologize for taking so much time, but to clarify that we need maybe not to pay too much attention to particular statement on a particular setting, responding to a journalist that made some question, but having into account the larger picture, and the larger picture, the President interpreted as meaning "multistakeholder."

And when she mentioned the civil framework as a reference for her speech at the United Nations, she used the word, as Joana has spelled out, this was developed in a multistakeholder setting. The principles developed by the Commission are a multistakeholder way are clearly inspired President Dilma's speech, so when she was referring that we need international level such an instrument, clearly there is a linkage to the multistakeholder dimension, even if there is not the word there.

So I just want to caution that sometimes from the part of Government, at that level of leaders maybe we should not be too much vigilant about any particular word, but see the larger picture and what is the real intent.

So I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank all stakeholders we have been meeting in the course of this IGF on the part of Government, Civil Society, private sector. We have seen an overwhelming support for the idea to develop, to go in the direction that was indicated by ‑‑ proposed by President Dilma, but also building on contributions that will add to the process, and it was very stimulating for us to see that there is a willingness to mobilize different stakeholders, to come forward with proposals, to be involved in the preparation for this meeting that we intend to be truly multistakeholder from its outset from the agenda setting, from the kind of outcomes. And we see it as a contribution to the processes that are existing processes.

We wanted to be respectful of the existing process and not compete or overlap or supersede any of the existing processes that exist. And maybe a final word, that is Brazil is a very firm defendant of Human Rights. We have been as was spelled out at the core group that drafted these landmark Human Rights Council Resolution, that gave this very clear message that Human Rights offline should be also respected online.

We are ready to uphold Human Rights in many settings, and in settings that would be global, that would be constructive, that would lead to stimulate countries and provide for positive incentives for Human Rights to be upheld on a worldwide basis. Thank you. Thank you very much.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thank you very much, Ambassador Fonseca. I'll go directly now to Bertrand.

We have remote interventions.

>> Yes, there are ‑‑

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Hold on a second Bertrand. We're going to start with remote questions. Go ahead.

>> SUBI CHATURVEDI: Thank you, Anne. There are two questions from Peter Hellman, and we have interaction as well, so that's a wonderful thing. Peter has a question for the U.S. representative, and he wants to know: Does defending U.S. foreign policy interests include surveillance of the phones of heads of Governments, of countries that are friends of the USA?

And there is a question for the representative from Google: There have been reports that U.S. cloud business can expect loss of business from non‑U.S. customers in the coming 3 years to the tune of about 30 billion U.S. dollars and that the overall negative impact for the IT industry over the next three years could be up to 180 billion U.S. dollars because of a loss of trust. What do you intend to do to restore that trust so that people feel that they can trust cloud providers to keep their data private and secure?

The Tweet also relates to the same theme of proportionate and necessary steps that governments can take on the theme of surveillance vis‑a‑vis security.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thanks so much, Subi. So now we'll go to Bertrand while our panelists can reflect on what they want to say later. Thank you.

>> BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you, Anne‑Rachel. Again I'm Bertrand de la Chapelle, the Director of the Internet and Jurisdiction Project. And following the discussion before, I wanted to highlight that this debate on surveillance actually can be placed in a larger framework of issues and I'd like to tackle quickly three. The first word is "sovereignty."

What we're talking about here among others things is the exercise of sovereignty in the digital age. The traditional exercise of sovereignty is on the National territory. And the advent of the Internet is introducing an incredible new capacity for National decisions for better or worse to have a transboundary impact on other ‑‑ on citizens of other countries. The fact that operators are based in one country allows by definition in any country the authorities of that country to exercise sovereignty on those operators and impact decisions that have consequences for actors on another territory.

This is a potential extraterritorial extension of sovereignty, and it reduces and balances among the different countries depending on the number of actors located on their soil.

But the reverse is true, as well. Following what has been named the recent events and the revelation of the Snowden affair, a large number of actors and countries in particular have taken positions in reaction in order to defend their sovereignty and have pushed forward for instance the notion of data sovereignty, requiring or intending to require the location of the data regarding their citizens on the territory.

This is a reintroduction potentially of physical frontiers in a certain way, in a technical infrastructure that was intended from the onset as a cross‑border architecture, not necessarily a completely borderless but a cross‑border architecture.

This is a challenge because the traditional notion of the international system is based on the separation of sovereignties and most international organisations are based on the principle of non‑interference in the affairs of some other country. The current situation is challenging this, and is putting in front of Governments an incredible challenge, which is: How do you cooperate to manage shared online spaces? That's the first point. This is a new type of challenge.

The second word that I would like to highlight, and this goes to what Joana was mentioning, is the notion of due process, of fair process, or any kind of element that ensures that the procedures for issues related to surveillance but also to law enforcement related to freedom of expression, privacy and so on, any kind of process that deals with Human Rights and the rights of citizens and Internet users have to be done according to a set of rules that are fair and en sure due process.

This is particularly difficult when you deal with transborder relations. When something is done in one country across the Internet and you have to obtain data, take down content, have to ask for the removal of a website. There is currently a lack of procedures to handle this and fair process mechanisms to handle the relationship between states, platforms, end users in a fair process manner across borders. And this question is reflection also of what happens here in this debate on surveillance because what we've been talking about is the implementation fair process, oversight, and that's the main issue. Because principles in themselves are not sufficient to ensure the protection of Human Rights. They are necessary but not sufficient.

If the procedures are not appropriate, if the National frameworks are not sufficiently protective, it is not enough. And even when the framework is present, the actual implementation of the framework may be faulty sometimes. And oversight is an important element.

Finally, the third word that I would like to use is the law of unintended consequences. The trend that we're seeing today, in reaction to the recent events and the debate on surveillance, is a very troublesome one for everybody. The notion that in reaction and by legitimate concern regarding the protection of their citizens, Governments are thinking about establishing rules regarding so‑called data sovereignty is something that we should explore with extreme caution. There are extreme technical challenges to do this, and there is a great likelihood that if you want to sort in the databases of large global corporations which users are from one given country or located in one given country, you might end up having to do a larger breach of privacy than the protection you want to establish, or the things you want to correct.

And the second element, and this was very present in a meeting that we organised in Delhi in the Internet jurisdiction project where the industry in India, not the foreign companies, the industry in India, was explicitly saying to the government, be careful what you wish for., because if the principle of data sovereignty is pushed too far you're harming the potential of the local industry to be an actor, a major actor, in the global cloud business.

So without elaborating, the challenge is we are in a situation where because there is no sufficient international frameworks for discussion, among the different stakeholders on those issues of sovereignty in the digital age, and due process, we run the risk of having a large number of uncoordinated actions by different Governments and different private actors that will look perfectly natural as a first step, but what was a communative effect will be harmful to everyone, which leads me to this my conclusion which is this meeting of the IGF has proved beyond doubt the benefit of addressing those issues in a multistakeholder format.

The fact that the whole environment has triggered an event that is likely to take place in Brazil is providing an opportunity to address some of those issues, and to probably hold a little on some of the National decisions that are under discussions until there is a certainty that the communative effect is not harmful. The Brazil meeting will be important. There are other processes. The meeting of the Freedom Online Coalition has been mentioned. There's been a great effort and I'm sure somebody in the audience will refer to on a set of principles called necessary and proportionate. There are not enough but that will certainly be part of the discussion.

And I want to highlight a final element regarding the Council of Europe recommendation two years ago that established the principle of no transboundary harm, i.e., the responsibility of States from the decisions at the National level that may have an impact across borders.

So those elements are aspects that require a lot of caution in the individual actions that the different Governments are contemplating to make sure that they're collectively for the benefit of an open and unified Internet.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you, Bertrand. Before we continue with the other commentators and remote participants I'd like to invite Jari who has to leave in about 10 minutes to reflect on the discussion so far especially from the point of view of the infrastructure and basic functionality of the Internet. Please, Jari.

>> JARI ARKKO: Thank you. Apologies for being forced to leave. I had another commitment in another room in a moment. And of course, much of the discussion has been at the different level not so much about the infrastructure perhaps or the technical things. I wanted to highlight a couple of things I've heard in the discussion so far. I really wholeheartedly agree with Ross about a fact based approach to this. This is really crucial.

The other thing that is important that was highlighted by many people, or almost everyone, is transparency, and the rule of law. Those are very good things, and worthwhile to work towards.

And then I kind of wanted to return also to the important principle question, and many of you had these points, as well, to look after Human Rights, multistakeholder model, decentralized nature of the Internet, in particular the multistakeholder model is really key for us to have an open, well‑functioning Internet that balances the different concerns, and I with pleasure noted the comments from Ambassador Fonseca Filho and others on how important the multistakeholder model is and there's consensus at least here on multistakeholder being the way forward. And I think it was Johann who commented also that the Internet needs to stay global. That really is true.

Sort of the only thing that I gathered from all of the discussions so far that kind of relates to infrastructure or technical things was this possible demand for keeping data local and I just wanted to raise an issue from the technical community perspective that sometimes we may have conflicting desires or requirements, and we need to be careful what we wish for.

I think a blanket requirement for data to be local within a country would probably harm innovation in the Internet. Because if I'm a small enterprise that comes up with a great idea, and I will invite users from all over the world, I don't necessarily immediately have an ability to build out facilities all over the place. I need to be able to innovate without too much burden.

And this is just one example of the kinds of things that we may run into, but we need to be careful about setting too many demands on how the network actually runs. The management and buildout needs to be possible still, and cheap. That's a key, and the innovation needs to continue.

So those were the short remarks that I have at the moment.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you, Jari. You gave us quite comprehensive overview of the infrastructure and technical aspects of the Internet, and a few warnings that we don't go too far with some prescriptions but more guiding principles, and nudging towards useful solution and leave everything as to develop more spontaneously.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thanks, Jovan, and thanks very much Jari for joining us so far. I know that Joana had another commitment. You're still okay? Great. Fantastic.

So I'm first going to go to the remote participation people, and then I will come back to Nick Ashton‑Hart.

>> SUBI CHATURVEDI: Thank you, Anne. There's a question from Monika Arnett, who is a freelance reporter and a journalist from Germany. And her question is to U.S. and Sweden representatives. She wishes to know: do the more mighty technical tools oblige us to fundamentally reconsider intelligence legislation? Because we otherwise face a state within the State which blinds public trust, oversight, erodes democratic control, and starts to possibly blackmail those elected to govern. Thank you.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thanks, Subi. So up to Nick now. Thank you.

>> NICK ASHTON-HART: Thank you very much. The Computer and Communications Industry Association is made up of many of the Internet's more successful business to consumer companies, so of course we have a strong interest in this, though I would say that our comments stand on their own and our members including Google, who are here, have made their own statements, and you shouldn't conflate the two.

I think fundamentally we're facing a problem that is not technical or an Internet problem even though the Internet has made ‑‑ the tools of the Internet has made it possible and many aspects cannot be solved by legislating, especially at the National level, about the Internet, such as Johann put on hosting. We have a paradigm where we're common digital citizens but also common digital foreigners, by which I mean that in the analog past, our nationally protected rights of privacy were protected because each country could only post, frankly, so many cultural attaches in their foreign embassies before countries would say: No, that's too many spies. You have to get out.

So you could only spy in the analog world frankly on a fairly limited number of non‑nationals. Unfortunately now that situation is inverted and it is now ‑‑ the lack of any legal prohibition on countries spying on other countries' nationals means that we're all in some way fair game for an almost unlimited amount of surveillance by countries, except the one we live in.

And so in previous debates about ACTA in Europe, SOPA, PIPA in the United States, we saw a strong reaction against using the Internet in a way that was harmful to the Internet itself, to solve a specific issue for the benefit for stakeholder or stakeholders, and in a way we can argue we have the same dynamic here where technology is being employed by security services to facilitate information gathering with few limits, especially on non‑nationals, thanks to technology, yet at the same time, the Internet relays on trust. Without trust, people simply will use services less. They will say less. They will fear more.

And right now, we have a debate that is largely focused I think on negative incentives, characterized by a lack of trust, an increase of suspicion, and a fairly continuous stream of revelations which I think we all realize will continue for quite some time. It's understandable that this would generate a lot of unhappiness.

But I think it also obscures a few fundamental things that we share in common, which is that we all would want to trust the online world more rather than less for social and for commercial purposes, that the further development and spread of the Internet, for those who have yet to go online, which is more than half the human family, is a shared goal, so efforts which make that more expensive or more difficult are not welcome.

That legitimate law enforcement efforts as relates to crime of whatever nature, that societies decide need to be interdicted, is a reasonable activity. That fundamental transparency in Government operations is important even if there is a tension about the relative level of transparency in some respects of Government activity.

We want our National Constitutional protections of rights to privacy and the like to have real meaning, online and offline. We want to enjoy the internationally protected Human Rights that are pretty universally accepted, even if they're not always universally observed as we would like.

These are profound common shared needs, and perhaps we can find a way to use them as a basis for a constructive conversation about the role of security services and law enforcement online as it relates in particular to the everyday lives of individuals especially those who are not employed by the Government or in Government service.

The debate we have right now, I don't think leads to a positive end for the Internet community, and especially for the Internet. But as a community, we have the knowledge and the incentive to work to change that debate. I hope that can be another shared interest that we can build on, recognizing of course that criticism of Government behavior is a fundamental right of all, and there must be room for such criticism.

But to return to my original point governments have a responsibility not to allow surveillance of their nationals to get out of control and ironically in a digital age, for those National protections to mean anything, that responsibility really cannot end at your National border because if it does, the result counter‑intuitively is that if everyone but you is spying on your nationals, how can you say that your National Constitutional protections have meaning name? They have even less meaning because you have no idea who knows what and is doing what in relation to you. In that vein I think the explanations we've heard from Ambassador Fonseca of the Brazilian initiative are welcome.

A conversation about what we share, the beliefs we share, is not something we should fear. It's I think essential if we're to meet this conundrum of an analog past meeting a digital future in terms of surveillance.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you very much for your excellent intervention. We'll try to tap this enormous expertise in the room, experience, expertise and knowledge and we will like to ask you for your comments and questions. I think there is one person in the room who comes from the organisation that can help us to address these balancing acts in the surveillance issues. We already heard about Human Rights aspect, security aspect, and Data Protection. And Council of Europe is organisation which has under its one roof three conventions and three institutional mechanisms for covering cybersecurity, Data Protection, Human Rights. I don't know if somebody from Council of Europe, Jan Malinowski, is here. Could you give us a quick remark, a few points, how to address this balancing act between different aspects? It has been underlying theme throughout the discussion, please.

>> JAN MALINOWSKI: The Council of Europe approach I think mirrors in many respects the different dimensions that have been mentioned here already, and I wouldn't go into that. I think that in substantive terms, what Johann Hallenborg has said is valid and it does exemplify the different responses of the Council of Europe.

But the Council of Europe approach I think can be described as multistakeholder. One has to listen in order to deliver good governance, one has to listen to the different voices and leave whoever is responsible for something to take the decisions, but taking into account everything that others have to say.

The Council of Europe response is multidisciplinary. There are different issues that need to be expressed in one topic and we see there are issues relating to National Security, to privacy, to freedom of expression, to crime, to rule of law. All of them need to be taken into account, and that requires a broad vision.

There are in the Council of Europe multiple responses. There are in addition to dialogue, there are responses that go through the intergovernmental negotiation line, with soft law, with recommendations, Bertrand de la Chapelle mentioned some of them. There are a host of others that would apply to this and there is hard law. There is international Treaty law as well. We have the cybercrime Convention that's been mentioned. We have the Data Protection Convention and above all we have the European Convention on Human Rights that encompasses all of it. It goes all the range from freedom of expression to others.

And we have multiple accountability responses, as well. We have political accountability. We have legal accountability in the court. We have discussions in the specialized Committees, in the Data Protection Committee, in the cybercrime Committee and so on.

In connection with the Snowden case in particular, the Council of Europe does not have a response or has not given or attempted to give a response at this stage but there are two things that I would like to draw your attention to in that respect.

Already from the '70s, the European Court of Human Rights has made it clear that a system of mass surveillance can undermine or destroy democracy under the cloak of protecting it. I think that's a very important statement. As I said, it relates to cases well before Snowden, well before the Internet.

And the other aspect which is very relevant to the Snowden affair is that the Council of Europe cares about whistleblowers. Whistleblowers who disclose information in the public interest should be protected, and I think that the discussions that we are having demonstrate that Snowden has made revelations and disclosures that are in the public interest. Thank you very much.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you for addressing this main dilemma if you have in the same room people from cyber security, data collection community and Human Rights community, what is the way to address the question of intersurveillance? And we will be facing it more and more, that interprofessional dialogue.

I saw some hands over there. Khaled, please. And over there, yes.

>> KHALED FATTAL: Thank you, Jovan. Can everybody hear me? Yes? Okay, thank you. My name is Khaled Fattal, Chairman of the Multilingual Internet Group. The issue that I see in front of us here is not about alleged or not alleged. It's really goes to the core and to the values of what multistakeholderism stands for.

Many who attend ICANN would remember that I took the lead on making this a topic that needs to be addressed by ICANN, by the international community during the ICANN Durban. Raising the issue that unless we deal squarely with the issue of surveillance, we are not giving the true value of how damaging it is to multistakeholderism.

This is like a cancer scare to the trust of the multistakeholderism we all believe in. We believe many of us believe in multistakeholderism from an altruistic point of view, and we believe in privacy, freedom online. I'm a Syrian American, and nobody needs to lecture me on the importance of democracy and privacy and freedom of expression. But when the values are being challenged of what this stands for, I think it's time to come to terms with greater acknowledgment of what damage has been done, and how to fix it is required.

In emerging markets, we're embarking on major events in emerging markets. This is the subject matter that people want to talk about at many levels of society. And unless we deal with it very, very squarely, very ‑‑ at a high priority level, we will not be able to diffuse the situation, because so far all I see is an attempt to diffuse, that people get it off their chest. The values of what we stand for is really what's at stake.

I'll just close with this one remark: The war against terror was angled at our values versus theirs. The war against terrorism is our values versus theirs.

What does it say that in pushing towards a free and open Internet, we discover we are spying on the rest of the world? It's again going back to the values. Please take note, a cancer scare does not get treated with an aspirin. It needs an acknowledgment of what had happened, and a desire and a genuine desire and process put in place to show this is being addressed and fixed, rather than just being an attempt to diffuse.

This is my recommendation, because all of us who believe in this do not want to see this multistakeholderism damaged. I will close with that remark. Thank you.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you, Khaled, contributing to the fifth basket on ethics and trust, importance of trust and values in addressing internet surveillance and we will try to organise our discussion along these main five lines. Please could you introduce yourself, Sir?

>> REN YISHENG: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I believe we have ‑‑

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Could you introduce yourself?

>> REN YISHENG: Yes, okay. My name is Ren Yisheng. I'm from the Foreign Ministry of China. I was going to introduce myself in my mother tongue Chinese because I believe we have interpretation in the room so please put on your earphones.

Let me start by making my intervention in English while you are getting your earphones. I have a couple of points to make. Number one, we all have consensus on the common values of the universality or universal value of Human Rights. On the other hand, that we would also like to stress that Human Rights concept is an integral concept, it's a whole concept that we should not neglect the other parts or elements of Human Rights, which is to say that we have two sets of rights, civil political rights, economic, social and cultural rights, and in fact the right to development.

On the other hand, also there is a check and balance of rights. We have rights. On the other hand, we have our obligations, responsibilities. Our obligation, our responsibilities to the society, to respect the rights of others. This is the first point I want to make.

The second point is on Internet. I think that we have so many elements, so many factors that we need to look at. There is at least in my view that we have many elements that we need to look at. For example, the right to access. I think this is a very important issue for many countries, the developing countries in particular.

I'm glad that you're getting your earphones so that I can switch back to my mother tongue language, Chinese.

Since all of you have earphones right now, I'm going to switch back to my mother tongue. Over the past two days, few days, IGF discussed many important issues in relation to Internet development including the stability of Internet, the resource allocation issues of the Internet, and the Internet crime issues, spam e‑mails, as well as how to enhance the trust of the public to Internet.

Meanwhile today, the issues we're discussing and issues we discuss over the past few days is that some individual country carrying out largescale surveillance over other countries, like other Delegations of other countries, we are very surprised, very much concerned over this issue. We believe massive surveillance no matter over the individual citizens or other politicians of other countries is a infringement of sovereignty, National interest, and privacies of other countries, and also it poses as a threat to the safe operation, secure operation, of Internet operation.

Meanwhile, this conduct seriously damaged the public trust of Internet. Last but not least, I'd like to say to discuss the principle of Internet Governance, several points are extremely important, such as transparency, inclusiveness, participatory principles, and cooperation. And so on and so forth. Therefore, we're very much in favor of the points made by the Brazilian Ambassador, the governance of Internet is something that we have to work very hard on the basis of multistakeholder, no matter be it the Government or Internet companies, academic circle, Civil Society, no part should be excluded from this process.

We believe all people should participate. If you exclude any stakeholder in the course of Internet Governance, it's not good. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you for your patience with our technical facilities and readiness to address us in English, and I think you reiterated quite a few important principles for our discussion, and elements of trust, Human Rights, in comprehensive way, question of sovereignty and I think we have quite a few interesting points. We have intervention here.

>> SUBI CHATURVEDI: Thank you. Am I on? Hi. Is the mic working? Okay. My name is Subi Chaturvedi, and I teach communication and new media technology at a University in India. It's a women's college, and we run a Foundation called media for change. The issues that we primarily look at is how the Internet and new media technologies can empower developing countries. I thank Raul once again for organising this session because we're looking at some of the most important questions that go to the heart of the matter. At the core of the Internet is trust.

The fact that we can trust this wonderful empowering technology which data which is immensely and increasingly private, personal and confidential. I do want to raise a couple of points here. When we start talking about situations such as these, I'm reminded of a story and we all grew up reading Sherlock Holmes and one of the stories was about why the dog didn't bark.

And this was about how we've decided to keep quiet at moments such as these, and when we are faced with uncomfortable situations, we decide to take positions. This is an important moment, and I can't agree more with what Khaled had to say. This is about trust but this is also about working in a space which is collaborative and I do not believe that cybersecurity and concerns around sovereignty can exist in isolation without the consideration for individual rights of States and citizens.

And I do want to reiterate that this journey from being the slave to the citizen has been a long one, and when we come to this point, of data collection by Governments for what purpose, by whom, and for how long, and where is it going to be kept? When we create honey pots such as these, these are questions that we worry about, not just from the Human Rights perspective. And I come from India. We have laws to protect children and women, and vulnerable communities in particular and we have just had two 18‑year‑old girls go to jail for updating a status, because they decided to voice their dissent.

And this is all for our own good, which is what I hear increasingly more often from Governments across the world, but I do want to say that two wrongs don't make a right, but what we have with us is a wonderful process which is bottoms‑up, inclusive and multistakeholder. Yes, there might be problems in the current system but that does not mean that we privilege one stakeholder which is largely the Government and most of us do not know then when these conversations take place, whether our voices would be heard.

Democracy is a wonderful thing and a participatory democracy is an even better one but it's not the same as multistakeholderism. I think we've got a solution. We have a platform. Let's acknowledge this, let's take it from here, and let's keep working with this platform. But let us work to reinforce the system that we have in multistakeholderism.

I think that is the only way forward. Thank you, Chair. Thank you for giving me this opportunity.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you for bringing Sherlock Holmes into our discussion, as well.

>> May I? My very brief question is for Mr. Scott Busby. I was really pleased to hear a changed statement or a changed tone from the U.S. Government, and I would hope and I believe that it is a reflection of the changed mindset within the U.S. Government towards surveillance, and Human Rights and privacy.

And if that's indeed the case, I would like to ask you that at the center of this whole ‑‑ at the center of these developments is a man called Snowden, whom Mr. Obama has referred to as a traitor. Is that still the position? Or has that position changed? Is this changed tone from the U.S. reflective also of the position on Snowden?

Because it's an important Human Rights issue. Snowden as a cause and Snowden as an individual, I'm talking about Snowden as an individual, what does the U.S. Government want to do with him? That's my very brief question and I would like that answer. Thank you.

>> JIMMY SCHULZ: May I? Okay. My name is Jimmy Schulz and I was a member of the German Parliament until Tuesday and the Committee for Internal Affairs and Home. And I've been taking care of the issue since it occurred.

It was said the whole thing of surveillance is not new. It was said that others do that, too. That's true. That doesn't make it better, and that's no excuse.

A question to Google: You said you don't give direct access, which sounds a little bit like Keith Alexander said in last year's Defcon, we don't spy on every American. That doesn't mean we don't give direct access. Is there any indirect access?

Because you've talked about legal interception, are you forced by any law not to tell us everything? That's a question to Google.

To the U.S. Representative: Keith Alexander said earlier this year those who encrypt are treated as potential terrorists, wherefore I am a potential terrorist. Do you think I am a potential terrorist?

And you also said some countries are taking advantage of the situation. Does this apply to Germany? Because I think the whole thing is an earthquake in our relationship. Friends don't do that.

And you said you're taking recommendations. I give you something that is not a recommendation: Stop surveillance now. But to be more coming to the point, I think we have to take three steps. First of all, I expect and I think we need complete transparency, complete transparency which means you have to tell us everything, and everyone has to be open on that issue.

Second, what we need are international contracts that friends don't spy on friends. And, third ‑‑ and this is a thing we really should do ‑‑ is encrypt all our communication so surveillance won't work. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> Thank you very much. Yes?

>> EVERTON LUCERO: Hello. So I'm with the Brazilian Government. I think we are dealing with a situation now that requires clarity in terms of what we need to address in the future, so as we avoid that it will ever happen again.

I mean, the unprecedented mass surveillance and un authorized monitoring of communications of millions of citizens worldwide by one intelligence Agency of one single country has naturally revealed something. First, I agree that it reveals we do not have a technological gap to fill in. This is an ethical and a political question. We have an institutional gap clearly. Because the only way that we will avoid there to happen again is if we agree in a set of principles and norms, and an institutional framework that would on the one hand recognize legitimate multistakeholder processes, and on the other hand, create an ethical ground for every actor to behave in the future in a way that will not damage Human Rights and privacy of any citizen in the world based on any grounds.

In particular, when it comes to National Security, I believe this argument does not stand for it any longer since you may hardly conceive a situation in which normal Brazilian citizens or companies or authorities are violated in their privacy. Is that done in the name of National Security? And how come? Does that mean that there is a suspicion that millions of Brazilian citizens and Brazilian companies and authorities are somehow involved with terrorism or any other activity that may be harmful to National Security of other countries?

As a Brazilian citizen and as a Brazilian public servant, to me, these are questions that are still to be answered. And the only thing we can proceed with this in order to create a new vision is to get together all the stakeholders and think deeply about how to make sure that we will agree on a minimum core set of rules and principles that will become the norm, and that will be observed from now on, so that this situation will not repeat itself. Thank you.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thank you very much, Mr. Lucero. I'm going to ask for you forgiveness for a few minutes. Given what Everton said I would like to call on our commenter, Megi. Megi is a special consultant with the right of Internet users so we'd like to hear from him now. Thank you.

>> MEGI MARGIYONO: Thank you, moderators and Chairman. As I am an Information Technology lawyer, so my comments will be on the legal aspects. I think our discussions should move forward, not just track a debate whether the surveillance are accepted or not accepted, but on how to make Internet still free and open despite surveillance activities. One of the issues is striking the balance of rights, the rights of security and the rights of privacy and freedom of expressions.

However, to make globally accepted set of standards, principles, and rule to striking the balance of those rights seems difficult, because despite Human Rights is accepted as universal rights, but the applications of Human Rights differs from places to places.

Also on the threat of security issues also different from countries to countries. Freedom of expression in the U.S. is regarded as quote, unquote, the most important right, because protected under First Amendment, but privacy in the U.S. is not clearly whether it's protected under U.S. Constitution. At least it's not written on the U.S. Constitution, despite there are some interpretations that privacy is Constitutional right in the U.S.

On the contrary, in European countries, privacy is most important and there are some sets of limitations of the applications of freedom of expression. We know there are margins of appreciations that apply and applications of the freedom of expressions in European countries.

In Asia, privacy and freedom of expression seems not a strong right, and not strongly protected. Government of Asia like Indonesia pay more attention on security than freedom of expression, also privacy. Some say that privacy don't have cultural rules in Asia like Indonesia.

So regarding to the matter of facts, it seems difficult to set up a globally accepted rule to striking the balance of these rights.

Sorry. However, democratic on the surveillance activity is very important. Maybe the surveillance activity have to be commissioned by Parliament to make sure the surveillance technology is not abused by Government. It's important because technology of surveillance has been proved to be abused by some Governments of Emirates Arab Union and Bahrain. According to a report, surveillance technology provided by United Kingdom company named Gamma Group International is misused to monitor journalists, bloggers and activists in those countries. That is also a report that militia use surveillance technology to monitor the activities of opposition parties prior to the general election last year.

And Indonesia just signed a contract with Gamma Group International on September this year and we should make sure that Indonesian Government don't use this surveillance technology to monitor the opposition activities on the election next year.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you. For our next speakers while they're queuing, a few ideas I can think of. One is this question of balancing act ‑‑ and we just heard that balancing act is not the same in Europe, Asia, United States and other places ‑‑ between security and privacy. Second point, we have the rules on privacy protection and international Government on civil and political rules, and as I've already indicated, there is a question how to apply it, what are the mechanisms.

>> One more point, please.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: How we can make the next ‑‑ while you're waiting in the queues think about these two issues: Balancing act in different regions and how we can move from applying the general rules to the problem that exists. Thank you.

>> RAUL ECHEBERRIA: My name is Raul Echeberria. I'm the CEO of LACNIC. I think that some consensus seems to be emerging from the discussion. One thing is that it seems that all of us agree that massive surveillance is something bad. It is something that should not be done, no matter who does it and no matter what are the motivations for doing it. There is also a kind of consensus that some kind of investigations should be permitted using technology but that this kind of use of technology should be done based on the respect of Human Rights given the due process warranted to everybody.

And I have heard many people speaking, using almost the same words about principles, and that any use of technologies for this kind of purpose should be done in the framework of certain principles so here is my question for all of the panelists, because it seems that the speech of the representative of the Swedish Government was very interesting, and it seems to me that they are applying this concept. So my question for all the panelists is: Could be what the Swedish Government is doing a basis for continuing to develop this concept and trying to get a solution in the future? I'm not expecting to have a full agreement today about the principles.

But probably we can get a kind of common view in this session about that this is the path forward. Thank you.

>> MATTHEW SHEARS: Thank you. My name is Matthew Shears with the Center for Technology and Democracy. A couple of comments on what we've heard so far. Let's not trivialize this discussion. I've heard others are worse, NSA envy, alleged hypocrisy. When we use the sentence "others are worse," that's no justification for our own mass surveillance. When we say NSA envy, that's pretty serious stuff, because there are countries out there who are exactly saying that, this is not a joke.

And it is hypocrisy. It's not alleged so let's be clear on this.

Second, thank you to the representative from the Government of Sweden for saying there is no balancing act. We've waited a long time for someone to say, there is no balancing act. Respecting Human Rights increases security, diminishing Human Rights diminishes security.

Three, Frank La Rue, to paraphrase him ‑‑ I'm sure very poorly ‑‑ says that mass surveillance not only makes a mockery of Human Rights, but threatens the very foundations of our societies and the rule of law. Let's remember that. It's very important.

And finally, I don't know about everybody else here, but I have not lost my trust in the Internet. Let's stop saying that. I've lost my trust in the institutions that use the Internet for the purposes of undermining my fundamental rights. Thank you.

[ Applause ]

>> PINDAR WONG: Good morning. I am Pindar Wong from Hong Kong. Hong Kong has been where Snowden chose to make his revelations. My question really was a question is about forgiveness. Partly because as a long time Internet participant, I think what's been demonstrated is spying on an open network or surveillance on a network are low hanging fruit. We really shouldn't be surprised. What we are surprised on about is the scale. So I'll echo what Jimmy Schulz's intervention in terms of full disclosure.

Those of us who have kids know that kids make mistakes, and although the Internet is in its adolescence, looking forward clearly there's been a mistake that has been made. So a starting point really is that full disclosure. It may be naive to ask it. I'm not saying who discloses to whom, but it is a basis of recognizing that you've made a mistake, coming clean, and then going forward.

But what is that going forward? What is that vision? I don't agree with the previous intervention by the CTD guy. There is no balancing act. At least I have a very clear vision of the future that we wish to build, and I think I would suggest that whilst there's a temptation to fall within our National boundaries, to go back to what I would call a pre‑internet era, let's not forget the opportunity before us, the opportunity to really build trade.

And let us view things in positive terms. The next 1.5 billion people perhaps will be coming on the Internet through their mobile phones, making payment over that mobile network. So let's not also look at the issue of routing money over the Internet.

So trade, money, these are all very important issues and those issues if we have a vision of our future, I would hope we can find forgiveness because I'm not surprised of the surveillance, I'm surprised about the scale but let's find mechanisms to reestablish trust and let's look at how we can do so through the old '70s concept: Peace through trade. Thank you.

>> MARKUS KUMMER: Just a quick correction to the scribes. Please correct in the final version the name of the gentleman who just spoke as Pindar Wong. Thank you.

>> MIKE GURSTEIN: Mike Gurstein from the Community Informatics Network from Canada. It's a global network. About a month ago I wrote a blog post arguing or pointing out that the Internet was in fact a two‑way system, and that the National Security Agency while drawing information from the Internet, was also fully capable of putting information into the Internet, and having significant impacts in many of the places, if not most of the places, where it was drawing information from.

In the meantime, we've had confirmation of that, direct confirmation, one being the fact that Mr. Cheney's heart pacer was made hacker‑proof because of fears that using the Internet, it was possible to interfere with his pacemaker and assassinate him in that way. That came out recently.

The second was the use of the Internet and Internet surveillance as a direct input into the drone wars that's being conducted in various parts of the world as guidance systems and as direction systems for these drone wars.

I guess my observation, it's not really a question, is that I think we're dealing with something far more serious than simply surveillance. I think we're dealing with the potential for the active intervention in spurious and potentially dangerous ways into whatever elements of the Internet that we use for whatever purposes that we choose to in our daily lives, including our banking, our health records, our internal organisational communications, our financial communications, and so on and so forth, so that whatever response that's developed into the issues of surveillance also have to take into account the issues of aggressive and offensive actions by those who are in a position to undertake this kind of surveillance. Thank you.

>> And the speaker's name was Michael Gurstein. Thank you.

>> WOUT DE NATRIS: Good morning. I'm here on behalf of NLIGF and reporting back on discussions we had which were relevant. I think one of the main things that came up in the two panels that we did is that Internet is becoming more and more a part of our lives and isn't it time to start acting towards the Internet as if it is normal and not something which is far away from us and unseeable. So in other words if that is true, then what goes on in regular life also goes for Internet life so that would mean there's a triangle of economic development on the one side and the other side is security and the last part is freedom. So in other words, if you treat it like that, then economic development becomes possible, and the Internet becomes safer because there are so many best practices we heard of that it's about time that we stop talking and start to act upon those best practices.

And I won't recall which ones they are but they're in the transcripts. You heard some excellent ones.

And some things that really came forward is that would if Governments want the Internet to be safer, then start showing leadership through showing the best practice. So we did a head count saying who actually orders software off the shelf, or who says, I wanted to have this, this or these qualities before you can sell it to me? And only the commercial parties showed their hands saying, we're doing these sort of demands on software and all the Governments were looking, what are we talking about?

So in other words if you want leadership on security for the Internet, then start showing it yourself by demanding security before you buy something from the Internet.

And the last comment I would like to make is that we tried to envision how large this table should be if you want to have all parties discussing Internet Governance, and we probably have a table as long as this hall up and down and still not enough. And about 50% of the people know each other and still they're responsible for making the same products. So how do you get these sort of people at the table? Maybe never. But let's start with software developers, because they're hardly here in the IGF discussion, they're hardly ever there so Governments can show leadership in security by bringing the right people to the room in your country or regionally or internationally, and start discussing security with the right people, because that's the only way to make the Internet more secure.

And that was one of the comments made by the IETF, which I think made some excellent comments during this IGF, and I was happy to hear them.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: The last two presentations brought the broader context for this issue and importance of this issue of surveillance also for individuals, and the way they use the Internet. Now we have the next speaker.

>> JOHN LAPRISE: Good morning. My name is John Laprise. I'm a Professor at Northwestern University. As a scholar and historian, I'm surprised so many States are so surprised by the scope of the NSA surveillance, and I'd just like to offer to those States that perhaps you better take a better look at your intelligence‑gathering entities in your own countries, because they're either demonstrating incompetence in terms of not seeing the history of intelligence gathering or they know about it and are not saying anything, in which case they're guilty of collusion. Either way you have a few problems to remedy in your own countries for your own intelligence organisations. Thank you.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you. Nothing new under the sun.

>> NORBERT BOLLOW: Thank you. My name is Norbert Bollow, speaking in personal capacity right now as a human being who cares about my Human Rights. I start by echoing some remarks that have been made. We should not try to balance Human Rights and security. We need security that protects our Human Rights, our ability to fully experience our Human Rights.

We already have a good set of international Human Rights standards. What we need is the ability to effectively enforce them. This requires, as it has been said, full transparency. And I think it requires an international Treaty of sorts to deal with these widespread transborder Human Rights violations that we have experienced.

And perhaps most importantly, we need to get serious about looking at the technical side of metadata encryption. This is much more difficult technically than encrypting communications content. I am absolutely convinced it can be done, but it requires a fundamental rethinking of the architecture that we use for communicating via the Internet, so I propose the creation of a Dynamic Coalition of metadata privacy protection. Thank you.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you. We have the last two comments and then we'll pass the floor to the panelists, last three comments, I'm sorry.

>> MALCOLM HUTTY: My name is Malcolm Hutty. I work for the London Internet Exchange, and my comments are informed by this, but I'm speaking entirely on my own behalf. I think we've heard a great deal of "can't" about the surveillance issue. It is plainly and always has been the proper purpose of intelligence agencies to gather information about foreign countries, and their activities, insofar as they affect the essential National business and the proper business of security services to identify and do something about those that would cause us harm.

What has changed however is that it is now being said that these proper purposes can only be purr sized if the intelligence and security agencies essentially know everything about everyone. This has never been previous approach of anything except totalitarian societies. And if the Heads of Intelligence and security services cannot be persuaded their mission can be pursued in other fashion I hope that the political leaders will understand that the reaction that's being built around the world here shows that it's worth more than the beliefs of the appropriate way to pursue their mission on the part of those authorities. It is undermining our friends and allies.

Secondly and finally, the activity that work to undermine the protective security mechanisms, in particular undermining fundamental encryption standards, do not merely help the intelligence and security agencies identify those that would do us harm, but generally advance the interests of those who would penetrate information systems and undermine those who would protect them. Fundamentally this is a poor tradeoff for the National Security interests. I would urge you to consider the consequences to business, as well as to citizens, of making flaws generally available as they are becoming generally available to those that would penetrate information systems whether they be states or not state actors. This is an owned goal. Thank you for your attention.

>> PRANESH PRAKASH: My name is Pranesh Prakash. I work with the Center for The Internet Society in India and with the Yale Information Society project. While issues of Human Rights privacy and surveillance will be dealt with at the National level, and there are some indications that in some cases they are being dealt and reforms are ‑‑ will be attempted at least, we need to agree that privacy is a right that belongs not just to the citizens of one country or another, but no one country should be able to deny me the right of being human that privacy is indeed a human right and a country can't escape its international Human Rights obligations by saying that we are safeguarding the privacy of our own citizens and only our own citizens.

Second point I wanted to make is that mass surveillance at the level of Internet infrastructure and architecture as is being done by countries like our friends in the West and India, are contrary to the UDHR and ICCPR and its non‑targeted, non‑proportionate, non‑reasonable nature makes it an arbitrary or unlawful interference in the enjoyment of privacy, that this is contained in itself in International Human Rights Doctrine that mass surveillance of the sort that we are seeing today, especially at the level of the Internet infrastructure, just is not legal. Thank you very much.

>> FURIYANI AMALIA: Thank you very much. My name is Furiani Amalia. I'm from Indonesia. During the last few days we have heard and listened to many challenges that portrayed by multistakeholders in the Internet field. However, we also come up with the common views that trust and cooperation are important issues that we should address. We have a problem of trust there but we cannot stop just right there.

So we need to think what IGF as one of maybe the most Forum that involve many various multistakeholder worldwide. That we need to think what IGF could offer in the future, what IGF can do in the future in leading the role of setting out the principles or norms that are agreeable by all stakeholders, because in this multistakeholder Forum, it's not only to speak up what your interests are. It's not only a Forum to tell everybody else what your concerns are but we need to understand what other interests are so therefore IGF should be a bridge for all stakeholders to be a Forum where everybody can understand each others. Thank you.

>> ANDRES AZPURUA: My name is Andres. I come from Venezuela as part of ISOC Ambassadors Programme. My country is a relatively small country with Human Rights problems makes completely no sense in making the decision if you have Human Rights problems or challenges as they like to be said here.

It doesn't make any sense distinguishing if they're online or offline so I would like to put my perspective on many of the subjects we've been talking in this IGF from the perspective of small countries that are not frequently represented in this Forum or that their issues are not usually commented too much. It's a little sad when Governments defend their actions by saying that they only target foreigners as if they were not subject to Human Rights, and the international Declaration of Human Rights.

I'm also really sad to see that the U.S. who had a very strong agenda in pushing it throughout the world now lacks the moral authority to keep doing that. I think it's time for other countries to step up if they decide not to change their policies.

Mass surveillance and other advanced persistent threats that are more targeted are being used not only by big Governments, also by small ones. In the case of these Governments, usually the controls and oversights are even more weak than in the famous case we've all been discussing. So it would be of much help for countries like mine to actually know what's getting into our countries, because most of this technology doesn't come from our own industries or our own tech industries. It comes from developed nations or nations with stronger IT industries.

So more controls and transparency in those important experts would definitely help activists like myself.

So as I said I'm not a lawyer. I'm just an activist with a tech background. And for me, it's obviously clear that mass surveillance should be treated as a huge Human Rights transgression. So I hope that in the meantime, we learn to use encryption correctly to protect ourselves, our colleagues, and our work. I hope that for next IGF or next meetings of this kind we'll see a lot more PGP fingerprint keys on business cards so that we could start to share the knowledge on how to communicate effectively and securely. Thank you.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thanks very much. We're going to go to the online remote participation. Subi?

>> SUBI CHATURVEDI: Yes, we have a question, there's one from Twitter that talks about what Government can do another from the same team about ethics and trust, and this is a question to European Governments. Sweden, as a representative of Europe regarding the individual Snowden issue who has done a great service to the global public in making this information accessible, do European countries consider him to be a whistleblower who needs to be protected? Or is he to be considered a traitor who should not receive protection?

Would any European country, any member of the Council of Europe, now be willing to grant Snowden asylum?

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: That's very much. So I think we're going to wrap up a little bit Jovan and then we're going to give the floor to our panelists to respond to some of the questions that we've had. Jovan?

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: There were ‑‑ I think there was quite high level of consensus of both problems and main issues and controversies, and here are a few points.

There is agreement about the severity of the problems. I think it was equaled in all intervention comments. And also highlighted that there is a question of trust, fundamental trust, as underlying element for the success in the future development of the Internet.

Second point, I think we agreed that there are existing rules in international law that cover this issue, and there is Article 17 of the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights saying clearly that no one should be suggested to arbitrarily or unlawful interference with his privacy and so on. The international law exists. As we know, international law is sometimes not easily applicable and then we come to the next point which was raised in many comments from Bertrand, how to apply international law. What are the procedures? And here the key words were: Checks and balances, introduce checks and balances, careful transparency, use due process, observe the rule of the law, and have institutional division as Johann from Sweden mentioned between different players in this field.

That will be the main challenge, and one can argue that maybe some new reporting mechanism of existing conventions should be introduced, or it should be introduced in universal periodical review in the work of the UN Council of Human Rights. We're speaking about the way how to implement existing rules.

There was a bit of ‑‑ there are quite a few different views about possibility of having win‑win solution or balancing act. We should act and we should aim for win‑win solution by achieving Human Rights protection through more security. But we should be equally ready to have some balancing acts, because it is reality of political life.

What are the next steps? First, we are waiting for the results of the review process in the United States. In the meantime, there are quite a few international initiatives in the UN Human Rights Council, and it will be moving on especially on the issues on protection of privacy and Data Protection.

And we should start exploring some National models like Swedish model for tackling these issues and these delicate balances between security, Human Rights and Data Protection and it was clear from all interventions the topic is extremely important and the IGF should find ways and means to continue discussion including proposal to create Dynamic Coalition dealing with these issues.

I hope it reflected in a few Tweets what was ‑‑ were underlying messages. Please.

>> I think there is one important issue that I should address, it's the liability and responsibility of technology providers. Technology providers should ensure that technology, they provide not be misused by Government so there should be any legal remedy if the technology used to suppress or to monitor the activity of activists or journalists. So there is the contract between the technology providers and Government should be cover an Article saying that the Government only use this technology for legitimate purposes, not misuse et cetera.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: We'll start now with our panelists answering the questions and commenting on overall discussion and also this underlying elements for possible summary of our discussion.

I think we had the most questions addressed to Scott. Scott, could you start, please?

>> SCOTT BUSBY: Thank you, Jovan.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: It's not surprising.

>> SCOTT BUSBY: I'm not sure I'll be able to answer them all, but I'll do my best. First of all I want to thank my Fellow panelists, commentators as well as the audience for all of your many thoughtful comments and questions. The United States Government is here in force. There are over 10 of us here. On the heels of a Government shutdown, mind you, which there was travel restrictions on virtually every U.S. Government Agency, and I hope that demonstrates to all of you not only the seriousness with which we take the IGF, but the seriousness with which we take this issue.

We intend to take back your comments, your questions, to report back to our senior leadership on what we've heard here, with the goal of ensuring that those views are taken account of in the deliberations that are now taking place in the United States.

Second of all, to Khaled who first made this point but the woman from India, as well, about the seriousness or potential lack of seriousness with which we take this issue, I don't think that President Obama and the rest of the U.S. Government is not taking this issue seriously, is trying to deflect. The President has taken extraordinary action in setting up this review Board of independent experts to give him their best advice on how the U.S. should move ahead on this issue.

As I just mentioned, the U.S. Government has come here in force knowing this issue was going to be at the heart of the discussions at this IGF and willing to engage with you, to hear you out, on this issue. So we take very seriously this issue.

With regards to transparency, which several commentators mentioned, the President has already ordered that as much transparency about what the NSA has been doing, the judicial orders relating to the NSA activities, that those be released, and indeed, you can find those online. If anyone wants to know the site where they can be found, I'd be happy to send that to them.

On Edward Snowden, I don't have anything to say on that beyond what President Obama has already said, so I would refer the questioner to what President Obama has said.

On China, on our intervention from a colleague from China, I would simply ask anyone who has questions about the Human Rights situation in China and the Human Rights situation in the United States to look at any independent Human Rights report on these issues, and draw their own conclusions. One of the best reports I think is the Freedom on the Net report issued by Freedom House. We have Freedom House here. There are copies of that report here. That report is critical of the United States, I would mind you. It's not often that a Government official refers people to a report that's critical of the United States.

I would urge people to look at that report, and draw their own conclusions.

To the Indonesian representative, the lawyer here, who asked about privacy in the United States, so interesting story here in the United States, for good or worse, we have a very old Constitution in the United States, older than most countries, and the concept of privacy actually post‑dates the creation of our Constitution.

So, yes, the concept of privacy is covered by our Constitution, but it's covered through legal interpretations of that Constitution by our Supreme Court. And there are a slew of decisions in the last century that essentially create this concept of privacy and indeed it is now considered a Constitutional right.

And lastly, there were several questions about the NSA and sort of the NSA out of control, being a state within a state. I would just urge folks to look at what the President has said. The NSA and these activities are subject to judicial review. They are subject to legislative review, and the NSA finally is subject to the command and control of our Commander in Chief, namely, the President of the United States.

So the President has said what he intends to do in this area. He has empowered a review panel to look at these issues, and we will be considering the recommendations of that review panel going forward. Thank you.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thank you very much, Scott. Now we go on to Ross.

>> ROSS LaJEUNESSE: Thanks very much. I want to echo Scott's sentiments that I've enjoyed today's panel, and particularly enjoy hearing questions from all of you. And so I've taken a couple notes. I don't think I was as thorough as you were, Scott.

But to Jimmy's question, I appreciated that very much, about direct access versus access. It's a very good point. When I meant we don't provide direct access, what I meant is that we really don't provide access to the infrastructure. I was trying to draw distinction between that and the process I outlined that when we get a legal request from the Government, we look at it thoroughly, and so it is possible for the U.S. Government to get user data, but only through that process that I outlined in my remarks. So thank you for that clarification.

There was a comment or question from a remote participant about user trust. And that is something that we are very focused on. It really is what drives everything we do at Google, so we're incredibly concerned about the impact of users' trust on us from the Snowden revelations. It drives everything we do. It's why we spend the resources that we do on our security infrastructure, on our encryption, with search encrypted by design and Gmail being encrypted and I would make the point that I feel the cloud is certainly more secure than alternative models as Bertrand characterized it, data sovereignty, data localization. The cloud is much more secure than that model.

But this issue of user trust drives much more than our security infrastructure and our technology. It drives the work we do on Internet Governance, our membership, our founding membership in GNI, which is a third party which audits the practices of companies. It drives our development of things like Project Shield, which allows independent news sites and similar sites to take advantage of Google's own security infrastructure for those sites that have been subject to DDoS attacks and the like, and it drives our sponsorship of Civil Society and our work which we do really in each and every country in which we have an office on free expression from issues like intermediary liability in Thailand and India, to even more challenging situations in parts of Southeast Asia.

Finally, to Matthew's intervention from CDT, as Matthew well knows, we are a strong partner of CDT for pushing for greater transparency in the United States, and we see I think very clearly eye to eye on that and so I wanted to clarify Matthew's point. When I said that others are doing it too I thought I made it fairly clear about five or six times in my comments but I'm happy to say it again, I'm not trying to excuse or trivialize in any way the revelations that have come about, about U.S. surveillance but I am making the point that this is not just a U.S. issue. That this is happening everywhere around the world and I think it would be unwise of us to focus solely on the U.S. surveillance programme, and not focus on the very real challenges that are occurring everywhere else around the world.

So that was may point and I thank Matthew for giving me the opportunity to clarify that. And I think as I'm checking my notes, that was it. But someone correct me if I'm wrong.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thanks very much, Ross. Next on our panel is Johann.

>> JOHANN HALLENBORG: Okay. Thank you very much. A couple of points from me, as well. There was a question about the powerful tools and resources if that has prompted any change in our society and any legislation. And the answer in my country is: Yes, it certainly has because that has created an all‑new way of looking at this, of course.

And around 10 years ago, discussions intensified in my country on how to find the right legislative framework for this, an area which largely were unregulated before, and so after long negotiations, a draft law was presented. It was thrown out of Parliament, wasn't approved, back to Government. Again the second draft wasn't approved, because of the Parliament felt that the protections for privacy were not good enough.

And the third draft eventually was approved in 2009. This law applies equally to everyone, every citizen. There was a question about not making a difference between different nationalities. It applies equally to Swedes and non‑Swedes. And it includes a fair amount of special mechanisms to protect individuals' privacy. Amongst other things, it includes a special court which takes a decision in every case of signals surveillance.

This law is now being put to the test in the European court of Human Rights. It's being challenged, and we welcome this of course. We welcome to hear if the court in Strasbourg finds it lives up to the standards of the European Convention on Human Rights.

There was a comment on Article 17 of the ICCPR. It is true, it establishes the fundamental right to respect for private life, which is I believe the accurate wording. We believe there may very well be reasons to look at Article 17 and see how we can increase our understanding of how Article 17 should be interpreted.

There are a number of different ways to do that, and we're currently engaging in Geneva and in New York to find ways of promoting the best way forward.

Finally, a few comments were made on the Swedish model. I'm not sure I really know what that would be, but if it refers to the fundamental principles that my Minister outlined last week, we are more than happy to discuss on the basis of those the way to go forward. And indeed, those principles are integrated in our law and in our framework, so in a way, it will ‑‑ I suppose it does represent the Swedish model.

Finally, I am not representing any other country than may own country here on this panel, so I am not in a position to speak on behalf of Council of Europe Member States or European Union Member States when it comes to Edward Snowden. I can just conclude that his Human Rights should be respected, period, regardless of the label that you give him. Thank you very much.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thank you, Johann. Joana, you've heard most of the comments. Would you like to say something more?

>> JOANA VARON: I just would like to make some remarks for us to include the comments on Mr. Bollow in this panel report because I believe it's an important Human Rights issue and we're only here debating surveillance because of them. And I'd like to ask Scott and the U.S. Government to give further thoughts about this. That it seems penalties for whistleblowers are getting worse and worse, and I'm not referring only to Snowden.

A person who leaked the information about the war in Iraq is in jail with a 35‑year sentence after remaining for three years without a sentence and according to notes from The Guardian that I quote here, "Manning’s three‑and‑a‑half‑decades jail term is unprecedentedly long for someone convicted of leaking U.S. government documents. Compare, for example, the ten years received by Charles Graner, the most severely punished of those held responsible for the Abu Ghraib torture in Iraq." So the jail is not only talking in Russia.

These people had normal importance for the countries we believe today are being severely punished and in a dilemma between being traitor to a nation and providing openness and important information to the world, I think that most of people here with good faith and will would go for traitor. So that's it.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thanks, Joana. So we've heard quite a few things, and I think we're going to give a few seconds to ‑‑ minutes to our commenters to respond. And we're going to start with Ambassador Fonseca. Is the mic around?

>> BENEDICTO FONSECA FILHO: Thank you. And very briefly much has been said and I don't have much to add, just also in reaction to what was proposed and the question that was formulated by Raul Echeberria from LACNIC, I would like to comment that the Swedish model, not the Swedish model, but the points that were raised by your Minister of External Relations at the civil conference really provide a very good basis for our work in regard to the issue of privacy in relation to security, which is of course one of the focus areas and core areas of the speech our President delivered at the United Nations. So we'd be comfortable in working within this framework.

But just to recall that we have proposed and the President has proposed we should aim at having a larger set of principles, and taking into account a huge amount of work that has already been done in that regard within different contexts, it has been mentioned the Council of Europe, we could refer to our OECD so we have a different set of principles but of limited in scope of participation so we are aiming at something of global nature that would encapsulate the core norms and agreed principles that should guide us through.

And just reiterate the invitation and the call for participation in the Brazilian meeting to be held next year. And if you allow me just a very brief comment in regard to this, I was referring before to the kind of misunderstandings that sometimes occur, and the President has termed this meeting as a "Summit," and it must be understood that from the point of view of Government, what we are aiming at is at a very high‑level event that would wishfully be able to make kind of decision that could impact on the work we are doing.

So this is the meaning of saying a "Summit." It should not be interpreted as meaning it's something exclusively for Governments. I think this is the kind of conceptual difference that sometimes must be spelled out. When we say "Summit," we mean a meeting that will be ‑‑ will have authority enough to make decisions. And at the same time, the President clearly also spelled out that she would expect Civil Society, private society, all stakeholders to be represented, and I would dare to say on an equal level as regard any decision‑making process that might be ‑‑ might take place at that point, which we aim of course at some kind of consensus.

So this is just very briefly to reiterate something I said before, and to specify that as we go back, our President is due in the next few days to make an announcement on the basis of everything we heard and the very important inputs we have received and ideas that were presented here. I would not at this point like to anticipate anything the President will say. I think sometimes we like to interpret what she has meant. I think it's as a disciplined civil servant I would prefer the President herself to spell out.

Of course, this will not be a decision or anything made in isolation but fully taking into account the multistakeholder aspect we want. But as the host of the meeting, I think it would be the President's prerogative to decide for example on the Summit aspect or not and this is something we will invite all to be there, and again the announcement to be made in next few days. Thank you very much.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: We'll have a few treats if it is possible Nick and Bertrand and we have one comment. We're closing the Plenary Session and the comments, we're wrapping up and if it is of relevance for the wrapping up comments that we will hear.

Please.

>> BERTRAND DE LA CHAPELLE: Thank you, Jovan. I wanted to reaffirm one element that after this panel, it is clear that the answer to excessive surveillance cannot be the proliferation of National frameworks establishing data sovereignty but rather increased oversight and increased due process respect and assessment of the impact of transboundary action or impact assessment for any National measures that has a transboundary action. Thank you.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Nick, please.

>> NICK ASHTON-HART: Thank you also for inviting me to speak in general. One thing that struck me here is that I think we have many different National approaches to surveillance and the protection of individuals in relation to it, but very little have I found published that actually spells out and contrasts the different choices countries have made, and the reasons why they have made them.

I know in Latin America, recent very serious Human Rights violations by security services in living memory have made this issue particularly sensitive in that region, for example, and in Switzerland I know we had a similar scandal in the '90s that has greatly changed the way surveillance is conducted by Switzerland and we've heard a bit about the Swedish protections.

Perhaps it would be useful to have more clarity and be able to compare different systems and understand the choices that they made, and I would say also, the interparliamentary Union in Geneva, the home of the world's Parliaments, perhaps should discuss this issue to see if the world's Parliaments can share information, understand each other better, and perhaps that would help.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Thank you, Nick. We'll have a Chinese colleague, and after that we'll be closing discussion. Otherwise I will be declared persona non grata by the IGF Organising Committee. I just received a letter from Markus. Please.

>> REN YISHENG: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for giving me the floor for the second time. I'll be very brief. First of all, I'd like to clarify. This morning we discussed issues on surveillance, so the Chinese Delegation while making the point quoted a well‑known case, but I don't know why the U.S. speaker is so sensitive to our intervention. He's not here. If he's here, he has to explain to us why he's so sensitive to that.

Secondly, the Human Rights condition situation in China is well known by the Chinese. The Chinese has every right to explain that. Other country has no right to comment on China's Human Rights. The universality of Internet in China, we have almost 600 million netizens in China, much more than the population of the U.S. We have more than 300 millions of users of social media. It's almost the same population of U.S.

Every day, people are posting things on microblogs, blogs. More than 200 million people doing that. Therefore, Chinese also enjoy a full freedom of speech, but any information shall not infringe the society. You have to abide the basic code of conduct, moral conduct, and also you are not allowed to spread any information that will harm National Security. Also, you are not allowed to spread groundless rumors online.

Last but not least, let me say one thing: Every year, U.S. Government publish Human Rights situation or status of more than 200 countries in the world. He recommend us to read that. However, he neglected one thing: The U.S. Government never published Human Rights status report of its own country, but the Chinese Government has done that for the U.S. Government, and for free.

China's state Council's information office publish annual report of U.S. Human Rights status. You're welcome to access. All the information are collected publicly from the U.S. media.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: ‑‑ periodical review which is useful mechanism to comparing various situations worldwide when it comes to the Human Rights as what we heard.

We are ‑‑ well, just a half Tweet.

>> ALEX COMNINOS: My name is Alex. I'm from the Internet. It seems people in this room are concerned about eaves dropping so I would just like to point out if you registered online to attend the IGF, you have leaked your personal information including date of birth, ID number or passport number, and residential address, e‑mail address, full name. So defenses against these type of things really do start at home. You can see it on the APC website, APC.org. Thank you kindly. Bye.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: Thank you very much.

>> My name is Juan Carlos. I'm from Brazil. Everyone is still under the perplexity of the size and the rich of American intelligence and many are making decisions in the heart of emotion and it's this that worries me. Decisions that are taken so passionately, decisions under the scenario generally does not so passionate and generally are hurting our hearts. I'm definitely not wanting to give away any right in exchange for security. That's all.

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: Closing the session with a poem, an artistic expression of overall discussion.

>> ANNE-RACHEL INNE: So what we're going to do right now, I think we're going to have Jovan remained us a little bit some of the points that were raised here in answering if you remember some of the questions that we had that Markus read that the session was also supposed to address.

And I would like to simply say that I think this session is one that is again Building Bridges. This is the start of discussions and I know that I've seen a few Tweets where people are saying we're not satisfied because there aren't really answers. And I don't think anybody expected really that we would have answers here this morning.

But at least conversations have started. You know, the start of a bridge is being built as Ambassador Fonseca said, one of our next meetings will be in Brazil, and that could be a place where at least some general principles could be agreed upon, and then it will be up to all of us to actually just like the other general and global principles that we have, to make sure that we adhere to those. Jovan?

>> JOVAN KURBALIJA: With the risk of confronting Twitter community which is not a wise thing to do, I have to admit that there were quite a few answers and quite a few useful insights. We heard about experiences within Brazil, quite a few suggestions.

There is agreement that there are international rules that cover these issues, and quite a few concrete suggestions how we can implement these rules, through due process checks and balances.

Therefore, I would say that I personally feel quite comfortable with advancement of our discussion, much more than expected before the session. And as you know, these problems are complex and they're so called big problems. You don't have a quick fix. There are many aspects, security, Human Rights, ethical, business that should be addressed. Markus gave us 7 questions at the beginning of the session which were questions posed through the public consultation.

And we answered all of those questions, and even added quite a few more questions. Therefore, we will be having an interesting discussion. And if I can conclude with one point with a famous quote, don't waste a crisis. It seems we're not going to waste this crisis and that at least based on your inputs and panelist inputs, there is a serious determination and responsibility to do something useful for Internet as a whole, and for humanity, first of all to avoid the situation like this one with NSA case, but also to prevent similar situations happening worldwide.

Therefore, there is an opportunity that we shouldn't miss, and I think quite a few players around the world are moving in that direction, to create space, ideas, and proposals that could make Internet even more powerful tool for enabling of the social and economic development worldwide.

Thank you.

>> MARKUS KUMMER: Let me just add a quick word: I think the discussion, A, was certainly very interesting. This is a sensitive issue on top of the agenda. And I think again, the IGF proved its value and its worth, and this kind of discussion clearly is best held in a multistakeholder setting.

And I think it will not be over and we will revisit it at the next IGF. With that, Mr. Chairman, over to you to close the meeting.

>> SETYANTO SANTOSA: Thank you, Markus. Thank you also, Madam Anne‑Rachel and Jovan, for moderating this opening discussion on emerging issues with focusing mainly on approaching the role of security, surveillance, transparency and privacy issues. If I may value this session, it's really the top of the top session of the IGF 2013. If you look at the response from the floor and also they say all the ideas.

As a piece of information that Indonesia also aware of positive impact of Internet as a means of economic development. However, it has become increasingly concerned over the impact of access of information and has demonstrated an interest in increasing its control of offensive online content, particularly pornographic and anti‑Islam online content. The government regulates such content through legal and regulatory framework and through partnership with the ISP, Internet service provider and also the Internet cafe. Meanwhile the telecommunication 99 also prohibit the wire tapping of communication necessary for obtaining evidence for criminal investigation. So ladies and gentlemen, this is my first IGF engagement, with more especially in Bali 2013 from 109 countries so let us wait for our next IGF 2014, wherever it will be held. I think we should come and really I enjoyed this familihood circumstances and it's really a kind of the spirit of multistakeholder cooperation of world community. With a statement I would like to conclude this meeting and again thank you for excellent moderating, and thank you also to our panelists and all participants for this valuable discussion. I hope you enjoy your stay in Bali, Indonesia. For those of you who will leave before the Closing Ceremony, I wish you have a pleasant and safe trip back home.

Please join me to give a big hand to all the panelists and moderators.

[ Applause ]

I return the floor to Mr. Markus Kummer.

>> MARKUS KUMMER: Nothing to add. We resume at 2:30 for the open microphone "Taking Stock" session.

[ End of session ]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/igf-2013-october-25-taking-stock-emerging-issues

(IMDEC) 2013

praskrishna — 2013-10-25T06:09:40Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/internet-mobile-digital-economy-conference.pdf

Annual Report (2012-13)

praskrishna — 2014-10-22T00:04:39Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/annual-report-2012-13.pdf

Is free speech an Indian value?

praskrishna — 2013-04-30T07:18:10Z

Is freedom of speech and expression deeply accepted in Indian society? Or is it merely a European cultural import that made its way along with the English language and appeared in the Constitution because of the founding fathers' genius? Satarupa Sen Bhattacharya reviews Freedom Song, a film and connects the dots.

Satarupa Sen Bhattacharya's blog post was published in India Together on April 27, 2013. Snehashish Ghosh is quoted.

Debates on freedom of speech can be traced back to the earliest evolutions of human society, but if there is a time which could be considered most apposite for this debate to come to the fore and dominate public thought and discourse, this surely would be it for Indian society.

From the banishment of literary icons such as Salman Rushdie to repeated assaults on artists and cartoonists seeking to express their viewpoints through their art, and even the gag on the common man’s voice in traditional and new media, freedom of speech and expression has found itself under fire increasingly and in the most alarming of ways.

Is India as a nation becoming more intolerant of contrarian perspectives, or is it merely that voices seeking to stifle dissent are now amplified, thanks to a greater number, as well as newer forms, of media covering this debate?

Can India really achieve free speech in the way that its founding fathers conceived of and constitutionalized it?

These are the questions probed in Freedom Song – a 52-minute documentary from the Public Services Broadcasting Trust, co-directed by veteran journalist, author and academic Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Professor Subi Chaturvedi.

Freedom Song, the film

Interestingly, since the time Freedom Song was conceived of and filmed, the clamp-down or attacks on free speech in India have only become more frequent and flagrant. This was made much before the time that Salman Rushdie, in almost a repeat of the 2010 Jaipur Lit-fest incident, was stopped by the state from attending the screening of Midnight’s Children in Kolkata; or when two young girls from Palghar in Maharashtra were arrested by the police merely because one of them had questioned on Facebook the derailment of normal life in Mumbai following Balasaheb Thackeray’s death and the other had ‘liked’ it; or even before the long-awaited Kamal Hassan film Vishwaroopam was banned for purportedly offending the sensibilities of a religious community in a few scenes, which the director eventually had to agree to censor in order to ensure that his creation could reach the audience.

Freedom Song, the documentary, chronologically precedes all of these as well as the debate and outrage over sociologist Ashish Nandy’s remarks on corruption and backward castes; yet, when one sees it now, recalls the numerous incidents highlighted in the film, and hears the debates that rage on, the larger context and culture that has facilitated the perpetuation of suppression become clearer. It also drives home, disturbingly, the alarming regularity with which speech and expression have been muffled. It can thus be seen as a commentary on the gradual but consistent build-up to the current climate where there is an almost systematic and continuous crackdown on free speech whenever it inconveniences the powers-that-be.

Gags on expression - recent incidents

In July 2010, when T.J. Joseph, a professor of Malayalam at the Newman College in Thodupuzha (Ernakulam district) in Kerala was arrested by police following a controversial examination question set by him, allegedly containing disparaging remarks about the Prophet Mohammad. He was released on bail but suspended from his post following protests by Islamic organizations. But suspension wasn’t the last of Joseph’s tribulations: he was brutally attacked by a gang of men who chopped off his hand at the wrist with an axe. He was also stabbed in the arms and legs. While Joseph’s hand was stitched back in a 16-hour-long operation, even as he was recuperating, his college terminated his services on grounds that he had offended the religious sentiments of students. He was also stripped of all benefits and pension.

Curiously, Joseph himself distances the entire incident from the issue of freedom of expression. In his conversation with the film-makers he says that whatever happened could be interpreted as attempts to meddle with and dilute academic independence in the state. “The incident is not related to the issue of freedom of expression...external attempts to break down communication between students and their teacher was at the core of the entire episode,” says Joseph. Even Union Minister for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor, who hails from the state himself, attributes this incident to the act of some anti-social fringe elements who masquerade as representatives of a particular community. But these arguments from the victim himself, and an eminent authority, cannot resolve the question of his expulsion from service. Nor can they address the fact that the atmosphere of tolerance in the country is such that anti-socials can hijack as simple an academic exercise as question-setting to their advantage and perpetrate such atrocities.

A more recent incident highlighted in the documentary is the arrest and detention of Ambikesh Mahapatra, a professor of Chemistry in Jadavpur University of West Bengal for forwarding a set of cartoons that allegedly defamed Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. Shortly after the dismissal of Union Railway Minister, Trinamool’s Dinesh Trivedi, and his replacement by Mukul Roy, the widely-circulated cartoon showed Roy and the CM having a conversation along the lines of one in a very popular Satyajit-Ray film, conspiring to get rid of Trivedi.

Ambikesh was not the creator of this cartoon – as he himself says, he received it on a forwarded email. Amused by it, he wanted to share it with his friends. Thus he forwarded it again to over 60 members of his housing co-operative society, some of whom happened to have affiliations to the party in power. This action led to the professor being arrested and charged under IPC Sections 509 (insulting the modesty of a woman), Section 500 (defamation) and Section 66 A of the IT Act (causing offence using a computer). He had to spend a night in jail before he was released on bail the following afternoon.

However, charges against the professor have since been dropped and the West Bengal Human Rights Commission (WBHRC) ruled that the state police were indeed guilty of harassing the professor (and one of his colleagues, who had also been arrested).

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, co-director of Freedom Song

Muffling creativity

One thing that stands out pretty sharply in Freedom Song is the deep angst shared by the creative fraternity in the country over the assault on free speech. Perhaps, by dint of being that section of society which is most inclined to spontaneous and non-conformist expression, they also constitute one of the most vulnerable groups when it comes to being restrained or gagged.

One of the darkest chapters of suppression of artistic expression in India relates to the forced exile of iconic painter M F Hussain during the last days of his life, after being targeted for his nudist depictions of Hindu Gods and Goddesses. Sadly, as artist Arpana Caur points out, such waves of intolerance or fanaticism fail to factor in either subjective value judgments (how deeply Hussain must have loved Hindu culture and mythology to actually apply his creative instincts to bring it alive) or objective facts (that the nudist paintings were actually done in the ancient Khajuraho tradition of figurative depiction, it was not something Hussain had developed).

Often, the gag on works by artists and writers has transcended to direct discrimination against the person himself. The state of West Bengal banned exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen’s book “Dwikhandito” in 2003 on fears that it would stoke communal disharmony. When human rights activists challenged the decision in Court and managed to win rulings on her behalf, the writer herself was banished from public life in the state. She was unceremoniously asked to leave the state in 2007, after violent protests against her by fundamentalists. Much later in 2012, even after the political reins in the state had changed hands, the launch of her book at the Kolkata Book Fair was cancelled upon threats of protest.

One of the most heart-rending is the story of Pakistani singer Ali Haidar, who confesses to being almost brainwashed, in one of his weakest moments, by radical elements into believing that the loss of his child was in fact a retribution for him having taken up music as a profession.

The feeling of anger, frustration and even a sense of bewilderment among the artists, writers and performers interviewed in the documentary is almost palpable. As Rajiv Lochan, Director of the National Gallery of Modern Art, says, “Freedom of expression, creative freedom…in simple words, that is the only freedom you are born with...” The unuttered question of how anyone can take that away from you hangs heavy in the silence.

If artists are the most vulnerable, they are also perhaps the most resilient. In the context of the various cartoon controversies that this nation has seen and the proscriptions of cartoonists from Shankar to Aseem Trivedi, eminent political cartoonist Sudhir Tailang says, “We cartoonists know only one way of protest, which is the most peaceful, Gandhian way…you do what you want, we’ll draw a cartoon…and more cartoons… we’ll flood you with cartoons.”

The defiance and rejection of censorship is also strongly voiced by noted danseuse Mallika Sarabhai, who talks of the various forms of attack and insult that she has been subjected to for her unconventional presentations and activism, but asserts that despite all of it, she feels it is her “dharma to go on.”

The language barrier

Perhaps unwittingly, Freedom Song tends to favour the premise that freedom of speech as a principle in India is largely a preoccupation among the English-educated, intellectual and creative segments of the populace. Even the musical score that has played such a dominant part in invoking the spirit of freedom throughout the film seems to underline that - from the refrains of Bob Marley’s ‘Won't you help to sing these songs of freedom,’ to the remixed pop version of ‘Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram’ that one hears in parties and joints in India’s westernized urban landscape.

How attuned to the issue of free speech is the wide majority of India, the section that still follows vernacular media and are relatively distanced from the constructs of Anglo-Saxon influence? The verdict on the linguistic divide does not emerge with clear certainty when we talk to intellectuals or thought leaders from various parts of the country.

In the words of academic Subhoranjan Dasgupta, a professor at the Kolkata-based Institute of Development Studies, mainstream Bengali media has played a big role in highlighting transgressions of freedom of speech and expression every time it has occurred, irrespective of the political regime in power at the time.

"Whether in the case of the ban on Taslima Nasreen or the arrest of Professor Mahapatra, local media - and especially two widely-followed dailies, the Anandabazar Patrika and Ei Shomoy - have been audibly vocal and consistent in their coverage of these incidents," says Dasgupta. "Irrespective of political ideologies, the common man in Bengal knows that Taslima Nasreen got a raw deal or that what happened to the professor was not acceptable," he adds. Ostensibly, the role of local media in such public consciousness cannot be written off. In a way, it might not be an exaggeration to say that the voices of these publications have been instrumental, to a large extent, in ensuring that these issues grab the eyeballs of the largest number possible, and hence gain traction.

And yet, a completely different picture emerges as one reaches out to another part of the country. Badri Seshadri, Publisher, New Horizon Media - a Chennai-based company that publishes books in Tamil, and an active blogger, feels that notions of freedom, or free speech, are essentially offshoots of the modern era which have found a voice in our country primarily through English media.

Seshadri goes back to the freedom struggle in India when many among the noted thought leaders and freedom exponents wrote both in English and the local language. In those days, the discourse on freedom of thought and expression were perhaps more at par across spheres. But with the dying trend of bilingual writing, intellectual writing increasingly gravitated towards English. Today, the gulf between English writers and regional writers has become so huge in his state that even the most fundamental of issues are discussed in vocabularies that cannot bridge the schism. Issues pertaining to secularism and democracy are viewed with a completely different lens in vernacular media, and those pertaining to liberalism, not at all.

"Take the case of the most recent ban on Kamal Hassan's Vishwaroopam," points out Seshadri; "this was not a film made in Hindi or English that you could assume to be emotively disconnected from the Tamil mindspace. It was a film that had been made by one of the cult film personalities of the region, and yet even as the national English media followed this issue and consistently questioned the violation of an individual's right to creative freedom, deliberations in local channels and publications were strangely muted and focused only on whether or not the disputed scenes in the film could be considered to be offensive to the Islamic community. The larger debate on whether one has the right to offend, in an impersonal way, was completely missing." Those who want to toe the line of liberalism either through their writing or new media are dismissed as harbouring "fancy" ideals or pandering to Western sensibilities.

Guhathakurta, himself, disagrees with the claim that free expression is essentially a Western construct or that debates around it are restricted to the chattering classes in plush drawing rooms. “It is something that concerns every common man,” he says, referring to the case of Laxmi Oraon, the teenaged tribal girl who was stripped, beaten and molested in the streets of Guwahati, where she had been part of a peaceful protest rally, seeking the inclusion of 80 lakh Adivasis living in Assam in the ST category. Traumatised and deeply angered by the brutal injustice meted out to her and the lack of legal redress, Laxmi eventually even contested the Lok Sabha elections, points out the director in order to elucidate the struggle that even the most marginalized take part in to press for their fundamental rights.


A still from the documentary Freedom Song. Pic: PSBT India via Youtube

"Reasonable” restrictions

Despite the continuous infringements on artistic and even individual expression, what emerges from the film is not a blanket wave of intolerance that is engulfing society but rather certain powerful groups with vested interests who are driven either by fanaticism for their ideologies or by the lure of political mileage to raise voices against freedom. In the age of 24x7 channels, their voices gain in both volume and pitch and new media enables greater visibility and debate around it.

As Tharoor says, “The government has the lowest level of tolerance possible because it cannot be seen as offending anybody who is held precious by any segments of Indian society.”

Veteran journalist Saeed Naqvi points out, “You have a whole link between the politician, the vote bank and the proprietor. Therefore, the freedom of the press, while this trio exists, is under threat.”

But having said all of the above, it is also clear that defining freedom, especially in an absolute sense, is in itself a huge challenge that most of society acknowledges. More so, in the context of Article 19 (2) of the Constitution which itself allows the state to impose “reasonable restrictions on the exercise of the right...in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.”

Senior journalists such as Rajdeep Sardesai are quoted in the documentary, expressing their support for such ‘reasonable restrictions’ to combat the spread of expression or opinion that fuels divisiveness or hatred in society. But the fact remains that such restrictions not only add a qualifier to freedom as enshrined in the founding principles, but also create the larger question of ‘who decides?’

Young India however would prefer to see Article 19 (2) as an enabler rather than as a veto. As Apar Gupta, an advocate of the Supreme Court says in the film, he would like to believe that the incorporation of “reasonable restrictions” was done with a view to ensuring that the Constitution does not remain a static document and does not apply only to fixed definitions of facts and circumstances. Certainly not with the objective of curbing any form of dissent or deviation from convention.

Fali S. Nariman, senior advocate to the Supreme Court and a constitutional jurist, also points out very pertinently that the range of restrictions in 19(2) does not include public interest.

Reality does not bear that out though; especially when one looks at the many recent instances of arbitrary impositions of Sec 66A of the IT Act in booking individuals for expression of their opinion and stances through channels offered by new media and Internet. The documentary in itself does not delve deep into the challenges and threats to freedom of expression that have emerged in the FB/Twitter era, perhaps because many of the most volatile and controversial cases surrounding freedom of speech on the Internet occurred after the film was made. But a new debate is brewing in India, especially after the Palghar incident or the arrest of a Puducherry businessman for allegedly posting 'offensive' text on the micro-blogging site Twitter about the son of an Union Minister.

Snehashish Ghosh, a lawyer and Policy Associate at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, says, “Essentially, there are eight restrictions on freedom of speech and expression as enumerated in Article 19(2) of the Constitution. The Supreme Court in many cases has held that these reasonable restrictions should be construed narrowly and with due regards to the value of freedom of speech in a democratic society. Section 66A in its current form goes well beyond the restrictions laid down under Article 19(2). Therefore, it is liable to be struck down for being in violation of Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution.”

Snehashish also feels that technologically, in the present time, it would be near-impossible to 'monitor' the Internet. As far as regulations are concerned, there are laws already in place which ensure the implementation of reasonable restrictions. For example, the Indian Penal Code, 1860 already covers offenses such as incitement of violence, obscenity, criminal intimidation and outraging religious sentiments. The laws which are being applied offline are well equipped to deal with offenses committed online. There is no need to have extraordinary laws where ordinary laws suffice.

But in a country that appears to grow increasingly thin-skinned with time, the import of such logic could well be lost.

Access and freedom

Interestingly, Freedom Song begins with a series of frames capturing the widely different and divergent faces of Indian society, fast moving scenes juxtaposing the educated, affluent sections of urban India against the child who performs on sidewalks to earn his bread or the old emaciated man getting his night’s sleep on the pavement. The clear correlation between access – to basic needs, education and media – and the very consciousness of freedom is hard to ignore.

“Freedom to me is the ability to do what I want, where no one tells me to do anything” says one child on screen, evidently from an English-speaking, relatively privileged background; but one cannot help feeling that his coherence and articulation on freedom would be hard to come across in the children on the streets who are filmed in some of the previous shots.

The point that access to the very basic necessities of life is a necessary condition for freedom of expression is driven home by social activist Ram Bhat in the documentary, who says that despite the technologies aiding free expression, and the profusion of players in this debate, talk of freedom of speech will be pointless unless the problem of access is solved. In its absence, such freedom will remain the privilege of a few.

On balance, in all the voices that emerge from our conversations, and the many more episodes that Freedom Song, the documentary narrates, the only thing that can be concluded without doubt is the challenge of establishing freedom as a perennial or permanent concept in a country as complex and diverse as India. A truly effective and desirable state of free speech and expression can only evolve out of a continuous, fearless, rational dialogue between society and its stakeholders, in which all voices are expressed and heard.

Whether India, as a whole, can facilitate such a dialogue is going to be the moot question in the times to come.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-together-april-27-2013-satarupa-sen-bhattacharya-is-free-speech-an-indian-value

March 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-04-14T11:45:29Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the third issue of its newsletter for the year 2013. In this issue we bring you an overview of our research programs, updates of events organised by us, events we participated in, news and media coverage, and videos of some of our recent events.

Jobs
CIS invites applications for the posts of Developer (NVDA Screen Reader Project), Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge and Openness), and Programme Officer (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to sunil@cis-india.org and pranesh@cis-india.org.

Accessibility

CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the Hans Foundation. One of this is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another is for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages. CIS is also working with the World Blind Union and many other organisations to develop a Treaty for the Visually Impaired helped by the WIPO:

National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities
Anandhi Viswanathan from CIS and Manojna Yeluri from the Centre for Law and Policy Research are working in this project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapters on Lakshadweep, Meghalaya and Uttar Pradesh:

The Lakshadweep Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, March 25, 2013): The union territory of Lakshadweep has not passed any legislation for persons with disabilities, but implements the provisions under the central laws. The benefits currently available to persons with disabilities in Lakshadweep include disability pension, unemployment allowance and grant for setting up kiosks.
The Meghalaya Chapter (by Manojna Yeluri, March 25, 2013): Meghalaya is one of the few north-eastern states, which has appointed a Commissioner for Disabilities. Most of the schemes and benefits given to persons with disabilities in Meghalaya are under centrally sponsored schemes. Very few schemes are initiated by the state government.
The Uttar Pradesh Chapter (by Manojna Yeluri, March 31, 2013): The Government of Uttar Pradesh has established shelter homes and vocational training centres in several parts of the states — most recently in Meerut, Bareilly and Gorakhpur. It has also undertaken to finance nearly 4340 corrective surgeries for polio across nine cities of Uttar Pradesh. It also intends to start several projects in 2013. These include the establishment of a Braille Press in order to produce Braille books, magazines and other study material.

Resources
We now have a new section on our website which contains all government notifications, RTI applications, and accessibility related resources: cases, statutes, etc. The following were published earlier this month:

Information about Schemes for Disabled Persons in Haryana We received this notification on schemes and policies for persons with disabilities from the Government of Haryana.
Haryana Government Notification (Hindi version): The notification that we received from the state government was in Hindi. We will put up the English translation soon.
West Bengal (Govt) Notifications: We received a series of notifications from the West Bengal Government from its various departments such as finance, higher education, transport, health and family welfare, labour, land and land reforms, panchayats and rural development, etc. OCR versions of the same have been published.
Lakshadweep (Govt) Notifications: Notifications received from the Lakshadweep Government including guidelines for functioning of KIOSKS, grant of unemployment allowance and special jobs to persons with disabilities, issuing identity card to persons with disabilities for availing government benefits, etc., are published. OCR versions have also been put up.

Event Participated In

A Discussion on Intercept between UNCRPD & CEDAW (organized by the Shanta Memorial Institute of Rehabilitation – Odisha, CBR Network and Mitra Jyoti, Bangalore, Karnataka, February 4, 2013): Anandhi Viswanathan participated in this event.

Access to Knowledge and Openness

The Wikimedia Foundation awarded CIS a two year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop the growth of Indic language communities and projects by community collaborations and partnerships. This is being carried out by the Access to Knowledge team based in Delhi. CIS is also doing a project (Pervasive Technologies) on examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. CIS also promotes openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software through its Openness programme.

Wikipedia

Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation awarded CIS a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The A2K team consists of four members based in Delhi: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval, and one team member Dr. U.B. Pavanaja who is working from Bangalore office.

Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project

Visualising Basic Parameters (by Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, March 26, 2013): Sajjad and Sumandro bring you a visualisation of the growth of Indic Wikipedia in this first post on Indic Wikipedia Visualisation project. They look into the different aspects of the past and present activities of Indic Wikipedias, and divide the visualisation into three different focus areas: (1) basic parameters, (2) geographic patterns of edits, and (3) exploring the topics that receives the greatest number of edits.

Events Organised

Introductory Wikipedia session at BITS Goa (organised by CIS, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, Goa, March 7, 2013). The Access to Knowledge team was invited by Nikhil Dixit from BITS to organise a Wikipedia editing session. Nitika Tandon led the session on IP editing.
Kannada Wikipedia Workshop (organised by CIS, Institution of Engineers, JLB Road, Mysore, March 24, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led this workshop.

Events Co-organised

Wiki Women's Day in Goa (organised by the Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS, Nirmala Institute of Education, Panaji, Goa, March 8, 2013). Nitika Tandon participated in this workshop held on International Working Women's Day, and shares the developments in this report.
Wikipedia Workshop for Kannada Science Writers (organised by Wikimedia India Chapter, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath and CIS, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath Conference Hall, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore, March 17, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.

Upcoming Event

Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013 (co-organised with the Telegu Wikipedia community, Hyderabad, April 9 to 11, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan is participating in this event as a speaker. A public event will be held on April 11 from 5.00 p.m. to 8.00 p.m. at Golden Threshold (Sarojini Naidu's house) in Hyderabad.

Events Participated

Wikipedia Women's Workshop Bangalore 2013 (organised by Wikimedia India, Servelots Infotech, Jayanagar, Bangalore, March 8, 2013). The event was covered by Kannada Prabha on March 9, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.
Wikipedia at Avenir (organised by the Wikipedia community, Netaji Subhash Engineering College, Kolkata, West Bengal, March 11, 2013). CIS supported this event.

Event Report from Other Organisations
Wikipedia Community members helped the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications Programme (HEIRA) of CSCS Bangalore to organize a day-long workshop on ‘Digital Literacy’ at Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, Maharasthra on January 17, 2013. Tanveer Hasan of HEIRA shares with us the developments in this report.

Other Openness Updates

Event Report

Iraqi Public Data Scenario Workshop: A Summary (by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, March 26, 2013): A workshop on public data was conducted by Sunil Abraham and Sumandro Chattapadhyay for the officials of the Government of Iraq. It was organized by UNDP Iraq in Amman, Jordan from October 18 to 23, 2012. Sumandro Chattapadhyay shares with us the developments from the workshop held over five days.

Event Participated

Open DataCamp - 2013 (organized by Open Data Camp, Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram (inside Christ University Campus), Dairy Circle, Bangalore, March 2 and 3, 2013): Sunil Abraham was a panelist.

HasGeek
HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works from the CIS office in Bengaluru.

Upcoming Events

Pig Workshop (organized by HasGeek, Alchemy Solutions, Domlur, Bangalore, 9.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.): A workshop on how to use Pig for mining useful information from data. It is open to programmers who have a background in Java programming, some familiarity with Hadoop and MapReduce algorithms, and have worked with large chunks of data.
The Fifth Elephant 2013 (organized by HasGeek, July 11 to 13, 2013, NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore).

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes. Currently, CIS is doing a project with Privacy International, London to facilitate research and events around surveillance, and freedom of speech and expression.

Privacy

Policy

Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill (April 2012): High Level Concerns (by Elonnai Hickok, March 12, 2013). The post examines the high level concerns that CIS has with the April 2012 draft of the Bill.
Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 Analysis (by Jeremy Gruber, Council for Responsible Genetics, US, March 19, 2013). Jeremy provides an analysis of the Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012. He says that India’s updated 2012 Human DNA Profiling Bill offers largely superficial changes from its predecessor, the Draft DNA Profiling Bill, 2007.

The Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013: A Citizen's Draft (by Bhairav Acharya, March 26, 2013). Bhairav Acharya has drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013. It contains provisions that speak to data protection, interception, and surveillance and also establishes the powers and functions of the Privacy Commissioner, and lays out offenses and penalties for contravention of the Bill. The Bill represents a citizen's version of possible privacy legislation for India, and will be shared with key stakeholders including civil society, industry, and government.

Upcoming Events

A Privacy Round Table in Delhi (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, FICCI Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, April 3, 2013).
A Privacy Round Table in Bangalore (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Jayamahal Palace, Jayamahal Road, Bangalore, April 20, 2013).

Event Organized

Analyzing the Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 (organized by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, March 1, 2013): Maria Xynou shares a summary of the workshop in this report.

Events Participated In

Global Partners Meeting @ London (organized by Privacy International, London School of Economics and Political Science, March 22 – 25, 2013). Sunil Abraham and Malavika Jayaram participated in the event.
India’s Civil Liberties Crisis: Of Bans, Blocks, Bullying and Biometrics (organized by the Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, March 28, 2013). Malavika Jayaram participated as a speaker.
Future of Privacy in India (organized by DSCI and ICOMP, Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi, April 5, 2013). Sunil Abraham is a speaker at this event.

Blog Posts

Hacking without borders: The future of artificial intelligence and surveillance (by Maria Xynou, March 15, 2013). In this post, Maria looks at some of DARPA´s artificial intelligence surveillance technologies in regards to the right to privacy and their potential future use in India.
Driving in the Surveillance Society: Cameras, RFID tags and Black Boxes... (by Maria Xynou, March 26, 2013). Maria examines red light cameras, RFID tags and black boxes used to monitor vehicles in India.
Microsoft Releases its First Report on Data Requests by Law Enforcement Agencies around the World (by Maria Xynou, March 27, 2013). CIS presents Microsoft´s report on law enforcement requests, with a focus on data requested by Indian law enforcement agencies.
The Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2013 — Penalising 'Peeping Toms' and Other Privacy Issues (by Divij Joshi, March 31, 2013). The pending amendments to the Indian Penal Code, if passed in their current format, would be a huge boost for individual physical privacy by criminalising stalking and sexually-tinted voyeurism and removing the ambiguities in Indian law which threaten the privacy and dignity of individuals.

IT Act

Featured Blog Post

CIS Welcomes Standing Committee Report on IT Rules (by Pranesh Prakash, March 27, 2013). CIS welcomes the report by the Standing Committee on Subordinate Legislation, in which it has lambasted the government and has recommended that the government amend the Rules it passed in April 2011 under section 79 of the Information Technology Act. The post was quoted in: The Times of India (March 28, 2013), The Statesman (March 28, 2013), Economic Times (March 28, 2013), Data Quest (March 28, 2013), and The Hindu (April 1, 2013).

Submissions
Bhairav Acharya, on behalf of CIS submitted comments to the Committee on Subordinate Legislation of the 15^th Lok Sabha for the following rules:

Comments on the Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 316(E) on April 11, 2011.
Comments on the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 313(E) on April 11, 2011.
Comments on the Information Technology (Guidelines for Cyber Cafe) Rules, 2011. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 315(E) on April 11, 2011.

Note: The above rules were submitted earlier but published on our website only recently.

Unique ID Project

Event Organized

Unique Identity Number (UID), National Population Register (NPR), and Governance (organized by CIS and Say No to UID Campaign, TERI, Bangalore, March 2, 2013): CIS interviewed Usha Ramanathan and Anant Maringanti. Watch the videos uploaded in this blog post by Maria Xynou. This was covered in newzfirst on March 3, 2013 and in the Hindu on March 3, 2013.

Interview

Unique Identification Scheme (UID) & National Population Register (NPR), and Governance (by Elonnai Hickok, March 14, 2013). The post examines the UID, NPR and Governance as it exists in India. A video on the UID interview Questions and Answers is published.

News and Media

Indian ID crisis unveils Aadhaar doubts (ZDNet, March 14, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
New $1 Billion RIC Project Casts Doubts on Aadhaar (AEG India, March 16, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Blog Entry

India's Biometric Identification Programs and Privacy Concerns (by Divij Joshi, March 31, 2013).

Free Speech and Expression

News and Media

Foreign Funding of NGOs (by Prashant Reddy, Open Magazine, March 2, 2013).
Iceland’s proposed porn ban ‘like repression in Iran, N. Korea’ – activists (RT, March 1, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Chidambaram to Talk Budget on Google+ Hangout (by Dhanya Ann Thoppil, Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Responding to govt requests is a challenge for online firms: Colin Maclay (LiveMint, March 13, 2013). Colin M. Maclay, managing director of Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard mentioned CIS.
Indian police set up lab to monitor social media (originally published by AFP, March 18, 2013, and also carried in Global Post on the same day). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Namaste, Mr. Eric Schmidt (by R. Jai Krishna, Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Parliament panel blasts govt over ambiguous internet laws (by Ishan Srivastava, The Times of India, March 28, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
What if the Net shut down for a few days (by Atul Sethi, The Times of India, March 30, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Press controls ‘send wrong message to rest of world’ (by Jerome Starkey from Johannesburg, Francis Elliott from Delhi and David Brown, The Times, UK).

Event Organized

Freedom Song: Film Screening and Discussion (IIHS Bangalore City Campus, March 21, 2013). Freedom Song, a documentary film produced by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust and directed by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Subi Chaturvedi was screened.

Events Participated In

Is Social Media Incredible? (organized by Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media, Bangalore, March 2, 2013). Snehashish Ghosh participated in a panel discussion. The New Indian Express published a post-event report.
Rethinking the Internet: The Way Forward (organized by Telecom Italia and Financial iTimes, Telecom Italia Future Centre, Italy, March 21 – 22, 2013). Pranesh Prakash participated in this event.

Others

Events Organised

DML 2013: Fourth Annual Conference (co-organised by CIS and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub Central, Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers - Chicago, Illinois, March 14 – 16, 2013). We had a special track that ran through the conference on "Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)". Noopur Raval was one of the 16 presenters that we had selected on the tracks. Nishant Shah was one of the members in the Conference Committee.

Blog Posts

WGIG+8: Stock-Taking, Mapping, and Going Forward (Fontenoy Building, conference room # 7, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, February 27, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was the moderator for the session. A summary of the discussion has been published.
What’s In a Name? — DNS Singularity of ICANN and the Gold Rush (by Sharath Chandra Ram, March 31, 2013). March 2013 being the 28th birthday of the first ever registered Internet domain as well as the exigent launch of the Trademark Clearing House disguised as a milestone in rights protection by ICANN for its new gTLD program, Sharath Chandra Ram, dissects the transitory role of ICANN from being a technical outfit to the Boardroom Big Brother of Internet Governance.
An Introduction to Bitfilm & Bitcoin in Bangalore, India (by Benson Samuel, March 12, 2013). Video of the event organized by CIS on January 23, 2013 is published in this blog post.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access

CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project on Internet Access. It covers the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access and will touch upon various polices and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for formulation policies related to internet access. The blog posts and modules will be published in a new website: www.internet-institute.in.

Upcoming Event
We are hosting an “Institute on Internet and Society” in collaboration with the Ford Foundation India, which is to be held from June 8, 2013 to June 14, 2013. Call for registration and relevant details will be announced soon on our website.

The following units have been published:

Internet Protocols (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, March 18, 2013).
How email works, how do you get your email? Email Protocols (SMTP, POP, IMAP), SPAM/Phishing (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, March 19, 2013).
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 19, 2013).
ITU sectors — ITU-R, ITU-T, ITU-D, etc. (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 27, 2013).
World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012 (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 29, 2013).

Telecom

CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility of telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Newspaper Column

Are India's Glory Days Over? (by Shyam Ponappa, Organizing India Blogspot, March 8, 2013, originally published in the Business Standard, March 6, 2013).

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

Events Participated In

Video Vortex # 9 Re:assemblies of Video (organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, Post Media Lab, Moving Image Lab, Leuphana, et.al, February 28 – March 2, 2013). Nishant Shah gave the key note. Videos of the event are published.

Digital Humanities

From 2012 to 2015, the Researchers @ Work series is focusing on building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. We organised the first Habits of Living workshops in Bangalore last year. The next workshop is being held in Brown University

Event Co-organised

Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects (co-organised with Brown University, March 21 – 23, 2013, Brown University, Rhode Island). Nishant Shah was a speaker at this event. He made a presentation on network ontologies.

Event Participated

Korean Trans Cine-Media in Global Contexts: Asia and the World (organized by Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute, Cinema Studies, Korean National University of Arts, Korean Film Archive and Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Seoul, March 27 – 29, 2013). Nishant Shah was a speaker at this event. He spoke on "The Asian Intercourse: Reimagining the Inter-Asia moment through ‘net-porn’ in networks".

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at http://cis-india.org

Support Us

Please help us defend consumer / 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, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2013-bulletin

Freedom Song: Film Screening and Discussion

praskrishna — 2013-03-15T06:51:39Z

Freedom Song, a documentary film produced by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust and directed by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Subi Chaturvedi will be screened at the IIHS Bangalore City Campus on March 21, 2013, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., followed by discussions. Paranjoy will be present for the screening and will answer questions from the participants.

Discussions and arguments on freedom of expression and what should or should not be censored are as old as civilization itself, across the world and in India. In recent years, these debates have acquired new dimensions with the growth of the mass media -- especially the internet. Maintenance of public order, national security, religious tolerance, blasphemy, libel, defamation, invasion of privacy, artistic licence, pornography, obscenity, copyright and other intellectual property rights have all become issues linked to freedom of expression, often under highly contentious and controversial circumstances. Whereas Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India guarantees freedom of expression as a fundamental right of all citizens, Article 19(2) imposes "reasonable restrictions" on the exercise of such freedom. There is no consensus on what constitutes "reasonable" restrictions and/or who or which body should determine what is or should be "reasonable" restrictions on freedom of expression.

The 52-minute-long documentary film entitled Freedom Song produced by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust and directed by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Subi Chaturvedi seeks to examine issues relating to freedom of expression in a contemporary Indian context. The film raises a number of questions. Has Indian society as a whole become more or less tolerant to dissent even as sections of the population have apparently become increasingly vociferous in protesting against what is considered offensive? Are vocal minorities drowning out the voices of passive majorities in issues pertaining to artistic freedom and independence of expression? Where does one draw a dividing line between an individual's right to offend and her or his obligations towards maintenance of social harmony?

The film includes examples of alleged violations and transgressions of the fundamental right to free expression in contemporary India. Such examples include incidents and episodes relating to why Salman Rushdie’s video conference at the Jaipur Literary Festival had to be called off, the banning of books by Taslima Nasreen by the West Bengal government, controversial paintings by the late Maqbool Fida Hussain, the chopping of the hand of professor of Malayalam T.J. Joseph in Ernakulam, Kerala, the arrest of professor Ambikesh Mohapatra in Kolkata for circulating an e-mail lampooning West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and the controversy surrounding a cartoon first published in 1949 which depicts India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the architect of the country’s Constitution B.R. Ambedkar.

These examples are juxtaposed with the views of a cross-section of Indians from different walks of life: lawyers, creative artistes, journalists, politicians, social activists and ordinary individuals.

Film duration: 52 minutes
Year of production: 2012

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an independent journalist and an educator. His work experience, spanning more than 35 years, cuts across different media: print, radio, television and documentary cinema. He is a writer, speaker, anchor, interviewer, teacher and commentator in three languages: English, Bengali and Hindi. His main areas of interest are the working of the political economy and the media in India and the world, on which he has authored/co-authored books and directed/produced documentary films. He lectures on these subjects to general audiences and also trains aspiring – and working -- media professionals. He participates frequently in and organizes seminars/conferences, is a regular contributor to newspapers, magazines and websites and is featured on television channels and radio programmes as an anchor as well as an analyst and commentator.

Born on October 5, 1955 and educated at St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi (1972-75) and at the Delhi School of Economics (1975-77) in the same university from where he obtained his Master’s degree in economics, he started his career as a journalist in June 1977 and has been employed with various media organizations including companies bringing out publications such as Business India, BusinessWorld, The Telegraph, India Today and The Pioneer. He worked with Television Eighteen (now Network 18) for almost six years between 1995 and 2001 when he anchored a daily discussion programme called “India Talks” on the CNBC-India television channel -- nearly 1,400 half-hour episodes were broadcast. From March 2007, he has been anchoring two one-hour-long weekly programmes for Lok Sabha Television (the channel owned and operated by the lower house of the Parliament of India) – a panel discussion called “Talktime” (earlier “Headstart”) and an interview called “1-on-One”. He has anchored programmes for other television channels.

He is (or has been) a visiting faculty member at over a dozen reputed educational institutions including the Indian Institutes of Management at Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Kolkata, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Millia Islamia, Jamia Hamdard University (both in Delhi), the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai, the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, the Film & Television Institute of India, Pune, the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration, Mussoorie and the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi. In September 2010, he became a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi, teaching M.Phil students.

He served as a member of the Press Council of India nominated by the University Grants Commission between January 2008 and January 2011. In April 2010, as a member of a two-member sub-committee of the Council, he co-authored a 36,000-word report entitled “Paid News: How Corruption in the Indian Media Undermines Democracy”.

He is a media trainer and a consultant/adviser on India’s political economy. He was the founder director of the School of Convergence (SoC). He has been a consultant at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, making presentations and writing papers on Indian politics. He has been associated with a number of projects of the United Nations Development Programme and the International Labour Organization (ILO). He moderated two panel discussions at the International Labour Conference at Geneva, Switzerland, in June 2009 and at the ILO’s Asia Pactific Regional Meeting in Kyoto, Japan, in December 2011. He is currently president of the Foundation for Media Professionals, an independent, not-for-profit organization. He has advised various organizations, including corporate bodies (Indian, foreign and multinational), government agencies (including India’s Ministry of Information & Broadcasting) and civil society organizations.

He is a director/producer of documentary films. One entitled “Idiot Box or Window of Hope” which examines the impact of television on Indian society – was produced by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) in 2003 and was broadcast on Doordarshan. In 2006-07, he produced and directed a five-part documentary series in partnership with the PSBT entitled: “Hot As Hell: A Profile of Dhanbad”, different versions of which have been broadcast on various television channels including Doordarshan and NDTV 24x7. In 2007, he directed a documentary film “Grabbing Eyeballs: What’s Unethical About Television News in India” for PSBT that was followed up by another entitled “Advertorial: Selling News or Products?” in 2009. In 2010, he produced and directed a three-part documentary film series entitled “Blood & Iron: A Story of the Convergence of Crime, Business and Politics in Southern India” on the political, economic and ecological consequences of iron ore mining in Bellary (Karnataka) and Ananthapur (Andhra Pradesh). The film has been translated into six Indian languages and broadcast on different television channels. In 2011, he produced and directed a documentary film entitled: “The Great Indian Telecom Robbery”. (He was one of the first journalists to write about the telecommunications spectrum scandal in November 2007 and was one of the petitioners in public-interest litigation petitions on the subject in the Supreme Court of India.) In 2012, he co-directed a film entitled “Freedom Song” that examines freedom of expression in a contemporary Indian context. He has produced/directed a number of other documentary films.

He has co-authored a book with Shankar Raghuraman entitled: “A Time of Coalitions: Divided We Stand”, published by Sage Publications India in March 2004. The book was able to anticipate the outcome of the 14th general elections in India, the results for which came out in May that year. A substantially revised, updated and enlarged version of the book titled “Divided We Stand: India in a Time of Coalitions” was published in December 2007. He has written “Media Ethics: Truth, Fairness and Objectivity, Making and Breaking News” published by Oxford University Press India in March 2009 – the second enlarged edition of the book was published in December 2011. He has contributed articles and chapters to books (including “Realizing Brand India” edited by Sharif D. Rangnekar [Rupa, 2005] and “India: The Political Economy of Reforms” edited by Bibek Debroy & Rahul Mukherji [Bookwell, 2004]).

He is currently engaged in authoring/co-authoring other books and producing/directing documentary films. He has travelled widely in India and across the world. He is a partner of Media Network of India, a firm engaged in designing and creation of content for all media, contract publishing, media training, establishment of radio stations and business development.

Contact details: Paranjoy Guha Thakurta
Work: E-1, Nizamuddin West, 2^nd Floor, New Delhi – 110 013, India
Phone: (+91) (011) 4182-7691; Mobile: (+91) 98101-70435
Home: K-33, South City – I, Gurgaon (Haryana) – 122001, India;
E-mail: paranjoy@gmail.com or paranjoy@hotmail.com

For details on the venue: +91-80-67606666

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/freedom-song-film-screening-and-discussion