Centre for Internet and Society

September 2017 Newsletter

Admin — 2017-11-21T15:19:25Z

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
CIS filed a request under the Right to Information Act in March 2016 as part of research for the paper: Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products: An Empirical Assessment of India's Form 27 Practice and Compliance (July 2017). Rohini Lakshané has captured the developments in a blog post. Last month’s judgment by the nine judge referral bench was an emphatic endorsement of the the constitutional right to privacy. Amber Sinha has dissected the various aspects of the right to privacy as put forth by the nine judge constitutional bench in the Puttaswamy matter. The papers on fundamental right to privacy can be accessed here. With offline as the theme of the third Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC18), CIS has invited teams of two or more members to submit sessions proposals by Sunday, October 22, 2017. The conference is expected to be held in Himachal Pradesh during February 22-24, 2018. The venue and dates will be confirmed soon. Anonymity-based internet apps like Sarahah may not be as vicious for those surrounded by the comfort of social status. If your experience of Sarahah has been positive, it might be good to reflect on your own cultural and social capital, wrote Nishant Shah in an article in the Indian Express, dated September 10, 2017.

CIS in the news:

Privacy is now a right in India. Here's what that means for the tech industry (Rishi Iyengar; CNN Tech; August 29, 2017).
Russian social network VKontakte temporarily blocked in India for Blue Whale threat (Kim Arora; The Times of India; September 12, 2017).

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

►Pervasive Technologies

RTI request to Indian Patents Office for Form 27 (Statement of Working of patents), March 2016 (Rohini Lakshané; September 9, 2017).
RTI request to Indian Patents Office for Form 27 (Statement of Working of patents), 2015 (Rohini Lakshané; September 9, 2017).

►Openness

Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Participation in Event

Praja - Enhancing Democracy Through Access to Open Data: What Are the Roles of Government and Civil Society? (Organized by Praja; September 8, 2017; New Delhi). Sumandro Chattapadhyay was a speaker.

-----------------------------------

Internet Governance
-----------------------------------

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

►Privacy

Blog Entries

Rethinking National Privacy Principles: Evaluating Principles for India's Proposed Data Protection Law (Amber Sinha; September 11, 2017).
The Fundamental Right to Privacy: An Analysis (Amber Sinha; September 27, 2017).

►Big Data

Upcoming Event

Emerging Issues in the Internet of Things (CIS, Bangalore; October 23, 2017). Andrew Rens will give a talk on the research that he is doing at the Internet Governance Lab.

-----------------------------------

Telecom
-----------------------------------
CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to 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:

Article

Revamp Telecom Sector & Revive The Economy (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; September 7, 2017).

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

Article

Digital native: What’s in a name? Privilege (Indian Express, September 10, 2017).

Announcement

Internet Researchers' Conference 2018 (IRC18): Offline - Call for Session (P.P. Sneha; September 20, 2017). Teams of two or more members to submit sessions proposals by Sunday, October 22, 2017.

Blog Entry

The Digital Humanities from Father Busa to Edward Snowden (P.P. Sneha; September 4, 2017).

-----------------------------------

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

► Follow us elsewhere

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

► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration

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

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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2017-newsletter

Amber Sinha - The Fundamental Right to Privacy: Part II - Structure

sumandro — 2017-09-28T08:37:26Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/amber-sinha-the-fundamental-right-to-privacy-ii-structure-pdf

Internet Researchers' Conference 2018 (IRC18): Offline - Call for Sessions

sneha-pp — 2017-11-29T12:30:13Z

Does being offline necessarily mean being disconnected? Beyond anxieties such as FOMO, being offline is also seen as disengagement from a certain milieu of the digital (read: capital), an impediment to the way life is organised by and around technologies in general. However, being offline is not the exception, as examples of internet shutdown and acts on online censorship illustrate the persistence and often alarming regularity of the offline even for the ‘connected’ sections of the population. The *offline* is the theme of the third Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC18). We invite teams of two or more members to submit sessions proposals by Sunday, November 19 (final deadline). The session selection process is described below. The Conference will be hosted by the Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics (Kandbari, Palampur, Himachal Pradesh) on February 22-24, 2018.

IRC18: Offline

Call for Sessions

Proposed Sessions (Conference Website)

Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics (External Link)

IRC18: Offline

State and commercial providers of internet and telecommunication services work in tandem to produce both the “online” and the “offline” - through content censorship, internet regulation, generalised service provision failures, and so on. Further, efforts to prioritise the use of digital technologies for financial transactions, especially since demonetisation, has led to a not-so-subtle equalisation of the ‘online economy’ with the ‘formal economy’; thus recognising the offline as the zones of informality, corruption, and piracy. This contributes to the offline becoming invisible, and in many cases, illegal, rather than being recognised as a condition that necessarily informs what it means to be digital.

Who is offline, and is it a choice? The global project of bringing people online has spurred several commendable initiatives in expanding access to digital devices, networks, and content, and often contentious ones such as Free Basics / internet.org, which illustrate the intersectionalities of scale, privilege, and rights that we need to be mindful of when we imagine the offline. Further, the experience of the internet, for a large section of people is often mediated through prior and ongoing experiences of traditional media, and through cultural metaphors and cognitive frames that transcend more practical registers such as consumption and facilitation. How do we approach, study, and represent this disembodied internet – devoid of its hypertext, platforms, devices, it's nuts and bolts, but still tangible through engagement in myriad, personal and often indiscernible ways.

For the third edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC18), we invite participants to critically discuss the offline. We invite sessions that present or propose academic, applied, creative, or technical works that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the offline.

For example, the sessions may explore one or more of the following themes:

Geographies of internet access: Infrastructural, socio-political, and discursive forces and contradictions
Terms, objects, metaphors, and events of the internet and their offline remediation and circulation
Minimal computing, maker cultures, and digital collaboration and creativity in the offline
Offline economic cultures and transition towards less-cash economy
Offline as democratic choice: the right to offline lives in the context of global debates on privacy, surveillance, and data justice
Methodologies of studying the *offline* at the intersections of offline and online lives

Please note that the above are not sub-themes or tracks under which a session should be proposed, but are illustrations of possible session themes and concerns.

Call for Sessions

We invite teams of two or more members to propose sessions for IRC18. All sessions will be one and half hours long, and will be fully designed and facilitated by the team concerned, including moderation (if any). Please remember this when planning the session. Everything happening during the session, except for logistical support, will be led and managed by the session team.

The sessions are expected to drive conversations on the topic concerned. They may include presentation of research papers but this is not mandatory.

We look forward to sessions that involve collaborative work (either in groups or otherwise), including discussions, interactions, documentation, learning, and making, are most welcome.

We also look forward to sessions conducted in Indic languages. The proposing team, in such a case, should consider how participants who do not understand the language concerned may engage with the session. IRC organisers and other participants shall help facilitate these sessions, say by offering translation support.

The only eligibility criteria for proposing sessions are that they must be proposed by a team of at least two members, and that they must engage with the *offline*.

The deadline for submission of sessions proposals for IRC18 is Sunday, November 19 (final deadline).

To propose a session, please send the following documents (as attached text files) to raw@cis-india.org:

Title of the Session: The session should be named in the form of a hashtag (check the IRC17 selected sessions for example).
Context of the Session: This should be a 300 words note discussing the context, the motivations, and the expectations behind the proposed session.
Session Plan: This should describe the objectives of the session, what will be done and discussed during the session, and who among the people organising the session will be responsible for what. This note need not be more than 300 words long. If your session involves inviting others to present their work (say papers), then please provide a description and timeline of the process through which these people will be identified.
Session Team Details: Please share brief biographic notes of each member of the session team, and contact details.

There is no registration fee for the Conference, but participants are expected to pay for their own travel and accommodation (to be organised by CIS) expenses. Limited funding will be available to support travel and accommodation expenses of few participants who are unemployed or under-employed.

Session selection process:

November 19: Deadline of submission of session proposals.All submitted sessions will be posted on the CIS website, along with the names and details of the session team members.
November 20 - December 17: Open review period. All session teams, as well as other interested contributors, are invited to review and comment upon each other's submitted proposals and revise their own. Read the proposed sessions here: Conference Website.
December 18-31: The selection process takes place. All session teams will select 10 sessions to be included in the IRC18 programme. The votes will be anonymous, that is no session team will know which other sessions have voted for their session.
January 08: Announcement of selected sessions.
February 22-24: IRC18 at Sambhaavnaa Institute!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc18-offline-call

Annual Report 2016-2017

Admin — 2017-09-20T01:43:30Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/annual-report-2016-2017

Annual Report 2015-2016

Admin — 2017-09-20T01:35:54Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/annual-report-2015-2016

Rethinking National Privacy Principles: Evaluating Principles for India's Proposed Data Protection Law

amber — 2017-09-11T02:22:01Z

This report is intended to be the first part in a series of white papers that CIS will publish which seeks to contribute to the discussions around the enactment of a privacy legislation in India. In subsequent pieces we will focus on subjects such as regulatory framework to implement, supervise and enforce privacy principles, and principles to regulate surveillance in India under a privacy law.

Edited by Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda

This analysis intends to build on the substantial work done in the formulation of the National Privacy Principles by the Committee of Experts led by Justice AP Shah.1 This brief, hopes to evaluate the National Privacy Principles and the assertion by the Committee that right to privacy be considered a fundamental right under the Indian Constitution. The national privacy principles have been revisited in light of technological developments such as big data, Internet of Things, algorithmic decision making and artificial intelligence which are increasingly playing a greater role in the collection and processing of personal data of individuals, its analysis and decisions taken on the basis of such analysis. The solutions and principles articulated in this report are intended to provide starting points for a meaningful and nuanced discussion on how we need to rethink the privacy principles that should inform the data protection law in India.

Click to read the full blog post

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/rethinking-national-privacy-principles

Rethinking Privacy Principles

elonnai — 2017-09-11T02:17:02Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/rethinking-privacy-principles

In our anxiety about the Blue Whale Challenge, are we missing the elephant in the room?

Admin — 2018-01-03T02:09:11Z

In the beginning, the Blue Whale Challenge seemed like it had all the hallmarks of an urban legend: an online self-harm game that instructed victims to commit increasing degrees of violence upon themselves, finally convincing them to commit suicide. While it was whispered about in schools, college corridors and Reddit forums, reporters found it difficult to trace.

The blog post by Karishma Attari was published by Scroll on September 9, 2017.

But since then, it appears to be accruing a body count: multiple suicides and suicide attempts in Russia, Kenya, Brazil, China, Spain, Italy, Chile and India have been attributed to people signing up for the challenge. The stories are often accompanied by images of a blue whale carved onto the victim’s skin or a last selfie taken before committing suicide.

The latest incident in India involves the last-minute rescue of a teenager in Jodhpur who attempted suicide twice – first by jumping into Kalina Lake on September 4, and then by overdosing on sleeping pills – within the same week. The teenager had carved the shape of a whale on her arm, and when interviewed, revealed that unless she completed the last task of the challenge, she believed that her mother would die.

Most victims of the Blue Whale Challenge across the world appear to have a few things in common – they are young and vulnerable to abuse online, and their connection with the game is hard to substantiate. While the stories speak to our wariness of technology-dependence, and send our parenting instincts into nervous overdrive, there is very little evidence on ground that the game even exists.

Ever since the challenge was first reported on a Russian news portal, news reports have debunked its existence, raising questions about the media’s responsibility in spreading unsubstantiated rumours and the manner in which the issue is being used to argue against the influence of the internet and promote panic. Much of the coverage regarding the challenge’s possible influence, begs the question: how can teens be raised in a way that makes them safe from the internet?

The Blue Whale Challenge in India

Cyber-lawyer Karnika Seth, who authored the book Protection of Children on Internet, admits that it is impossible to generate the kind of surveillance required to nip perceived online threats – both on account of privacy laws and the sheer scale of effort such an exercise would require. She calls the unregulated internet in India a “mammoth problem that cannot be overlooked anymore”.

While there is no specific law to be applied to a situation like the alleged Blue Whale Challenge, Seth pointed to acts relating to the cyber space like the IT Act and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, along with inbuilt provisions within the Indian Penal Code, such as Act 305, that could be applied.

There have been approximately 10 reported cases of suicide in India, which are believed to be related to the Blue Whale Challenge. Google Trends show that Indian interest in the phenomenon has been overwhelming – the most common searched phrases have been “Download Blue Whale Game”, which might suggest that people are keen to inflict self-harm, or just morbidly curious (particularly in Kochi and Calcutta).

Timely intervention appears to have saved at least a few lives, such as the case of an engineering student in Kolkata who claimed that having completed several levels of the game, he was pulled back from the brink of suicide by his teacher, parents and a CID officer who counselled him. He was quoted as saying: “My message to whoever is in this game is stop before it is too late. It is not a game…they give you challenges and they take you to places you cannot come back from. They drive you to suicide.”

But despite this, the police in India have found no direct link between the suicides and the existence of any virtual moderator, who according to the Blue Whale legend, instructs victims to inflict self-harm. A lot of the so-called links have been proved to be hearsay and hysteria as seen in the case of a 12-year-old from Indore, whose mother clarified that while he had admitted to “playing games”, he had never heard of Blue Whale.

A disturbing trend

Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society, concluded: “All the available evidence points to this being a hoax, including those situations where teenagers have actually engaged in self-harm by carving a whale on their arm and have blamed the ‘Blue Whale app’ and a stranger threatening them. The children have subsequently been found to be lying through hard evidence, for instance the mobile operator finds no records of any messages or calls at those timings to the child’s number.”

While the first suicide linked to the alleged challenge emerged in Russia in 2015, Prakash added: “[E]ven the Russian police haven’t revealed any evidence in their possession in the arrests they have made related to the Blue Whale Challenge, nor have those cases gone to trial. How else can one explain the fact that there hasn’t been evidence of a ‘tutor’ in even a single one of the cases reported in India?”

There is, however, a huge problem regardless of whether the game exists: “The harm caused by the media sensationalism is quite real thanks to what is known as the Werther effect, leading to copycat suicides,” Prakash said.

Authorities in most countries where victims have appeared have treated these claims seriously. In May, the Russian Duma or parliament made it an act of criminal responsibility to create a pro-suicide group on social media. Authorities in China and other countries are monitoring mentions of the game on forums and live broadcasts. The Delhi Police have issued an advisory after a cyber cell spotted related hashtags and messages on social networking sites. In India, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology directed several internet companies such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, WhatApp, Microsoft and Yahoo to remove all links which direct users to the Blue Whale Challenge.

The real problem

Teenage suicide is a growing concern worldwide and India has one of the world’s highest suicide rates for youth aged between 15 and 29. In the US, suicide is documented as the second leading cause of death for young people. The Netflix original series 13 Reasons Why was banned in several countries over accusations that it glamourised teen depressives and suicides.

The real conversation we need to be having with the youth is about their reasons for choosing self-harm – about mental health and depression. Dr Depeak Raheja, a senior psychiatrist and vice-president of the Delhi Psychiatric Society, suggested that parents who suspect their child might have suicidal urges should address not just the issue of the game, “but also the underlying causative factors – isolation, low self-worth, hopelessness and underlying or active depression”.

One way in which this is already happening is through online mental health support groups which are promoted as alternatives to the Blue Whale Challenge. In Brazil, a designer has created a viral counter movement called the Pink Whale (Baleia Rosa), which relies on the collaboration of hundreds of volunteers and is based on positive tasks that combat depression. The British YouTuber HiggyPop has also set up an email service that sends daily Pink Whale challenges to participants. In the United States, a site called Blue Whale Challenge uses fifty days of tasks to promote mental health and well-being, while the Green Whale Challenge is a humorous version of the game in Argentina.

The fear and anxiety around the Blue Whale Challenge shows our willingness to project our fears of an unregulated internet onto anything that fits the profile, even as we override all evidence to the contrary. Instead, parents in particular must treat the tragic aftermath of popular suicide games as an opportunity to have a necessary, if belated, conversation about depression and mental health. The Blue Whale challenge may well turn out to be a hoax, but the challenge of keeping teenagers safe and healthy is a very real one.

Karishma Attari is the author of I See You and Don’t Look Down. She runs a workshop series called Shakespeare for Dummies and is currently writing a novel titled The Want Diaries. Her Twitter handle is @KarishmaWrites.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/scroll-karishma-attari-september-9-2017-in-our-anxiety-about-the-blue-whale-challenge-are-we-missing-the-elephant-in-the-room

The Digital Humanities from Father Busa to Edward Snowden

sneha-pp — 2017-10-04T11:02:10Z

What do Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower behind the NSA surveillance revelations, and Father Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit, who worked for almost his entire life on Saint Thomas Aquinas, have in common? The simple answer would be: the computer. Things however are a bit more complex than that, and the reason for choosing these two people to explain what the Digital Humanities are, is that in some sense they represent the origins and the present consequences of a certain way of thinking about computers. This essay by Dr. Domenico Fiormonte, lecturer in the Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Political Sciences at University Roma Tre, was originally published in the Media Development journal.

Cross-posted from Media Development, Vol. LXIV 2/2017. Published on May 13, 2017.

Although it is true that computer science was born from the needs of calculation (i.e. computing), in other cultures and languages the usual term is “informatics”, or the science of information. The difference is not trivial, and in fact the encounter between the computer and words, or rather with language, can be considered a cultural watershed. Father Busa himself was one of the protagonists of this meeting which came about in 1949 when he visited New York to ask Thomas J. Watson Sr, the president of IBM, for permission to use computers to study the vocabulary of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Jones, 2016). That endeavour is considered by many to have signalled the birth of computer-based “Natural Language Processing”, the inter-disciplinary field behind many of the digital tools that we use in our everyday life: from the technologies of T9 on our smartphone to voice recognition and synthesis, etc.

But these tools, although fundamental, are not the most striking (or perhaps disturbing) results of this age of transformation. Through the gesture of entering words in a computer, Busa framed the basis of a new concept of hermeneutics that was no longer based solely on purely subjective interpretation, but also on automatic processing of linguistic data, and hence in some sense “objective”. Busa’s undertaking founded the discipline of Humanities Computing (although years later it was renamed Digital Humanities), but above all it laid the groundwork for a profound epistemological and cultural transformation. And at the heart of this revolution was the “written document”, the text, understood as an alphanumeric sequence. In an effort to best explain this revolution, I will concentrate on one aspect, the representation of the document, and return to the hermeneutical aspects in the final part.

The epistemological revolution of the digital document

My own association with Digital Humanities (DH), as for many humanists of my generation, came from philology and textual criticism. My first foray into electronic textuality was in 1990, when it became clear that the confluence of informatics and the humanities would revive an inherent, almost arcane dualism: in the beginning was the data… But I was unprepared to tackle the conflict between information retrieval and interface, or between a textual paradigm based on the idea of information (text=data) and a vision of the textual document as a stratified historical-material reality, visualized not only as information, but also as an object (or series of objects), to be ultimately used and enjoyed. This dualism certainly did not only come about as a result of the encounter between informatics and text, but what we can say is that the process of digitization from this point on would “enhance” certain characteristics of the document at the expense of others.

The problem of the digital document in fact cannot be understood unless one first understands what digitization is and how it works: that is to say, the process of translating what we who undertake the work call “encoding” or more generally “representation”. The pioneers of informatica umanistica in Italy (Tito Orlandi, Raul Mordenti, Giuseppe Gigliozzi, etc.) taught the students of my generation two key concepts: 1) the passage from the analogue to the digital implies a process that formalizes the object of research (from the single character to the more complex structures of the historical artefact); 2) each act of encoding, or rather each act of representation of the specific “object” via a formal language involves a selection from a set of possibilities and is therefore an interpretative act (Orlandi, 2010).

The fundamental difference is that the human language and its writing systems were always many and various, whereas formal computer languages are based on a codex universalis, an Esperanto derived for the most part from the English language. As George Steiner wrote in After Babel, “the meta-linguistic codes and algorithms of electronic communication are founded on a sub-text, on a linguistic ‘pre-history’, which is fundamentally Anglo-American” (Steiner, 1998: xvii). Digital “standards” always reflect a cultural bias, and the act of encoding is never neutral, but tends to assume (and overlap with) universalizing discourses that on the surface are hard to see.

An important standard for character representation with ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange created in the 1960s. That technology is continued today by Unicode, an industrial standard, which purports to represent the characters of all written languages. Beside the fact that it is directed by the usual mega-corporations, Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, etc., Unicode is underpinned by an alphabet-centric logic that penalizes non-Western systems of writing. Given this weakness, it should come as no surprise that it has attracted criticism on several fronts, including the charge of ethnocentrism (Perri, 2009; Pressman, 2014: 151), and also because it ignores the difficulties faced by languages of low commercial value in their efforts to be properly represented (and therefore at risk of extinction). To paraphrase Alexander Galloway, “technical is always [geo]political” (Galloway, 2004: 243).

Even if our lack of awareness as humanists might have deceived us into thinking that the translation from the analogue to the digital was a neutral and painless process, we would soon have realized that, as with any change of format, digital representation can change and influence both the life of the original object and its digital future. And we would have discovered the “multiple biases” inherent in the digitization process. So in one respect we have entered in a post-Busa phase where interpretation is not something you can have without defining both the object and the source of your knowledge.

Busa never showed much interest in theoretical questions or in the link between hermeneutics and epistemology (and even less between semiotics and politics), or between the interpretation of the object and the nature of its representation. Perhaps this was because the question “What do I want to represent, and how?” would have provoked a series of more disturbing questions: “What is knowledge? Who produces it, how, and for what purpose?” These questions probably would have threatened to paralyze his pragmatic approach. On the other hand, it cannot have been easy to ignore the problem, since many philosophers, starting with Plato when discussing the transition from orality to writing, kept asking questions about the formats and systems of knowledge representation (Stiegler, 2006).

As humanists we then begin to understand that the problems information technology appeared able to resolve, soon created new problems which were not limited to a single discipline, like philology or textual criticism. To ignore the epistemological (and also ethical or political) problems generated by the confluence of the humanities and information science was certainly possible: but at what price? The more pragmatic among us would have been content to use machines for what they could immediately offer: the tremendous possibilities and tools for representing, archiving and automatic analysis of humanistic objects and artefacts. This approach seemed prevalent in the first historical phase of DH, reflected in canonical definitions like “the application of computational methods to humanities research and teaching” or “researching the Humanities through digital perspectives, researching digital technologies from the perspective of the Humanities” [1].

But what are the effects of these methods and technologies? The answer to this question coincides with the new phase that DH is actually in at the moment, a phase that forces us to consider the costs of all of the above, the ethical, social, and political implications of the instruments, resources and infrastructure, and the cultural biases inherent in their conception and design.

The social and political implications of DH

Fr Busa’s “hermeneutic” approach has been the main focus of the past 20 years of DH, while the methodological and epistemological concerns have been pushed to one side. The reason for this is fairly simple. Since the overwhelming majority of evidence on which the memory of people is based (particularly in the West) is the written text, the computer, a manipulator of alphanumeric symbols, has been shown to be a powerful agent of their preservation and management. This need to unravel the concept of the “text as data”, as mentioned above, has pushed aside for the moment the question of interface, that is, ways for the text to be used and read.

The materiality of written documents, given their incredible linguistic and cultural diversity, their visual and pragmatic dimensions, etc. (especially holographs and manuscripts) does not marry all that well with the limited possibilities offered by information science – or at least doesn’t fit with what has been produced by those who have guided its development thus far. Therefore, up until the early 2000s, the Digital Humanities focused especially on the design of tools and resources for the analysis and preservation of written documents. The spread of the Web from the mid-1990s, despite the first rumblings on the theme of user interface development (which Busa always considered to be a minor problem), ended by confirming this tendency.

There was in my view a precise moment when this concept of “text as data” reached a point of crisis, by showing its dark side. As humanists we would probably have preferred to continue our work quietly as if nothing had changed, but at a certain point something monumental happened, an event which has changed our relation with the digital dimension of knowledge, and hence of research. And this moment was the 6th of June 2013, when the Washington Post and the Guardian began publishing the documents supplied by Edward Snowden about mass surveillance by the NSA. The immensity of this event was immediately clear: a document published by the US National Security Agency and its British twin (GCHQ), said that in one month alone over 181 million records had been collected, including metadata and content (text, audio and video [Gellman and Soltani, 2013]).

The news that in July 2016 half of Silicon Valley, from Amazon to Google, had been co-opted by the Pentagon (Collins, 2016), and the dynamics of the last presidential elections in the USA confirmed, that the Net has become the field on which the geopolitical balances of the planet are played out. And at the centre of this “new world” is the idea of the “universal archive” where all data (past, present, and future) are stored. It is here that both the hermeneutical and epistemological questions fall down. In modern times, knowledge and interpretation depended on history, which we conceived as a linear process, i.e. based on space and time. But the dynamics of digital data seem to escape the logics of space and time, because the digital archive is ubiquitous and eternally present.

In my opinion, the heritage of Busa is reflected by the obsession with control (collection) and the analysis (interpretation) of data by government agencies and high-tech multinationals. Both have committed to the “hermeneutic” vision (although of the bare bones variety), or rather to the analysis of huge amounts of our data as the basis of their interpretation of the world. Welcome to the fantastic world of Big Data...

The question is no longer what the document is or how it is represented (an epistemological question) or how it is to be interpreted (a hermeneutical question). Even if the better forces of DH have insisted on this point and on the necessity of proceeding in this order (because interpretation of the object is inseparable from the circumstance of its representation), these “humanistic” scruples appear suddenly irrelevant. The actual question is in fact “who are we really?” Or rather not us, but the creation through our digital footprint of an alter ego that the algorithms of Google or Facebook decree is more “true” than the other (which we mistakenly believe still to exist). But who will be able to decipher or take apart these stories (data + algorithms) which we daily write and re-write? And does it still make sense to investigate the instruments of production and preservation of memories and knowledge when we no longer have any control over them?

Geoffrey Rockwell and I recently tried to analyze a commercial surveillance package, Palantir, from the point of view of DH (Rockwell and Fiormonte, 2017). Palantir scans and combines data from “documents, websites, social media and databases, turning that information into people, places, events, things, displaying those connections on your computer screen, and allowing you to probe and analyze the links between them” (Anyadike, 2016). But these kinds of software can be also seen as story-telling tools, because they allow someone to build stories about us and through us. So there seems to be a “literary” and rhetorical side to surveillance software, which the digital humanist seems particularly well-equipped to analyze. After all, the story of Big Data is also our story. There seems to be an “original sin” present in Big Data, i.e. the information retrieval paradigm that treats stories as data and data as a resource to be mined. And this approach is clearly reflected in Busa’s original idea of computational hermeneutics: digitize your texts, get your data, then build an interpretation upon them.

A posteriori we can ask ourselves what happened on that distant morning in 1949 in the heads of Thomas J. Watson Sr. and Father Busa. Was the founder and owner of IBM conscious of what the vision of Father Busa would lead to? And could the Jesuit father have ever expected that his intuition would change not only our means of reading and interpreting history, but also how we construct it? No one can ever know. But history reaffirms once again the great responsibility of science – in this case the responsibility of the “ignorant” humanities. If anyone believes that the humanities do not have a future, it is good to read again how 70 years ago a meeting between Thomas Aquinas and computers formed the basis of a revolution in digital communication. But from now on, the role and responsibility of the humanist will not only be to preserve and interpret the signs of the past, but to engage critically with, and where necessary unmask, the technological, political and social discourses that are shaping our knowledge, memories, and consciousness.

This article was translated by Desmond Schmidt.

Note

[1] Selected responses to the question “How do you define DH?” from Day of DH 2012. Accessed from http://archive.artsrn.ualberta.ca/Day-of-DH-2012/dh/index.html.

References

Anyadike, Obi (2016). Spies Sans Frontières? How CIA-linked Palantir is gaining ground in the aid industry (and why some humanitarians are worried). IRIN, March 7, 2016. Accessed from https://www.irinnews.org/investigations/2016/03/07/spies-sans-fronti%C3%A8res.

Collins, Terry (2016). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos joins Pentagon innovation board. CNet, July 28, 2016. Accessed from https://www.cnet.com/news/jeff-bezos-amazon-blue-origin-pentagon-ash-carter-eric-schmidt-google/.

Galloway, Alexander R. (2004). Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.

Gellman, Barton – Soltani, Ashkan (2013). NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say. The Washington Post, October 30, 2013. Accessed from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html.

Jones, Steven E. (2016). Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing. The Priest and the Punched Cards. London, Routledge.

Orlandi, Tito (2010). Informatica testuale. Teoria e prassi. Roma-Bari, Laterza.

Perri, Antonio (2009). Al di là della tecnologia, la scrittura. Il caso Unicode. Annali dell’Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Vol. II, pp. 725-748.

Pressman, Jessica (2014). Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Rockwell, Geoffrey and Fiormonte, Domenico (2017). Palantir: Reading the Surveillance Thing. Critical Software Stories as a Way of the Digital Humanities. Paper presented at the AIUCD 2017 Conference, University of La Sapienza, Rome, January 26-28, 2017.

Steiner, George (1998). After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Stiegler, Bernard (2006). Anamnesis and Hypomnesis. The Memories of Desire. In Armand, L. and Bradley, A. ed., Technicity. Prague, Litteraria Pragensia, pp. 15-41. Online version. Accessed from http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis.

Author

Domenico Fiormonte (PhD University of Edinburgh) is currently a lecturer in the Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Political Sciences at University Roma Tre. In 1996 he created one of the first online resources on textual variation (www.digitalvariants.org). He has edited and co-edited a number of collections of digital humanities texts, and has published books and articles on digital philology, new media writing, text encoding, and cultural criticism of DH. His latest publication is The Digital Humanist. A critical inquiry (Punctum 2015) with Teresa Numerico and Francesca Tomasi. His current research interests are moving towards the creation of new tools and methodologies for promoting interdisciplinary dialogue in the humanities (http://www.newhumanities.org).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-digital-humanities-from-father-busa-to-edward-snowden

August 2017 Newsletter

Admin — 2017-10-09T14:48:24Z

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
Elonnai Hickok wrote a blog post which provided a high level comparison of the 2017 and 2015 DNA Profiling Bill - calling out positive changes, remaining issues, and missing provisions. Rohini Lakshane wrote a blog post on dataset for patent requirements and complex products. The dataset has been released under the Creative Commons-Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License. A Marathi Wikipedia workshop was held in Sangli, Maharashtra. Subodh Kulkarni shared the developments in a blog post. In an emphatic endorsement of the right to privacy, a nine judge constitutional bench unanimously upheld a fundamental right to privacy. The events leading to this bench began during the hearings in the ongoing Aadhaar case, when in August 2015, Mukul Rohatgi, the then Attorney General stated that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy. CIS gave its statement on right to privacy judgment.

CIS in the news:

Privacy laws: Alternatives to consent (Livemint; August 1, 2017).
The rise of India’s typography community (Susanna Myrtle Lazarus; Hindu, August 4, 2017).
UNESCO Internet Universality Indicators consulted at the 8th Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (UNESCO, August 9, 2017).
Aadhaar may be made must for market investments: Good to curb laundering but what about data security? (Bindisha Sarang; August 10, 2017).
Privacy is now a right in India. Here's what that means for the tech industry (Rishi Iyengar, CNN Tech, August 29, 2017).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Aadhar: Privacy is not a unidimensional concept (Amber Sinha; Economic Times; July 23, 2017).
A New Telecom Policy that Works (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; August 2, 2017).
Should an Inability to Precisely Define Privacy Render It Untenable as a Right? (Amber Sinha; The Wire; August 2, 2017).
Here’s why we need a lot more discussion on India’s new DNA Profiling Bill (Elonnai Hickok; August 21, 2017).
Infographic: The Impending Right to Privacy Judgment (Amber Sinha and Pooja Saxena; The Wire; August 22, 2017).
Digital native: You are not alone (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; August 27, 2017).

►Pervasive Technologies

Dataset for "Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products: An Empirical Assessment of India's Form 27 Practice and Compliance" (Rohini Lakshané; August 17, 2017).

►Wikipedia

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

Blog Entries

Marathi Wikipedia Workshop in Sangli, Maharashtra (Subodh Kulkarni; August 1, 2017).
Wikipedia Workshop on Template Creation and Modification Conducted in Bengaluru (Tito Dutta; August 10, 2017).
Telugu Wikisource Workshop (Pavan Santhosh; August 15, 2017).

-----------------------------------
Internet Governance
-----------------------------------

►Privacy

Blog Entries

High Level Comparison and Analysis of the Use and Regulation of DNA Based Technology Bill 2017 (Elonnai Hickok; August 4, 2017).

-----------------------------------

Telecom
-----------------------------------
CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to 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

A New Telecom Policy That Works (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; August 2, 2017).

-----------------------------------

► Follow us elsewhere

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

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/august-2017-newsletter

CIS Statement on Right to Privacy Judgment

amber — 2017-08-31T18:13:14Z

In an emphatic endorsement of the right to privacy, a nine judge constitutional bench unanimously upheld a fundamental right to privacy. The events leading to this bench began during the hearings in the ongoing Aadhaar case, when in August 2015, Mukul Rohatgi, the then Attorney General stated that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy.

reliance was on two Supreme Court judgments in MP Sharma v Satish Chandra (1954) and Kharak Singh v State of Uttar Pradesh (1962): both cases, decided by eight- and six-judge benches respectively, denied the existence of a constitutional right to privacy. As the subsequent judgments which upheld the right to privacy were by smaller benches, he claimed that MP Sharma and Kharak Singh still prevailed over them, until they were overruled by a larger bench. This landmark judgment was in response to a referral order to clear the confusion over the status of privacy as a right.

We, at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) welcome this judgement and applaud the depth and scope of the Supreme Court’s reasoning. CIS has been producing research on the different aspects of the right to privacy and its implications for the last seven years and had the privilege of serving on the Justice AP Shah Committee and contributing to the Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy.[1] We are honoured that some of our research has also been cited by the judgment.[2] Such judicial recognition is evidence of the impact sound research can have on policymaking.

In the course of a 547 page judgment, the bench affirmed the fundamental nature of the right to privacy reading it into the values of dignity and liberty. The judgment is instructive in its reference to scholarly works and jurisprudence not only in India but other legal systems such as USA, South Africa, EU and UK, while recognising a broad right to privacy with various dimensions across spatial, informational and decisional spheres. We note with special appreciation that women’s bodily integrity and citizens’ sexual orientation are among those aspects of privacy that were clearly recognised in the judgment. For researchers studying privacy and its importance, this judgment is of great value as it provides clear reasoning to reject oft-quoted arguments which are used to deny privacy’s significance. The judgement is also cognizant of the implications of the digital age and emphasise the need for a robust data protection framework.

The right to privacy has been read into into Article 21 (Right to life and liberty), and Part III (Chapter on Fundamental Rights) of the Constitution. This means that any limitation on the right in the form of reasonable restrictions must not only satisfy the tests evolved under Article 21, but where loss of privacy leads to infringement on other rights, such as chilling effects of surveillance on free speech, the tests for constitutionality under those provisions for also be satisfied by the limiting action. This provides a broad protection to citizens’ privacy which may not be easily restricted. We expect that this judgment will have far reaching impacts, not just with respect to the immediate Aadhaar case, but also to in a score of other matters such as protection of sexual choice by decriminalising Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, oversight of statutory search and seizure provisions such as Section 132 of the Income Tax Act, personal data collection and processing practices by both state and private actors and mass surveillance programmes in the interest of national security.

As this judgment comes in response to a referral order, the judges were not dealing with any questions of fact to ground the legal principles in. Subsequent judgments which deal with privacy will apply these principles and further evolve the contours of this right on a case-by-case basis. For now, we welcome this judgment and look forward to its consistent application in the future.

[1]. http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/genrep/rep_privacy.pdf

[2]. CIS was quoted in the judgement on footnote 46, page 33 and 34: http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/pdf/LU/ALL%20WP(C)%20No.494%20of%202012%20Right%20to%20Privacy.pdf The quote is " Illustratively, the Centre for Internet and Society has two interesting articles tracing the origin of privacy within Classical Hindu Law and Islamic Law. See Ashna Ashesh and Bhairav Acharya ,“Locating Constructs of Privacy within Classical Hindu Law”, The Centre for Internet and Society, available at https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/loading-constructs-of-privacy-within-classical-hindu-law. See also Vidushi Marda and Bhairav Acharya, “Identifying Aspects of Privacy in Islamic Law”, The Centre for Internet and Society, available at https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/identifying-aspects-of-privacy-in-islamic-law " Further, research commissioned by CIS cited in the judgment includes a reference in page 201 footnote 319, "Bhairav Acharya, “The Four Parts of Privacy in India”, Economic & Political Weekly (2015), Vol. 50 Issue 22, at page 32."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-statement-on-right-to-privacy-judgment

Privacy is not a unidimensional concept

amber — 2017-08-07T08:02:20Z

Right to privacy is important not only for our negotiations with the information age but also to counter the transgressions of a welfare state. A robust right to privacy is essential for all citizens in India to defend their individual autonomy in the face of invasive state actions purportedly for the public good. The ruling of this nine-judge bench will have far-reaching impact on the extent and scope of rights available to us all.

This article, written by Amber Sinha was published in the Economic Times on July 23, 2017.

In a disappointing case of judicial evasion by the apex court, it has taken over 600 days since a reference order passed in August 11, 2015, for this bench to be constituted. Over two days of arguments, the counsels for the petitioners have presented before the court why the right to privacy, despite not finding a mention in the Constitution of India, is a fundamental right essential to a person’s dignity and liberty, and must be read into not one but multiple articles of the Constitution. The government will make its arguments in the coming week.

One must wonder why we are debating the contours of the right to privacy, which 40 years of jurisprudence had lulled us into believing we already had. The answer to that can be found in a series of hearings in the Aadhaar case that began in 2012. Justice KS Puttaswamy, a former Karnataka High Court judge, filed a petition before the Supreme Court, questioning the validity of the Aadhaar project due its lack of legislative basis (since then the Aadhaar Act was passed in 2016) and its transgressions on our fundamental rights. Over time, a number of other petitions also made their way to the apex court, challenging different aspects of the Aadhaar project. Since then, five different interim orders by the Supreme Court have stated that no person should suffer because they do not have an Aadhaar number. Aadhaar, according to the court, could not be made mandatory to avail benefits and services from government schemes. Further, the court has limited the use of Aadhaar to specific schemes: LPG, PDS, MGNREGA, National Social Assistance Programme, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojna and EPFO.

The real spanner in the works in the progress of this case was the stand taken by Mukul Rohatgi, then attorney general of India who, in a hearing before the court in July 2015, stated that there is no constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy. His reliance was on two Supreme Court judgments in MP Sharma v Satish Chandra (1954) and Kharak Singh v State of Uttar Pradesh (1962): both cases, decided by eight- and six-judge benches respectively, denied the existence of a constitutional right to privacy. As the subsequent judgments which upheld the right to privacy were by smaller benches, Rohatgi claimed that MP Sharma and Kharak Singh still prevailed over them, until they were overruled by a larger bench.

The reference to a larger bench has since delayed the entire matter, even as a number of government schemes have made Aadhaar mandatory. This reading of privacy as a unidimensional concept by the courts is, with due respect, erroneous. Privacy, as a concept, includes within its scope, spatial, familial, informational and decisional aspects. We all have a legitimate expectation of privacy in our private spaces, such as our homes, and in our personal relationships. Similarly, we must be able to exercise some control over how personal data, like our financial information, are disseminated. Most importantly, privacy gives us the space to make autonomous choices and decisions without external interference. All these dimensions of privacy must stand as distinct rights. In MP Sharma, the court rejected a certain aspect of the right of privacy by refusing to acknowledge a right against search and seizure. This, in no way prevented the court, even in the form of a smaller bench, from ruling on any other aspects of privacy, including those that are relevant to the Aadhaar case.

The limited referral to this bench means that the court will have to rule on the status of privacy and its possible limitations in isolation, without even going into the details of the Aadhaar case (based on the nature of protection that this bench accords to privacy, the petitioners and defendants in the Aadhaar case will have to argue afresh on whether the project does impede on this most fundamental right). There are no facts of the case to ground the legal principles in, and defining the contours of a right can be a difficult exercise. The court must be wary of how any limits they put on the right may be used in future. Equally, it is important to articulate that any limitations on the right to privacy due to competing interests such as national security and public interest must be imposed only when necessary and always be proportionate.

It will not be enough for the court to merely state that we have a constitutional right to privacy. They would be well advised to cut through the muddle of existing privacy jurisprudence, and unequivocally establish the various facets of the right. Without that, we may not be able to withstand the modern dangers of surveillance, denial of bodily integrity and self-determination through forcible collection of information. The nine judges, in their collective wisdom, must not only ensure that we have a right to privacy, but also clearly articulate a robust reading of this right capable of withstanding the growing interferences with our autonomy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/privacy-is-not-a-unidimensional-concept

July 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-08-23T02:03:19Z

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
In an article published in the Huffington Post on July 1, 2017, Nirmita Narasimhan stated that imposing taxes on assistive devices is unfair. It is unconscionable that disability aids and assistive technology are considered a luxury and taxed at a higher rate than rough semi-precious stones or cashew nuts. A research paper on patent working requirements and complex products in India authored by Prof Jorge L. Contreras, University of Utah, and Rohini Lakshané, CIS has been accepted for publication in the Jindal Global Law School Law Review 2017. Negotiators from 16 countries met in Hyderabad for discussing a free trade agreement titled Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Anubha Sinha along with Arul George Scaria reported this in an article published by Live Law.in. Supreme Court of India while dismissing an appeal by the Indian Reprographic Rights Organization ruled that there was no copyright infringement and no licence was required since the activities fell under the education exception in Indian copyright law. In an article published by EIFL, Anubha Sinha discusses the judgment and what it means for access to educational materials in India. Odia Wikipedians, in conjunction with Indian Athletics Federation and Sports and Youth Services collaborated to document the 2017 Asian Athletics Championships. Hundreds of photos were uploaded and new Wikipedia content added to inform the event’s fans, wrote Sailesh Patnaik and Jnanaranjan Sahu in a blog post. As recently as May 27, 2016, the General Data Protection Regulation (REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 was adopted The Data Protection Directive (1995/46/EC) will be replaced by this Regulation. It is expected that under this Regulation data privacy will be strengthened. Aditi Chaturvedi analyses the developments in a report.

CIS in the news:

UIDAI declining multiple requests by police to share Indian citizens’ biometrics (Justin Lee; Biometrics; July 4, 2017).
Act now to protect yourself against future ransomware attacks (Sanjay Kumar Singh; Business Standard; July 5, 2017).
Reliance Jio data leaked on website : report (Livemint; July 10, 2017).
Supreme Court sets up constitution bench to hear Aadhaar privacy issues (Priyanka Mittal; Livemint; July 12, 2017).
Centre to form panel to 'encrypt' MGNREGA-DBT database and prevent leaks (Sanjeeb Mukherjee; Business Standard; July 14, 2017).
Calls for law change after Indians left in dark over data leaks (Rahul Bhatia and Sankalp Phartiyal; Reuters; July 14, 2017).
Indians Call For More Stringent Data Protection Laws (PYMTNS; July 17, 2017).
Social Activist Alleges Threat By Police Officer Over Possession of Aadhaar (Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar; Wire; July 16, 2017).

Aadhaar privacy: Key issues that all Aadhaar card holders should bear in mind (Business Today, July 19, 2017).
Data in the open makes it easy for cyber criminals (Kiran Parashar KM; New Indian Express; July 26, 2017).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Why GST Is A Step Backward For The Disabled (Nirmita Narasimhan; Huffington Post; July 1, 2017).
Course Packs for Education Ruled Legal in India (Anubha Sinha; EIFL; July 12, 2017).
Digital native: Not only words (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 16, 2017).
Aadhar: Privacy is not a unidimensional concept (Amber Sinha; Economic Times; July 23, 2017).
RCEP IP Chapter: A Serious Threat to Access to Knowledge/ Cultural Goods? (Arul George Scaria and Anubha Sinha; July 27, 2017).
Digital native: Ever on the go (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 30, 2017).

-------------------------------------
Accessibility & Inclusion
-------------------------------------
India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

Article

Why GST Is A Step Backward For The Disabled (Nirmita Narasimhan; Huffington Post; July 1, 2017).

►Pervasive Technologies and Copyright

Research Paper

Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products: An Empirical Assessment of India's Form 27 Practice and Compliance (Jorge L. Contreras and Rohini Lakshané; SSRN and Jindal Global Law School Review; July 17, 2017).

Participation in Event

19th RCEP Meeting (Organized by Ministry of Commerce, Government of India; July 17 - 28, 2017; Hyderabad). Anubha Sinha participated in the meeting.

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Note: The events were organized earlier but reports were published in July 2017:

Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Internship (Manasa Rao and Ananth Subray; July 5, 2017).
Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Faculty Orientation Report (Ananth Subray; July 7, 2017).
How It Came To Be: Wiki Loves Uniformed Services (Krishna Chaitanya Velaga; July 10, 2017).
Tallapaka Pada Sahityam is now on Wikisource (Pavan Santhosh; July 10, 2017).
Thematic Edit-a-thon at Yashawantrao Chavan Institute of Science, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; July 11, 2017).
Asian Athletics Championships 2017 Edit-a-thon (Sailesh Patnaik and Jnanaranjan Sahu; July 31, 2017).

-----------------------------------

Internet Governance
-----------------------------------

►Privacy

Blog Entry

Data Protection: Understanding the General Data Protection Regulation (Aditi Chaturvedi; July 4, 2017).

Participation in Event

IViR Summer Course on Privacy Law and Policy (Organized by the University of Amsterdam; July 3 - 7, 2017; Amsterdam). Amber Sinha attended the course.

►Free Speech and Expression and Cyber Security

Participation in Events

OHD on Consultation Paper on Net Neutrality (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; July 25, 2017). Pranesh Prakash was a speaker.
UNESCO Multistakeholder consultation at 8th Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) (Organized by UNESCO; Bangkok; July 26 - 29, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker. Vidhushi Marda also participated in the event.
Cybersecurity Workshop: Spotlight On GCCS 2017 (Organized by Global Partners Digital (GPD) and the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi, in collaboration with Digital Empowerment Foundation, Digital Asia Hub and Open Net Korea; Bangkok; July 25 - 27, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker. Udbhav Tiwari and Vidushi Marda participated in the event.

-----------------------------------
Telecom
-----------------------------------
CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to 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:

Participation in Event

Workshop on Public Open Wi-Fi Pilot (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; July 25, 2017). Pranesh Prakash was a speaker.

Event Organized

Dr. Prerna Prabhakar - Impact of Digitisation of Land Records in Rural India (CIS, New Delhi; July 7, 2017).

-----------------------------------

► Follow us elsewhere

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

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2017-newsletter

Aadhar: Privacy is not a unidimensional concept

amber — 2017-08-23T01:50:19Z

Right to privacy is important not only for our negotiations with the information age but also to counter the transgressions of a welfare state. A robust right to privacy is essential for all Indian citizens to defend their individual autonomy in the face of invasive state actions purportedly for the public good.

The article was published in the Economic Times on July 23, 2017.

The ruling of this nine-judge bench will have far-reaching impact on the extent and scope of rights available to us all. In a disappointing case of judicial evasion by the apex court, it has taken over 600 days since a reference order was passed in August 11, 2015, for this bench to be constituted. Over two days of arguments, the counsels for the petitioners have presented before the court why the right to privacy, despite not finding a mention in the Constitution of India, is a fundamental right essential to a person’s dignity and liberty, and must be read into not one but multiple articles of the Constitution. The government will make its arguments in the coming week.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-times-july-23-2017-amber-sinha-aadhar-privacy-is-not-a-unidimensional-concept

Social Activist Alleges Threat By Police Officer Over Possession of Aadhaar

Admin — 2017-07-20T14:31:12Z

Social activist Shabnam Hashmi recorded a policeman telling her those without address proof and Aadhaar could be “eliminated”.

The article by Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar was published in the Wire on July 16, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Well-known social activist Shabnam Hashmi held a press conference to say she was threatened on the telephone by a police officer at the Lajpat Nagar police station warning her that the government had launched a ‘surround and eliminate’ campaign against people whose addresses are not known and who do not possess Aadhaar numbers or cards. This is now a standing instruction to all police stations, Hashmi was told. Moreover, the officer – accused of threatening and abusing Hashmi when she called him on the night of July 14 to know why the husband of a woman, who learns stitching at a training centre run by the NGO Pehchan at Jaitpur in south-east Delhi, had been summoned at a late hour – insisted that police personnel were well within their rights to act in this way.

The police may brush aside this assertion as the concerned officer’s personal opinion, or they may deny the veracity of the conversation, which Hashmi recorded and shared with the media; but she and other anti-Aadhaar activists say the interaction raises questions about the consequences – intended or unintended – of the Centre’s stress on making Aadhaar mandatory for the personal liberty and civil rights of ordinary residents.

Many Aadhaar critics have, in the past, expressed the fear that the irresponsible use or misuse of Aadhaar could lead to India becoming a ‘surveillance state’ or ‘police state’ by placing enormous discretionary powers in the hands of unscrupulous state officials.

Petitioners in SC had cautioned against misuse of Aadhaar

Earlier this year, Communist Party of India leader Binoy Viswam had filed a petition in the Supreme Court questioning the introduction of Section 139 AA of the IT Act to link Aadhaar cards with PAN cards. Subsequently, in an interview in April this year, he had noted that “the citizens are becoming instruments in the hands of the state” as “by taking fingerprints, iris scans and other details of the citizens of the country, the state is becoming the custodian of its people.” He had also expressed the fear that “the state can use this data according to its whims and fancies”.

Viswam could not have been more correct. Much before the use of data, “elements” of the state have started using the ruse of creation of data itself as a convenient tool to threaten and intimidate people and this is precisely what happened in the case of Hashmi.

Recalling the incident, Hashmi, who is the founding trustee of Pehchan, said the NGO runs a small centre in Jaitpur extension where it teaches school dropouts to appear for class 10 and 12 examinations and also runs sewing classes for women.

Hashmi said that at around 9 pm on July 14, Haseen, the husband of Mubina, one of the trainees, was summoned by a sub-inspector to the Lajpat Nagar police station regarding a complaint. When Hashmi called up the police station to find out what the summons was about, the policeman allegedly “hurled abuses”, and used “highly derogatory and uncivilised language” during the conversation.

Though Hashmi did not have a recorder in her phone at the time of the first call, she subsequently downloaded one and later recorded her conversation with the same officer.

In this conversation, the policeman is heard reasoning with Hashmi that he had not summoned Haseen at a late hour. He claimed that he used harsh language in the first conversation since she had not identified herself and had only proclaimed herself to be a social worker. It also comes across in the conversation that Hashmi had told the man in the earlier conversation that he was drunk while being on duty and that this had irked him. It emerged that the cop had got an inkling that she was recording the later conversation, because of which he apparently mellowed down.

The issue assumes significance as after declaring twice in the past that Aadhaar cannot be made mandatory for delivering services, the Supreme Court had recently upheld the validity of an Income Tax law amendment linking PAN with Aadhaar for filing tax returns.

Former Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi had argued that the government was “entitled to have identification” and that “as constituents of society people can’t claim immunity from identification.” Rohatgi had insisted that “no right is absolute, right to body is not absolute. Under extreme cases even right to life can be taken away, under due process.”

Experts have often cautioned against Aadhaar misuse

According to legal experts, the illegalities related to Aadhaar do not just end with such arguments. Writing for The Wire, Prashant Reddy T., a research associate at the School of Law, Singapore Management University, had noted that in the past couple of months the “Modi government has increasingly used its rule-making powers under various laws in a manner which is contrary to the law of the land.” He was referring to the Centre’s announcement to mandatorily link Aadhaar numbers to all non-small bank accounts, failing which, access to the bank accounts would be disabled after December 31.

“As is often the case with this government, the question now is whether this new mandatory Aadhaar requirement (and the threatened punishment) is legal,” the expert had asked.

Earlier this year, writing for the Hindustan Times, Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, and an affiliated fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, had referred to the immense potential of Aadhaar for profiling and surveillance. He had called for fundamentally altering Aadhaar, saying that if the rampant misuse of surveillance and wilful ignorance of the law by the state were anything to go by, the future looked bleak.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-wire-gaurav-vivek-bhatnagar-july-16-2017-social-activist-alleges-threat-by-police-officer-over-possession-of-aadhaar

Centre for Internet and Society

September 2017 Newsletter

Amber Sinha - The​ ​Fundamental​ ​Right​ ​to​ ​Privacy:​ ​Part​ ​II - Structure

Internet Researchers' Conference 2018 (IRC18): Offline - Call for Sessions

IRC18: Offline

Call for Sessions

Proposed Sessions (Conference Website)

Sambhaavnaa Institute of Public Policy and Politics (External Link)

IRC18: Offline

Call for Sessions

Annual Report 2016-2017

Annual Report 2015-2016

Rethinking National Privacy Principles: Evaluating Principles for India's Proposed Data Protection Law

Rethinking Privacy Principles

In our anxiety about the Blue Whale Challenge, are we missing the elephant in the room?

The Blue Whale Challenge in India

A disturbing trend

The real problem

The Digital Humanities from Father Busa to Edward Snowden

The epistemological revolution of the digital document

The social and political implications of DH

Note

References

Author

August 2017 Newsletter

CIS Statement on Right to Privacy Judgment

Privacy is not a unidimensional concept

July 2017 Newsletter

Aadhar: Privacy is not a unidimensional concept

Social Activist Alleges Threat By Police Officer Over Possession of Aadhaar

Amber Sinha - The Fundamental Right to Privacy: Part II - Structure