Centre for Internet and Society

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #ListsAsDatabase

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:20:14Z

Details of a session proposed by Ria De and Samata Biswas for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

The internet-based List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA), initiated by Dalit feminist and lawyer activist Raya Sarkar in 2017 anonymously crowd-sourced names of academics and activists who were accused of harassing women colleagues and students. While a large number of women in the academia rallied in support of the list and its motivations, it also unleashed anxieties about how the list was put together, and the kind of impact it was feared to have. Variously, it has been equated to Khap Panchayats, vigilantism, mob lynchings etc. Last month, the government of India launched an online National Database on Sexual Offenders (NDSO), which will contain the details—names, photographs, residential address, fingerprints, DNA samples, PAN and Aadhar numbers—of individuals convicted on charges of sexual offences against women and children. An associated portal, the Cyber Crime Prevention Against Women and Children (CCPWC) was also launched where citizens can enter complaints against child pornography and other sexually explicit material. Both are modes of digital enlisting through the use of new media technologies, one that is open access and therefore available for modification, co-option and critique, while the other is to be accessible only to law personnel. This two-member panel locates the list in the context of ongoing debates about the conversion of social justice and rights issues in to data repositories. We take in to account the debates on the Right to be Forgotten or the right to delist from the internet, as a specific concern raised in the Personal Data Protection Bill 2018 submitted by the Justice B.N. Krishna Committee. The Bill recognises data principals (or the individuals to whom personal data belongs) as a central component of the legal framework, and subjects data fiduciaries (or agencies seeking to collect, use and process personal data) to the free, informed and explicit consent of the data principals. Right to be Forgotten has clearly emerged as a logical extension of the demands for one’s Right to Privacy. Given that a number of logics, that of ‘naming and shaming’ of offenders, a digital list (database) as a means of communication, dissemination of information and surveillance etc. underscore both the #LoSHA and the NDSO, how do we navigate the messy terrain of human rights concerns about the freedom of speech and expression on the one hand, and the rights to privacy on the other hand? We also think about this vis-a-vis the larger issues related to the data economy and those of data ownership. We refer to studies on state-generated data on crime in India and elsewhere to understand how such data artefacts can be monopolised and processed by private and non-governmental agencies, and how they co-opt contemporary feminist politics and articulations?

We, Samata Biswas and Ria De, will present a collaborative study, organised across two 30 minute long papers, plus a 15 minute discussion time for each totalling to the mandated 90 minute session. The first paper will study the form and scope of the list as a digital artefact through a detailed analysis of the #LoSHA and the NDSO. The second paper will configure the two lists in terms of their status within the data economy.

Session Team

Ria De is pursuing her PhD in Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research was about stardom and intermediality. She is interested in popular culture, network and media studies and gender. Currently, she is interested in the women’s movements in the Indian film industries.

Samata Biswas teaches English Literature at Bethune College, Kolkata, India. Her doctoral research was about body cultures in contemporary India, analysing fitness, weight loss, and diet discourses as present in popular media as well as through narratives of participants. She is interested in visual culture, gender studies, and literature and migration. At present, she is trying to map Kolkata as a sanitary city, focusing on access to clean sanitation or the lack thereof. She runs the blog ‘Refugee Watch Online’. Her latest publication is on “Haldia: Logistics and Its Other(s)” in Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Ranabir Samaddar (Edited) Logistical Asia: The Labour of Making a World Region. (Palgrave Mcmillan, 2018)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listsasdatabase

Workshop on Cybersecurity Illustrations

Admin — 2018-11-13T14:34:17Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/workshop-on-cybersecurity-illustrations.pdf

October 2018 Newsletter

Admin — 2018-11-15T02:44:58Z

Highlights

Published an article titled "Digital Technology Engaging Pedagogy through Hindi Wikipedia - A Case Study" in International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities. The authors of the article were Hindi faculty members of Christ University. Ananth Subray from Centre for Internet & Society provided research assistance.
Ananth Subray wrote an article "History of Wikipedia Education programme at Christ University" which has given an insight of Christ Wikipedia Education Program, how students are involved in different capacities in the program and shares the best practices of the Education Program.
CIS-A2K has collaborated with Tribal Research and Training Institute (TRTI) to facilitate development of Open knowledge resources on Community Forest Resource and content development in Wikimedia projects with community participation. These contents will become a part of "Van Bodh Knowledge repository".
Elonnai Hickok and Arindrajit Basu co-authored a research paper that was published as part of the Briefings from the Research and Advisory Group (RAG) of the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) for the Full Commission Meeting held at Bratislava in 2018.
Arindrajit Basu in an article published by Oxford Human Rights Hub has argued that artificial Intelligence offers the potential to augment many existing bureaucratic processes and improve human capacity, if implemented in accordance with principles of the rule of law and international human rights norms.
Agnidipto Tarafder and Arindrajit Basu in an article published in Socio-Legal Review has traced the journey of the recent 377 (Navtej Johar v Union of India) and assessed its societal implications.
CIS invites applications for *three Research Fellow positions* to undertake field studies of platform-work in two cities, including Bangalore and another city (to be decided). The project seeks to produce a comparative understanding of at least two different kinds of platform-work as unfolding across Indian cities. Each fellow will be responsible for one field study (one form of work in one city) based on their language fluency and research experience.

Articles

377 Bites the Dust: Unpacking the long and winding road to the judicial decriminalization of homosexuality in India (Agnidipto Tarafder and Arindrajit Basu; Socio Legal Review; October 11, 2018).
Digital Native: Time to Walk the Talk (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; October 14, 2018).
Why Data Localisation Might Lead To Unchecked Surveillance (Pranesh Prakash; Bloomberg Quint; October 15, 2018).
Discrimination in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Arindrajit Basu; Oxford Human Rights Hub; October 23, 2018).
Digital Native: Hashtag Fatigue (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; October 28, 2018).
Lessons from US response to cyber attacks (Arindrajit Basu; Hindu Businessline; October 30, 2018). The article was edited by Elonnai Hickok.

Media Coverage

Gmail users beware while giving access (Surupasree Sarmmah; Deccan Herald; October 4, 2018).
Are online shows obscene? (Anila Kurian; Deccan Herald; October 10, 2018).
Internet services not to be affected as DNS servers undergo update (Hindustan Times; October 12, 2018).
Spending too much time on social media? Tech abuse may lead to mental health issues (Divya Shekhar; Economic Times; October 13, 2018).
Sales of surveillance cameras are soaring, raising questions about privacy (Rahul Sachitanand; Economic Times; October 14, 2018).
Not Surprised by Indian govt's data localisation directives: Michael Dell (Anand J.; VC Circle; October 17, 2018).
Factcheck: No, phones of users who provided only Aadhaar as proof of identity won’t be disconnected (Kanishk Karan; Scroll.in; October 18, 2018).
Rural Indians don’t trust messages on WhatsApp blindly: Survey (Vidhi Choudhary; Hindustan Times; October 19, 2018).
Brazil’s experience a red flag for WhatsApp in Indian polls, say experts (Vidhi Choudhary; Hindustan Times; October 21, 2018).
Reliance-Jio Users Complain Of Porn Websites Being Blocked; Company Yet To Issue Official Statement (Logical Indian; October 27, 2018).

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Access to Knowledge
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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.

►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).

Peer Reviewed Article

Digital Technology Engaging Pedagogy through Hindi Wikipedia - A Case Study (Dr. George Joseph,Dr. Sebastian K.A, and Kavitha A with research assistance from Ananth Subray; International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities, Volume 6, Issue 8, August 2018).
.

Blog Entries

South India Copyright Workshop (Subodh Kulkarni; October 21, 2018).
History of Wikipedia Education programme at Christ (Deemed to be University) (Ananth Subray; Wikimedia Blog; October 29, 2018).

Event Organized

Van Bodh Workshop for content development on Forest Resources at Gadchiroli (Co-organized by TRTI and CIS-A2K; Gadchiroli; October 2 - 5, 2018).

Participation in Event

Community Toolkit for Greater Diversity (Organized by Wikipedia Community; Mandrem, Goa; October 5 - 7, 2018). P.P. Sneha participated in the event.

►Copyright and Patent

Media Coverage

5th Global Congress On IP And The Public Interest: Successes, Strategies Highlighted (David Branigan; Intellectual Property Watch; October 3, 2018).

Participation in Events

KEI Seminar on "Appraising the WIPO Broadcast Treaty and its Implications on Access to Culture" (Organized by KEI; Geneva; October 3 - 4, 2018). Anubha Sinha spoke on the panel titled "Rationale, Beneficiaries and Scope (of the Treaty)".
Stakeholders Consultation on draft WIPO Treaty to Protect Broadcasting Organization (Organized by Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Govt. of India; Copyright Office, New Delhi; October 23, 2018). Anubha Sinha participated in the meeting.

►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

Panel Discussion on Equitable Access to Knowledge (Organized by DST Centre for Policy Research (IISc); Bangalore; October 23, 2018). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist and moderator at the event.

Media Coverage

Sting job by Hyderabad scientist exposes fake journals (Business Standard; October 11, 2018).

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Internet Governance
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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

Participation in Events

Confidentiality of Communications and Privacy of Data in the Digital Age (Organized by INCLO and Privacy International; Human Rights Council 39th ordinary session; September 25, 2018). Elonnai Hickok participated in the event.
Meetings of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 'IT Security techniques' (Organized by Standards Norway with support from NTNU, Microsoft, Telenor, et.al.; Gjøvik, Norway; September 30 - October 4, 2018). Gurshabad Grover participated in the meetings.
State of Work in India (Organized by Bangalore International Centre, TERI and Azim Premji University; Bangalore; October 3, 2018).
Technology Foresight Group Tandem Research's AI policy lab on the theme AI and Environment (Organized by Tandem Research; Goa; October 5, 2018). Shweta Mohandas attended a roundtable discussion on artificial intelligence and environment.
Indian Feminist Judgment Project Workshop (Organized by Jindal Industries; New Delhi; October 6 - 7, 2018). Swaraj Paul Barooah participated in the discussions.
Community Standards Roundtable Conversations (Organized by Facebook, School of Media & Cultural Studies, and Tata Institute of Social Sciences; Bangalore; October 7, 2018). Ambika Tandon participated in the roundtable discussions.
Surveillance Stories: Optimizing rights and governance (Organized by National Centre for Biological Sciences; Bangalore; October 16, 2018). Sunil Abraham gave a talk.
Debating Ethics: Dignity and Respect in Data Driven Life (Organized by International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners; Brussels; October 24 - 25, 2018). Elonnai Hickok was a speaker in the panel "Move Slower and Fix Things".

►Cyber Security

Research Paper

Conceptualizing an International Security Regime for Cyberspace (Elonnai Hickok and Arindrajit Basu; October 26, 2018).

Event Organized

Roundtable on Cyber-security and the Private Sector (Omidyar Network Office; Bangalore; October 17, 2018).

Participation in Event

CyFy 2018 (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; New Delhi; October 3 - 5, 2018).

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Telecom
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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

Policies & the Public Interest (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; October 4, 2018 and Organizing India Blogspot; October 4, 2018).

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Researchers at Work
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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:

Job

Call for Research Fellows - Field Studies of Platform-Work: The Research Fellows will be associated with CIS from December 2018 to June 2019, undertake fieldwork, participate in two research workshops, and prepare an Ethnographic Report based on the fieldwork.

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About CIS
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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/october-2018-newsletter

Surveillance Stories: Optimizing rights and governance

Admin — 2018-10-31T01:39:56Z

Sunil Abraham gave a talk at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore on October 16, 2018. Sunil used a series of stories to explain how surveillance works and fails in the context of theft, murder, insider trading, terrorism, demonetization and encounter killings.

These stories were used to explore multiple technical solutions for solving the “surveillance optimization problem”. Policy makers have to simultaneously maximize various rights — the right to privacy, the right to transparency, the right to free speech — and uphold the imperatives of the nation state: national security, law enforcement and effective governance.

Two decades ago, Lawrence Lessig introduced a socioeconomic theory of regulation called the ‘pathetic dot theory’, which discusses how individuals in a society are regulated by four forces — law, code or technical infrastructure, market and social norms. The talk will explore how these four regulatory options contribute to solving the surveillance optimization problem.

This was published on the website of National Centre for Biological Sciences

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/surveillance-stories-optimizing-rights-and-governance

Discrimination in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Arindrajit Basu — 2018-10-26T14:47:57Z

The dawn of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been celebrated by both government and industry across the globe. AI offers the potential to augment many existing bureaucratic processes and improve human capacity, if implemented in accordance with principles of the rule of law and international human rights norms. Unfortunately, AI-powered solutions have often been implemented in ways that have resulted in the automation, rather than mitigation, of existing societal inequalities.

This was originally published by Oxford Human Rights Hub on October 23, 2018

Image Credit: Sarla Catt via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

In the international human rights law context, AI solutions pose a threat to norms which prohibit discrimination. International Human Rights Law recognizes that discrimination may take place in two possible ways, directly or indirectly. Direct discrimination occurs when an individual is treated less favourably than someone else similarly situated on one of the grounds prohibited in international law, which, as per the Human Rights Committee, includes race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Indirect discrimination occurs when a policy, rule or requirement is ‘outwardly neutral’ but has a disproportionate impact on certain groups that are meant to be protected by one of the prohibited grounds of discrimination. A clear example of indirect discrimination recognized by the European Court of Human Rights arose in the case of DH&Ors v Czech Republic. The ECtHR struck down an apparently neutral set of statutory rules, which implemented a set of tests designed to evaluate the intellectual capability of children but which resulted in an excessively high proportion of minority Roma children scoring poorly and consequently being sent to special schools, possibly because the tests were blind to cultural and linguistic differences. This case acts as a useful analogy for the potential disparate impacts of AI and should serve as useful precedent for future litigation against AI-driven solutions.

Indirect discrimination by AI may occur at two stages. First is the usage of incomplete or inaccurate training data that results in the algorithm processing data that may not accurately reflect reality. Cathy O’Neil explains this using a simple example. There are two types of crimes-those that are ‘reported’ and others that are only ‘found’ if a policeman is patrolling the area. The first category includes serious crimes such as murder or rape while the second includes petty crimes such as vandalism or possession of illicit drugs in small quantities. Increased police surveillance in areas in US cities where Black or Hispanic people reside lead to more crimes being ‘found’ there. Thus, data is likely to suggest that these communities commit a higher proportion of crimes than they actually do – indirect discrimination that has been empirically been shown through research published by Pro Publica.

Discrimination may also occur at the stage of data processing, which is done through a metaphorical ‘black-box’ that accepts inputs and generates outputs without revealing to the human developer how the data was processed. This conundrum is compounded by the fact that the algorithms are often utilised to solve an amorphous problem-which attempts to break down a complex question into a simple answer. An example is the development of ‘risk profiles’ of individuals for the determination of insurance premiums. Data might show that an accident is more likely to take place in inner cities due to more densely packed populations in these areas. Racial and ethnic minorities tend to reside more in these areas, which means that algorithms could learn that minorities are more likely to get into accidents, thereby generating an outcome (‘risk profile’) that indirectly discriminates on grounds of race or ethnicity.

It would be wrong to ignore discrimination, both direct and indirect, that occurs as a result of human prejudice. The key difference between that and discrimination by AI lies in the ability of other individuals to compel the decision-maker to explain the factors that lead to the outcome in question and testing its validity against principles of human rights. The increasing amounts of discretion and, consequently, power being delegated to autonomous systems mean that principles of accountability which audit and check indirect discrimination need to be built into the design of these systems. In the absence of these principles, we risk surrendering core tenets of human rights law to the whims of an algorithmically crafted reality.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/oxford-human-rights-hub-arindrajit-basu-october-23-2018-discrimination-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence

Sales of surveillance cameras are soaring, raising questions about privacy

Admin — 2018-10-16T14:22:55Z

The Telangana government wants more eyes on the streets to upgrade Hyderabad’s safety. It has asked enterprises, public sectors, residential associations and individuals to install closed-circuit television cameras (CCTVs) in and around their premises.

The article by Rahul Sachitanand was published in Economic Times on October 14, 2018. Elonnai Hickok was quoted.

More than a lakh CCTVs are expected to be installed across the city in the next few years. The initiative is part of the Nenu Saitham (Telugu for Me Too) project — being promoted by Hyderabad Police, which will monitor the feed. To ensure that lowquality CCTVs are not installed and the project is sustainable, the police has asked citizens to only buy from selected vendors.

With this move, launched in November 2017, the Telangana govt joins a growing list of governments, corporations, educational institutes, residential buildings and small businesses across the country that are buying such technology.

According to industry estimates, over a million surveillance units were sold every month a couple of years ago. Now it is two million. The Indian market is growing 20-25% annually, say experts. Frost & Sullivan says the security & surveillance market was worth Rs 8,200 crore in FY2017, reached Rs 11,000 crore in FY2018 and is expected to touch Rs 20,000 crore in FY2020.

The rise in CCTV coverage can also be observed anecdotally. There’s a steady uptick in CCTV clips circulating on Whatsapp, capturing crimes or funny events that would otherwise have gone undocumented. Many of the sensational crimes recently, including multiple incidents of murder in Tamil Nadu, were captured on CCTV cameras, distilling the pure horror of those moments on our mobile screens, and also offering valuable proof to nail the culprits.

The surveillance and security boom is fed by several companies, ranging from homegrown firms such as CP Plus to joint ventures such as Prama Hikvision to multinationals such as Bosch, Panasonic, Honeywell and Axis. The Telangana project, for example, helped Sweden-based Axis Communications widen its India market. It has already installed 1,500 cameras, and more will be installed soon. Other state governments have or are in the process of placing orders.

The Swedish company says it recently installed cameras and associated technology across a range of large corporate and government establishments across India. “We are at the beginning of a five-year boom cycle for these devices,” says Sudhindra Holla, sales director (India & Saarc), Axis Communications. “We are catering to a rush of orders ranging from large companies with complex security infrastructure to deals from government agencies in small towns such as Nanded and Kolhapur.”

Multiple factors are driving the growth in the CCTV segment, says Manu Tiwari, programme manager (automation and electronics practice), Frost and Sullivan. A strong government push to enhance security; purchases for initiatives such as the Smart City project, which covers 100 cities, and the Rs 2,219 crore allocated under the Nirbhaya Fund for women’s safety, which covers eight cities, are some of the growth drivers.

According to Sanjay Kaushik, managing director of security consultancy Netrika Consulting, there is a push to better use CCTV feeds to improve security across India. “While the focus hitherto has been on post facto scouting of footage to find perpetrators, organisations are now trying to be more proactive with their monitoring to spot suspicious people and packages before crimes occur.”

This could involve closely looking at footage to spot suspicious movements at places such as malls or airports or using technology to spot suspicious objects left unattended for long periods. Then, there’s also a focus on making sure the cameras are installed correctly. “Recognisability is key. Organisations are being pushed to ensure simple things like camera feeds are free of obstructions, licence plates are visible in feeds and there is adequate lighting,” adds Kaushik. Advances in technology have ensured that CCTV systems are cheaper and more accessible.

While large enterprises had taken to such technology earlier, even smaller commercial establishments and private residents now can afford to install security systems. The prices have practically halved over the last couple of years. An entry-level camera is now available for a little over Rs 2,000. “Even the cost of an integrated solution, which was as much as Rs 40,000 to Rs 50,000 three or four years ago, is today available for as little as Rs 15,000,” says Yogesh Dutta, COO of New Delhi-based CP Plus. “A rapid increase in the number of CCTVs sellers and technicians has also helped widen access.” The devices have become popular as it helps law enforcers to tackle crime, he adds.

CP Plus’s customers include Vedanta Power and Odisha Police, which has also decided to use e-surveillance to enhance security. Frost and Sullivan says small & medium enterprises and large corporations were together the biggest end-user segments in FY18. This segment had a market share of 33%. Residential had a 28% market share; the industrial segment had 18% and the government 13%, it said. Other major end-user segments are hospitality, education and healthcare.

An increase in such surveillance, however, may be double-edged, say privacy advocates. While a blanket coverage using CCTVs may give citizens a feeling of security, India’s rudimentary legislation around who can access these feeds is a problem. Some countries such as the UK and UAE have stricter guidelines on this. Law-enforcement agencies can access such feeds while following up on their investigations, says Supreme Court lawyer Karnika Seth, without procuring a warrant. “As long as it is for this purpose, it is within the purview of the law. However, with the new judgment on privacy, anything more would be a no-go area.”

The use of CCTV can potentially impinge on the rights of an individual, says Elonnai Hickok, who heads privacy research at the Centre for Internet and Society, an advocacy outfit in Bengaluru. “Technically speaking, the feed can reveal personal information about an individual, including identity, location and daily patterns. Because the feed captures individuals in public spaces, it is not possible for people to have an opt-out option. The access and use of the data are often unclear.” Regulations are starting to address the use of CCTV imagery in some places. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, for example, has recognised that imagery that identifies an individual is personal data and thus requires lawful, fair and transparent processing.

The draft data protection bill by the Srikrishna committee also says CCTV imagery would be considered personal data. If CCTV cameras are put in place by a private actor, Hickok contends, they would need to adhere to the principles laid out in chapters II and III of the draft — which covers fair and reasonable processing, purpose limitation, collection limitation, lawful processing, notice, data quality, data storage limitation, accountability and consent.

For feeds used by the state for reasons such as public safety, the consent clause will not apply. But state actors will still need to adhere to the principles laid out in chapter II. If CCTVs are used for the purpose of prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of a crime, it will be exempt from adhering to the requirements of the bill. However, this use must be backed by a law passed in Parliament and the data cannot be retained once its purpose has been met.

There are more legal restrictions if the CCTV application is integrated with capabilities that capture biometrics. "Clear responsibilities and reasons should be enunciated, the policies should be clearly documented and publicised and, importantly, the cost and benefits should be ascertained," Hickock argues. ¡§It is important to have technical safeguards like encryption and procurement guidelines.

Legal and privacy issues aside, the commercial aspect is clearly looking bright. Prama Hikvision, a Chinese-Indian joint venture, has invested Rs 100 crore in a factory in Bhiwandi to make 500,000 cameras a month. A second factory, possibly in Telangana, is expected to go on stream soon, with a monthly capacity of 1,50,000 units. "CCTVs have gone from being used by a sliver of companies, primarily banks and jewellers, to being adopted by a much broader audience," says Ashish Dhakan, MD and CEO, Prama Hikvision. "Our client list includes companies in the sectors of transportation, power, petroleum, oil and gas and retail."

Another trend market players have spotted is a shift from analog, which used tapes to record footage, to digital systems, where recording time and storage space are not major constraints. "We see continuous enhancement to megapixel (displays) from lowresolution, improved compression technology. This allows more data, more storage capacity, and overall lowering of cost for storage recording devices," says Sharad Yadav, general manager, Honeywell Building Technologies, India. Frost and Sullivan analyst Tiwari lists emerging offerings - including intelligent video surveillance, wireless systems and higher resolution of visuals - as features that will define the next-generation devices.

But digital also comes with some dangers. As CCTV cameras go from standalone devices to being digital and connected ones, experts say there is a risk of hacking. Hackers may also be able to use the network as a gateway. This could give hackers access to much more than just the camera feed. "Cybersecurity is a constant focus for us," says Holla of Axis Communications. "While no camera is hackproof, we believe we have built enough capabilities to react to these hacks and quickly release patches to secure them."

Others such as Hickok of CIS say more safeguards are required. "Technical safeguards like encryption and procurement guidelines are also important, as has been highlighted by the UK Information Commissioner's Office," she says. Keeping the cameras safe may be as important as safeguarding the lives these devices monitor.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-rahul-sachitanand-october-14-2018-sales-of-surveillance-cameras-are-soaring-raising-questions-about-privacy

Why Data Localisation Might Lead To Unchecked Surveillance

pranesh — 2018-10-16T14:08:34Z

In recent times, there has been a rash of policies and regulations that propose that the data that Indian entities handle be physically stored on servers in India, in some cases exclusively. In other cases, only a copy needs to be stored.

The article was published in Bloomberg Quint on October 15, 2018 and also mirrored in the Quint.

In April 2018, the Reserve Bank of India put out a circular requiring that all “data relating to payment systems operated by them are stored in a system only in India” within six months. Lesser requirements have been imposed on all Indian companies’ accounting data since 2014 (the back-up of the books of account and other books that are stored electronically must be stored in India, the broadcasting sector under the Foreign Direct Investment policy, must locally store subscriber information, and the telecom sector under the Unified Access licence, may not transfer their subscriber data outside India).

The draft e-commerce policy has a wide-ranging requirement of exclusive local storage for “community data collected by Internet of Things devices in public space” and “data generated by users in India from various sources including e-commerce platforms, social media, search engines, etc.”, as does the draft e-pharmacy regulations, which stipulate that “the data generated” by e-pharmacy portals be stored only locally.

While companies such as Airtel, Reliance, PhonePe (majority-owned by Walmart) and Alibaba, have spoken up in support the government’s data localisation efforts, others like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and Mastercard have led the way in opposing it.

Just this week, two U.S. Senators wrote to the Prime Minister’s office arguing that the RBI’s data localisation regulations along with the proposals in the draft e-commerce and cloud computing policies are “key trade barriers”. In her dissenting note to the Srikrishna Committee's report, Rama Vedashree of the Data Security Council of India notes that, “mandating localisation may potentially become a trade barrier and the key markets for the industry could mandate similar barriers on data flow to India, which could disrupt the IT-BPM (information technology-business process management) industry.”

Justification For Data Localisation

What are the reasons for these moves towards data localisation?

Given the opacity of policymaking in India, many of the policies and regulations provide no justification at all. Even the ones that do, don’t provide cogent reasoning.

The RBI says it needs “unfettered supervisory access” and hence needs data to be stored in India. However, it fails to state why such unfettered access is not possible for data stored outside of India.

As long as an entity can be compelled by Indian laws to engage in local data storage, that same entity can also be compelled by that same law to provide access to their non-local data, which would be just as effective.

What if they don’t provide such access? Would they be blacklisted from operating in India, just as they would if they didn’t engage in local data storage? Is there any investigatory benefit to storing data in India? As any data forensic expert would note, chain of custody and data integrity are what are most important components of data handling in fraud investigation, and not physical access to hard drives. It would be difficult for the government to say that it will block all Google services if the company doesn’t provide all the data that Indian law enforcement agencies request from it. However, it would be facile for the RBI to bar Google Pay from operating in India if Google doesn’t provide it “unfettered supervisory access” to data.

The most exhaustive justification of data localisation in any official Indian policy document is that contained in the Srikrishna Committee’s report on data protection. The report argues that there are several benefits to data localisation:

Effective enforcement,
Avoiding reliance on undersea cables,
Avoiding foreign surveillance on data stored outside India,
Building an “Artificial Intelligence ecosystem”

Of these, the last three reasons are risible.

Not A Barrier To Surveillance

Requiring mirroring of personal data on Indian servers will not magically give rise to experts skilled in statistics, machine learning, or artificial intelligence, nor will it somehow lead to the development of the infrastructure needed for AI.

The United States and China are both global leaders in AI, yet no one would argue that China’s data localisation policies have helped it or that America’s lack of data localisation polices have hampered it.

On the question of foreign surveillance, data mirroring will not have any impact, since the Srikrishna Committee’s recommendation would not prevent companies from storing most personal data outside of India.

Even for “sensitive personal data” and for “critical personal data”, which may be required to be stored in India alone, such measures are unlikely to prevent agencies like the U.S. National Security Agency or the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters from being able to indulge in extraterritorial surveillance.

In 2013, slides from an NSA presentation that were leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the NSA’s “BOUNDLESSINFORMANT” programme collected 12.6 billion instances of telephony and Internet metadata (for instance, which websites you visited and who all you called) from India in just one month, making India one of the top 5 targets.

This shows that technically, surveillance in India is not a challenge for the NSA.

So, forcing data mirroring enhances Indian domestic intelligence agencies’ abilities to engage in surveillance, without doing much to diminish the abilities of skilled foreign intelligence agencies.

As I have noted in the past, the technological solution to reducing mass surveillance is to use decentralised and federated services with built-in encryption, using open standards and open source software.

Reducing reliance on undersea cables is, just like reducing foreign surveillance on Indians’ data, a laudable goal. However, a mandate of mirroring personal data in India, which is what the draft Data Protection Bill proposes for all non-sensitive personal data, will not help. Data will stay within India if the processing happens within India. However, if the processing happens outside of India, as is often the case, then undersea cables will still need to be relied upon.

The better way to keep data within India is to incentivise the creation of data centres and working towards reducing the cost of internet interconnection by encouraging more peering among Internet connectivity providers.

While data mirroring will not help in improving the enforcement of any data protection or privacy law, it will aid Indian law enforcement agencies in gaining easier access to personal data.

The MLAT Route

Currently, many forms of law enforcement agency requests for data have to go through onerous channels called ‘mutual legal assistance treaties’. These MLAT requests take time and are ill-suited to the needs of modern criminal investigations. However, the U.S., recognising this, passed a law called the CLOUD Act in March 2018. While the CLOUD Act compels companies like Google and Amazon, which have data stored in Indian data centres, to provide that data upon receiving legal requests from U.S. law enforcement agencies, it also enables easier access to foreign law enforcement agencies to data stored in the U.S. as long as they fulfill certain procedural and rule-of-law checks.

While the Srikrishna Committee does acknowledge the CLOUD Act in a footnote, it doesn’t analyse its impact, doesn’t provide suggestions on how India can do this, and only outlines the negative consequences of MLATs.

Further, it is inconceivable that the millions of foreign services that Indians access and provide their personal data to will suddenly find a data centre in India and will start keeping such personal data in India. Instead, a much likelier outcome, one which the Srikrishna Committee doesn’t even examine, is that many smaller web services may find such requirements too onerous and opt to block users from India, similar to the way that Indiatimes and the Los Angeles Times opted to block all readers from the European Union due to the coming into force of the new data protection law.

The government could be spending its political will on finding solutions to the law enforcement agency data access question, and negotiating solutions at the international level, especially with the U.S. government. However it is not doing so.

Given this, the recent spate of data localisation policies and regulation can only be seen as part of an attempt to increase the scope and ease of the Indian government’s surveillance activities, while India’s privacy laws still remain very weak and offer inadequate legal protection against privacy-violating surveillance. Because of this, we should be wary of such requirements, as well as of the companies that are vocal in embracing data localisation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/bloomberg-quint-pranesh-prakash-october-15-2018-why-data-localisation-might-lead-to-unchecked-surveillance

September 2018 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-10-16T06:28:42Z

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights

Wikisource is one of the trending Wikimedia projects. Many new editors and new books to Indic language Wikisource's get added over a period of time. However, new editors as well as existing editors face numerous problems while working with the content online. The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team, to help the editors, has created a Wikisource Handbook for Indian communities. CIS invites feedback to the first draft of this Handbook.
Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) participated in the 5th Global Congress on IP and Public Interest held in Washington in a big way. CIS signed on as a supporting member to the Civil Society Proposal for a Treaty on Education and Research Activities.
Sunil Abraham, in an article in the Hindustan Times, explores what leads to fake news. He has revealed that transparency regulations is the need of the hour especially for election campaigns and political advertising.
Amber Sinha, Elonnai Hickok, Udbhav Tiwari and Arindrajit Basu co-authored a blog post which examines cross-border data sharing. The authors have argued that conventional methods of compelling the presentation of evidence available for investigative agencies often fail when the evidence is not present within the territorial boundaries of the state.
Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok wrote a blog entry on usage of artificial intelligence in governance sector in India. As per research though artificial intelligence has the potential to ameliorate structural inefficiencies in governmental functions, the deployment of this technology across sub-sectors is still on the horizons.
Amber Sinha, Elonnai Hickok and Arindrajit Basu produced a research paper on the implications of artificial intelligence in India in various sectors such as health, banking, manufacturing, and governance sectors.
Artificial Intelligence in many ways is in direct conflict with traditional data protection principles and requirements including consent, purpose limitation, data minimization, retention and deletion, accountability, and transparency. Authors Elonnai Hickok and Amber Sinha have explained this in a blog entry.
The researchers@work programme has selected 10 essays, based on an open call announced in August, engaging with the thematic of "offline". The abstracts of the selected essays have been published, and the final essays will be published on the upcoming r@w blog.

Articles

India’s post-truth society (Swaraj Paul Barooah; Hindu Businessline; September 7, 2018).
Digital Native: #MemeToo (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; September 9, 2018).
The Right Words for Love (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; September 23, 2018).
A trust deficit between advertisers and publishers is leading to fake news (Sunil Abraham; Hindustan Times; September 30, 2018).
Digital Native: Hardly Friends Like That (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; September 30, 2018).

CIS in the News

Can this curb your addiction? (Surupasree Sarmmah; Deccan Herald; September 5, 2018).
'Why should we talk to Dunzo?' State regulators fume at liquor delivery (Aroon Deep; Medianama; September 7, 2018).
#NAMAprivacy: Data Protection Authority's regulatory and enforcement challenges (Rana; Medianama; September 9, 2018).
'What Security Breach?' The Unchanging Tone of UIDAI's Denials (Karan Saini; The Wire; September 12, 2018).
Haryana Cops Say Internet Shutdowns Hurt Police Operations (Gopal Sathe; Huffington Post; September 19, 2018).
Find ways to trace origin of messages: Government to WhatsApp (Surabhi Aggarwal; Economic Times; September 20, 2018).
Net nanny meets muscular law (Laxmi Murthy; Himal South Asian; September 26, 2018).
After Supreme Court Setback, Fintech Firms Await Clarity On Aadhaar (Nishant Sharma; Bloomberg Quint; September 27, 2018).

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.

Copyright and Patent

Participation in Event

5th Global Congress on IP and the Public Interest (Organized by PublicCitizen, Washington College of Law, American University, O'Neill Institute and the American Assembly, Columbia University; Washington D.C.; September 24 - 29, 2018). Sunil Abraham, Anubha Sinha and Swaraj Paul Barooah were panelists at the event.

Wikipedia

Publication

Wikisource Handbook for Indian Communities (Bodhisattwa Mandal and Ananth Subray P. V.; September 19, 2018).

Blog Entry

Christ (DU) students enrolls for 3rd Wikipedia certificate course (Ananth Subray; September 23, 2018).

Events Organized

Copyright Workshop (CIS; New Delhi; September 1 - 2, 2018).
Meeting on Digitization and Content Donation (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute; Pune; September 6, 2018).
Orientation session on Sanskrit Wikipedia (Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth; Pune; September 6, 2018).
Workshop on FOSS, Unicode & Wikimedia Projects for Publishers, Printers, Designers and Writers (Fergusson College; Pune; September 7, 2018).
Workshop in MKCL regarding Vanbodh Project with TRTI (Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited; Mumbai; September 11, 2018).

Internet Governance

Privacy

Research Papers

The Srikrishna Committee Data Protection Bill and Artificial Intelligence in India (Amber Sinha and Elonnai Hickok; September 3, 2018).
AI in India: A Policy Agenda (Amber Sinha, Elonnai Hickok and Arindrajit Basu; September 5, 2018).
Artificial Intelligence in the Governance Sector in India (Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok; edited by Amber Sinha, Pranav MB and Vishnu Ramachandran; ecosystem mapping by Shweta Mohandas and Anamika Kundu; September 14, 2018).
Cross-Border Data Sharing and India: A study in Processes, Content and Capacity (Amber Sinha, Elonnai Hickok, Udbhav Tiwari and Arindrajit Basu; September 27, 2018).

Participation in Events

Online Cogitatum on AI and Ethics in India (Organized by Takshashila; Takshashila Institution; August 27, 2018). Elonnai Hickok participated in the event.
Conference on Data Protection (Organized by National Institute of Public Finance and Policy; New Delhi; September 4, 2018). Sunil Abraham and Amber Sinha were discussant in the session Disclosures in Privacy Policies: Does Consent Work?
Symposium on Data Privacy and Citizen's Rights (Organized by Tech Law Forum of NALSAR University of Law; Hyderabad; September 9, 2018).
Gender and Privacy: Countering the Patriarchal Gaze (Organized by Privacy International; United Kingdom; September 13 - 14, 2018).
Meeting of Information Systems Security and Biometrics Sectional Committee (Organized by Bureau of Indian Standards; New Delhi; September 14, 2018).
Forecasting the Implications of the CLOUD Act Around the World (Organized by Global Network Initiative; Russell Senate Office Building, Washington D.C.; September 18, 2018). Elonnai Hickok was a speaker.
Networked Economies and Gender Action Learning (Organized by IDRC and facilitated by Gender at Work; Ottawa; September 20 - 21, 2018). Elonnai Hickok, Sunil Abraham and Ambika Tandon participated in the meeting. Sunil Abraham, Swaraj Paul Barooah and Ambika Tandon also attended a workshop on Gender Action Learning on September 24 - 25, 2018, which discussed strategies to work on gender under a grant for Cyber Policy Centres.
Round Table Discussion on Personal Data Protection Bill (Organized by SFLC; Bengaluru; September 25, 2018). Shweta Mohandas participated in the event and moderated the first session on Data Protection Principles (Rights and Obligations).

Cyber Security

Event Organized

Symposium on India’s Cyber Strategy (India Habitat Centre, New Delhi; August 31, 2018).

Participation in Event

Cyber-Security in the Age of Smart Manufacturing (Organized by Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce & industry (FICCI) in association with Karnataka Innovation and Technology Society, and Government of Karnataka; The Lalit Ashok, Bengaluru; September 26, 2018). Arindrajit Basu attended the event.

researchers@work

The researchers@Work (r@w) 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.

Blog Entry

Essays on 'Offline' - Selected Abstracts (P.P. Sneha; September 6, 2018).
Digital Native: #MemeToo (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; September 9, 2018).
The Right Words for Love (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; September 23, 2018).
Digital Native: Hardly Friends Like That (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; September 30, 2018).

Participation in Event

Plenary Talk at Jyothi Nivas College Research Symposium (Organized by Jyoti Nivas College; Bangalore; September 28, 2018). P.P. Sneha made a presentation on presentation on new reading and writing practices in the digital context.

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.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2018-newsletter

Net nanny meets muscular law

Admin — 2018-10-02T05:48:32Z

India’s new human-trafficking bill could criminalise sex workers and curtail free speech.

The article by Laxmi Murthy was published in Himal South Asian on September 26, 2018.

When conservative morality is armed with the law and prejudice is given legal validity, the state is transformed into a wet nurse cum security guard. The Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill 2018, passed on 26 July in the lower house of the Indian Parliament, represents a growing trend of increased state surveillance and control, and a carceral approach to dealing with non-compliance with overbroad and vague laws laced with prudery.

Trafficking in persons, as defined by the United Nations, is “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons” by coercion, deception or the abuse of power or position for the purpose of exploitation. Human trafficking is considered to be a form of modern-day slavery and is outlawed in most countries.

Following the ratification of the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others in 1949, India enacted the Suppression of Immoral Traffic in Women and Girls Act 1956. However, nowhere was trafficking clearly defined in the law. The acronym of this law, SITA, seemingly deliberately modelled after Sita, the chaste wife of Rama from the epic Ramayana, reinforced the moralism already codified into law. Moving from suppression to prevention of ‘immoral’ trafficking took three decades, but the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA), as the act was renamed in 1986, continued to prioritise morality over human rights, focusing its attention on raiding brothels and “rescuing and rehabilitating” sex workers, whether or not they wanted such intervention. Though sex work is not illegal per se in India – with some notable exceptions with respect to soliciting in public places – the ITPA views consensual adult sex work as a misnomer and approaches all women in sex work as victims in need of rescue. This ultimately criminalises even consenting adult sex workers by treating solicitation, brothel ownership and procurement as criminal activity.

Unfortunately, the 2018 trafficking bill has been drafted with this very mindset, and goes on to widen the scope to cover “aggravated” forms of trafficking, including trafficking for the purpose of forced labour, begging, trafficking by administering chemical substance or hormones for early sexual maturity among other things. It also includes in its ambit trafficking for the purpose of surrogacy, at a time when questions around commercial surrogacy and consent of surrogates have yet to be settled in Indian law.

The bill also aims to unify existing criminal law provisions on trafficking. The definition of trafficking in the Indian law is drawn primarily from Section 370 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which includes ‘any act’ of physical exploitation, sexual exploitation, slavery or practices similar to slavery and servitude. Trafficking under this bill also includes begging and domestic work. However, critics of the bill, including a collective of sex-worker-rights groups and organisations working with bonded labour, children and adolescents under the banner of the Coalition for an Inclusive Approach on the Trafficking Bill, say that the bill, with its criminalised approach, will further stigmatise sex workers, transgender persons and beggars. The supposed ‘victims’ of trafficking would, therefore, be forcibly rescued, rehabilitated and repatriated, and denied their chosen residence as well as their means of livelihood. The elaborate anti-trafficking bureaucracy to be set up at district, state and national levels seems unwieldy and without representation of the communities it purports to protect.

Cross-purposes

The anti-trafficking bill embodies a constitutional conundrum: in attempting to fulfil the mandate under Article 23 of the Constitution – to protect persons from exploitation inherent in human trafficking – it can potentially violate fundamental freedoms, in particular, the freedom of speech and expression, a core protection guaranteed by Article 19.

According to Section 39 (2) of the bill, “Whoever solicits or publicises electronically, taking or distributing obscene photographs or videos or providing materials or soliciting or guiding tourists or using agents or any other form which may lead to the trafficking of a person shall be punished (emphasis added)”.

This provision, while intending to criminalise online soliciting, casts a wide net and prescribes penalties – rigorous imprisonment for a term of five to ten years and a fine between INR 50,000 (USD 700) and INR 100,000 (USD 1400) – for vaguely defined acts which may lead to trafficking. It is not necessary, as per this provision, to prove a direct causal link between these acts – such as distributing obscene photographs or providing materials – and the actual crime of trafficking. Such a broad brush is highly problematic and violates well-established tenets of criminal jurisprudence which require criminal intention (mens rea) along with the actual criminal act (actus reus). That is, a criminal act must be accompanied by a criminal intention. Without any burden to prove a causal link, anything deemed to potentially lead to trafficking can be proscribed – for example, any artistic work, academic publication or cinematic representation.

Sexually explicit content – text, audio and visual – has evoked deeply contentious opinions right from the time of the Kamasutra and the erotic sculptures of the Khajuraho temples. There is no one single position on pornography or obscenity among feminists, despite their shared concern about enhancing women’s rights and stopping exploitation. On the one hand, American feminist Robin Morgan’s famous pronouncement back in 1974, that pornography is the theory and rape is the practice, implying that pornography was directly responsible for violence and sexual abuse of women, influenced early feminists the world over, and continues to hold sway among sections of women’s rights advocates. However, while images undoubtedly impact on the human psyche, the causal links between pornography and rape are not established firmly enough to warrant censorship and bans. On the other hand, sex-positive feminists who celebrate varied expressions of sexual desire, especially female sexuality, advocates of feminist pornography (which is not seen as a contradiction in terms), adult entertainers and sex workers have practiced and theorised sexual desire and its many manifestations in ways that are undergirded by consent, respect, agency and autonomy, but not necessarily confined to contemporary social mores. Conversations around sexuality and desire have moved beyond criminalisation of what is considered deviant, but echoes of these conversations do not seem to have been heard in the corridors of the Parliament.

With the prevalent moral disapproval of pornography and adult entertainment, the phrase “taking or distributing obscene photographs or videos or providing materials” can easily be misinterpreted as leading to trafficking. The word ‘obscene’ is itself too subjective and culturally loaded a term to withstand rigorous legal scrutiny. It is a no-brainer that deciding what is aesthetically pleasing erotica and what is unacceptable pornography is in the eye of the beholder and is, therefore, subjective. Where there is no requirement to prove intention, or mens rea, any image or video deemed to be obscene can be censored. This could bring into its ambit online material, articles, literature, magazines as well as artists and their work, and consenting adult sexual interactions in the digital space including adult dating apps like Tinder or OkCupid.

It was only as recently as 2014 that India’s Supreme Court jettisoned the archaic Hicklin Test, which was developed in an 1868 case in England to determine whether specific material could “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences”. This outdated standard was applied, for instance, in the landmark case of Udeshi v State of Maharashtra in 1964 to uphold the ban on the D H Lawrence classic Lady Chatterley’s Lover and to convict Ranjit Udeshi, a bookseller, under Section 292 of the IPC for distributing “obscene” material.

Half a century on, in 2014, Anand Bazaar Patrika, publishers of Sportsworld, a magazine which reprinted a nude photograph of tennis champion Boris Becker and his fiancée, won the case in the apex court which rejected the Hicklin Test. However, the court adopted a ‘community standards’ test derived from the 1957 Roth v United States case that determined what was obscene and was, therefore, unprotected by the First Amendment to the American Constitution that protects freedom of speech. The ‘community standards’ test has itself been challenged for its vagueness, since what is considered to have social importance is itself variable. In addition, the Supreme Court in the Sportsworld case allowed the nude photograph because, in the court’s view, it did not have “a tendency to arouse feeling or reveal an overt sexual desire”. The nude photograph of a white-skinned Becker with his dark-skinned fiancée was deemed to be in the public interest, as its intention was to cast a spotlight on racism and apartheid. However, the justification that the photo did not arouse sexual desire and was, therefore, acceptable, is both highly subjective and problematic in its criminalisation of sexual desire, in that it allows – without any evidence whatsoever – the dangerous possibility of nudity having a causal effect on violence.

Stormy seas and safe harbours

The Trafficking Bill 2018 in its “offences related to media” chapter, continues in its inexorable march towards criminalisation on the basis of vague definitions. According to Section 36, a person is said to be engaged in trafficking of person even if that person “advertises, publishes, prints, broadcasts or distributes, or causes the advertisement, publication, printing or broadcast or distribution by any means, including the use of information technology or any brochure, flyer or any propaganda material that promotes trafficking of person or exploitation of a trafficked person in any manner.”

However, since “promoting trafficking or exploitation” has not been clearly defined, it makes room for different interpretations of liability. There is little in this provision that attempts to impose a clear, rigorous standard of evidence that could demonstrate direct cause. The Bengaluru-based non-profit Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) cautions that, under this clause, the likelihood of authors of adult material, videographers, filmmakers and internet sites being charged with promoting trafficking or exploitation is quite high, since the clause might build a legal link between hosting or producing pornography and trafficking.

Clamping down on internet freedom on the basis of obscenity is not new. In July 2015, the government banned 857 websites that it considered pornographic. This followed the Kamlesh Vaswani case in the Supreme Court where the then chief justice of India expressed his inability to order a ban as it would go against the right to personal liberty guaranteed in Article 21 of the Constitution. In their submission challenging the ban, and underlining the subjectivity in viewing and interpreting content, the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) said, “one man’s pornography is another man’s high art”, making it impossible for them to ban any sites. The ISPs were later told that they should ban only sites showing child pornography, but they submitted that they neither created content nor owned it and that it was not possible for them to view content before hosting it. And therein lies one of the most controversial features of the trafficking bill.

The most pernicious provision of the bill, Section 41 (2), displays a complete lack of understanding of the manner in which the digital space functions. The section penalises anyone who “distributes, or sells or stores, in any form in any electronic or printed form showing incidence of sexual exploitation, sexual assault, or rape for the purpose of exploitation or for coercion of the victim or his family members, or for unlawful gain.”

As the CIS critique of the bill points out, digital infrastructure requires third party intermediaries to handle information during transmission, storage or display. As it is not always desirable or even practically possible to verify the legality of every bit of data that gets transferred or stored by the intermediary, the CIS points out, the law provides ‘safe harbours’ to protect intermediaries from liability, ensuring that entities that act as architectural requirements and intermediary platforms are able to operate smoothly and without fear. It must be noted that users who upload and initiate transfer of information online, are not always the same parties who are directly involved in transmission of content.

In India, immunity from liability or a ‘safe harbour’ for intermediaries involved with transmission or temporary storage of content is currently provided by Section 79 of the Information Technology Act 2000 (IT Act), on condition that they: (i) act as a mere ‘conduit’ and do not initiate the transmission, select the receiver of the transmission, or select or modify the information contained in the transmission and (ii) exercise due diligence, which has been defined under the law. The provision for safe harbours has also been tested in court, notably in the case of the virtual market Baazee.com (later acquired by eBay), which had hosted an advertisement for an ‘obscene’ video for two days before it was taken down. The court held that the IT Act would prevail over the IPC, and the managers could not be held liable for the content of the advertisement.

With Section 59 of the proposed trafficking bill set to override existing legislation, the provision of safe harbours under the IT Act will be in jeopardy. Notably, this move to prosecute internet intermediaries is in keeping with a worldwide trend. In April 2018, the United States President Donald Trump signed into law two controversial pieces of legislation aimed to tackle human trafficking online, which have grave implications for free speech. The US Congress bill, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), and the Senate bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), have been welcomed by some as a victory for victims of sex trafficking. Alarmingly, however, the bills, better known by their acronyms FOSTA-SESTA, create an exception to the safe harbour rule, ie Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA). This provision, which is regarded as a landmark protection, says “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” For over two decades, in the spirit of actualising the immense potential of the digital space to share information, ideas and opinions, this section has provided immunity for intermediaries, allowing users to freely generate content without making platforms and ISPs accountable for such content.

Under FOSTA-SESTA, however, websites are liable to be penalised for advertisements promoting consensual adult sex work, dating or escort services (such as Backpage.com or Craigslist) which could be deemed to promote trafficking. Sex-worker-rights activists in the US posit that such an unwarranted clampdown on these avenues through which adult sex workers could safely screen clients and avoid potentially dangerous situations, is putting them at risk.

Despite the protests against the impact of FOSTA-SESTA on the internet and free expression, parliamentarians in the United Kingdom seem set to follow a similar regulatory route. An All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Prostitution and the Global Sex Trade in July 2018 called for a ban on “prostitution websites”, by which they mean virtual advertising sites such as Vivastreet and Adultwork which host adult advertisements. Anticipating the same fallout as in the US, Amnesty UK tweeted, “Taking down these platforms will push sex workers deeper underground exposing them to greater risks of violence, exploitation and trafficking.”

Beyond criminalisation

According to Interpol, trafficking in human beings is a multi-billion-dollar international criminal industry, which is usually carried out for forced labour, sexual exploitation or for harvesting of tissue, cells and organs. Despite this recognition of the different motives for trafficking, the crime has largely been linked – in the popular imagination, media and, unfortunately, even law enforcement – to sexual exploitation. The thrust of anti-trafficking efforts in India, post-Independence, set the stage for decades of human-rights violations in the name of anti-trafficking, using an ineffective law that penalised victims more than traffickers. The proposed bill, with its ill-conceived criminalised regime, is likely to do more harm than good, and give rise to a repressive regime that is not in the interests of marginalised populations most vulnerable to traffickers. Not only is the bill unlikely to make any dent in the organised trafficking networks, but the fallout of its provisions policing the internet is also likely to hamper freedom of expression and consensual, adult sexual activity mediated through the digital space.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/himal-south-asian-laxmi-murthy-net-nanny-meets-muscular-law

Agenda for Round-table for Data Protection

Admin — 2018-10-02T03:13:15Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/agenda-for-round-table-for-data-protection

MLAT Report

Admin — 2018-09-27T15:53:24Z

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

A trust deficit between advertisers and publishers is leading to fake news

sunil — 2018-10-02T06:44:55Z

Transparency regulations is need of the hour. And urgently for election and political advertising. What do the ads look like? Who paid for them? Who was the target? How many people saw these advertisements? How many times? Transparency around viral content is also required.

The article was published in Hindustan Times on September 24, 2018.

Traditionally, we have depended on the private censorship that intermediaries conduct on their platforms. They enforce, with some degree of success, their own community guidelines and terms of services (TOS). Traditionally, these guidelines and TOS have been drafted keeping in mind US laws since historically most intermediaries, including non-profits like Wikimedia Foundation were founded in the US.

Across the world, this private censorship regime was accepted by governments when they enacted intermediary liability laws (in India we have Section 79A of the IT Act). These laws gave intermediaries immunity from liability emerging from third party content about which they have no “actual knowledge” unless they were informed using takedown notices. Intermediaries set up offices in countries like India, complied with some lawful interception requests, and also conducted geo-blocking to comply with local speech regulation.

For years, the Indian government has been frustrated since policy reforms that it has pursued with the US have yielded little fruit. American policy makers keep citing shortcomings in the Indian justice systems to avoid expediting the MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties) process and the signing of an executive agreement under the US Clout Act. This agreement would compel intermediaries to comply with lawful interception and data requests from Indian law enforcement agencies no matter where the data was located.

The data localisation requirement in the draft national data protection law is a result of that frustration. As with the US, a quickly enacted data localisation policy is absolutely non-negotiable when it comes to Indian military, intelligence, law enforcement and e-governance data. For India, it also makes sense in the cases of health and financial data with exceptions under certain circumstances. However, it does not make sense for social media platforms since they, by definition, host international networks of people. Recently an inter ministerial committee recommended that “criminal proceedings against Indian heads of social media giants” also be considered. However, raiding Google’s local servers when a lawful interception request is turned down or arresting Facebook executives will result in retaliatory trade actions from the US.

While the consequences of online recruitment, disinformation in elections and fake news to undermine public order are indeed serious, are there alternatives to such extreme measures for Indian policy makers? Updating intermediary liability law is one place to begin. These social media companies increasingly exercise editorial control, albeit indirectly, via algorithms to claim that they have no “actual knowledge”.

But they are no longer mere conduits or dumb pipes as they are now publishers who collect payments to promote content. Germany passed a law called NetzDG in 2017 which requires expedited compliance with government takedown orders. Unfortunately, this law does not have sufficient safeguards to prevent overzealous private censorship. India should not repeat this mistake, especially given what the Supreme Court said in the Shreya Singhal judgment.

Transparency regulations are imperative. And they are needed urgently for election and political advertising. What do the ads look like? Who paid for them? Who was the target? How many people saw these advertisements? How many times? Transparency around viral content is also required. Anyone should be able to see all public content that has been shared with more than a certain percentage of the population over a historical timeline for any geographic area. This will prevent algorithmic filter bubbles and echo chambers, and also help public and civil society monitor unconstitutional and hate speech that violates terms of service of these platforms. So far the intermediaries have benefitted from surveillance — watching from above. It is time to subject them to sousveillance — watched by the citizens from below.

Data portability mandates and interoperability mandates will allow competition to enter these monopoly markets. Artificial intelligence regulations for algorithms that significantly impact the global networked public sphere could require – one, a right to an explanation and two, a right to influence automated decision making that influences the consumers experience on the platform.

The real solution lies elsewhere. Google and Facebook are primarily advertising networks. They have successfully managed to destroy the business model for real news and replace it with a business model for fake news by taking away most of the advertising revenues from traditional and new news media companies. They were able to do this because there was a trust deficit between advertisers and publishers. Perhaps this trust deficit could be solved by a commons-based solutions based on free software, open standards and collective action by all Indian new media companies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hindustan-times-sunil-abraham-september-24-2018-a-trust-deficit-between-advertisers-and-publishers-is-leading-to-fake-news

'What Security Breach?' The Unchanging Tone of UIDAI's Denials

Admin — 2018-09-19T14:14:53Z

This week brought with it another instance of Aadhaar déjà vu. The narrative is now eerily familiar to people with even a passing acquaintance with the matter.

The article by Karan Saini was published in the Wire on September 12, 2018

A security vulnerability in the Aadhaar ecosystem comes to light, usually through civil society stakeholders or the media. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) issues a standard denial, refuses to publicly acknowledge that it has to course-correct and fix the problem, and the public waits for the process to repeat.

Following a three-month-long investigation by Huffington Post into the known and documented problem of cracked Aadhaar enrolment software, several security experts from within the country and elsewhere were able to conclude that the authenticity of entries within the Aadhaar database was likely compromised to an unknown extent. This was a direct result of a patched version of the enrolment software with stripped security features being circulated and used by potential hostile actors – among others.

The patched software bypasses several crucial security features of the enrolment client and could have also been used to get around the biometric authentication which legitimate enrolment operators would have to undertake before attempting to add new entries to the database.

The UIDAI responded to this report with a statement which is nearly identical to many of the authority’s previous press releases on alleged security incidents.

In its statement, the UIDAI said that “the claims made in the report about Aadhaar being vulnerable to tampering leading to ghost entries in Aadhaar database by purportedly bypassing operators’ biometric authentication to generate multiple Aadhaar cards is totally baseless”.

The statement which was issued by the authority seems straightforward but is actually cryptic in its very nature. The story published by Huffington Post did not categorically assert that the software bypass was being used ‘to generate multiple Aadhaar cards’, while the authority’s statement specifically refuted this claim.

This is, sadly, not new. The Aadhaar authority has always purposely misinterpreted what is actually being alleged in critical stories, and then presented their interpretations in their statements of rebuttal, which essentially amount to irresponsible dissemination of misleading information.

For instance, the UIDAI ignores that even without the issue of cracked enrolment software, there are already many proven cases of ghost entries in the database, including that of a Pakistani ISI spy as well as an Uzbek national involved in illegal sex-trade in the country. Both of these persons held real, valid Aadhaar cards which were issued to them under false identities.

The UIDAI also states that enrolments are verified at their backend system in order to prevent any such false entries from finding their way into the database. Given this, the question arises – how did these highlighted cases of false entries make it through the supposed checks and balances in place to the point where Aadhaar numbers for these persons were issued (and delivered)?

Similar events took place when in March 2018, ZDNet broke the story of an application programming interface (API) hosted on the website of utility provider Indane Gas, which could have been abused by hackers to steal information such as full names, Aadhaar numbers, names of linked banking institutions as well as details of the specific utility provider which a person uses for a major chunk of the population.

The UIDAI statement at the time baldly claimed that there was no breach of its central database (what is called the ‘CIDR’) and that biometric data were safe. The only problem? Neither of these issues were asserted or even hinted at in the original story.

Reporters from the publication had attempted to reach out to UIDAI repeatedly – and that too through several mediums of communication, such as phone, email and even direct messages to the official UIDAI Twitter account – all to no avail.

“We tried to contact UIDAI by phone and email after we learned of the Aadhaar data leak. We eventually sent all the details in a Twitter DM message — but only because UIDAI wouldn’t offer […] an email address to send this data leak issue to,” posted Zack Whittaker, the reporter who had broken the story for ZDNet, as a tweet on his public Twitter account.

This was not the first time the authority had done such a thing (and neither was it the last, as we see with the Huffington Post story), as witnessed in the January 2018 incident with the Tribune; where the UIDAI did not respond to the paper’s attempts at communication at all before publication and later used it to state that no security incident had taken place altogether.

Reporters from the Huffington Post had also attempted to reach out to UIDAI prior to publication of the story; attempts at communication which the UIDAI willingly left unanswered. After UIDAI’s rebuttal, the Huffington Post published a statement of their own in which they asserted that they stood by the claims made in their story, while also making it known that the UIDAI had never responded directly to any of their communication.

The UIDAI’s most recent statement deploys a bizarre array of security jargon including buzzwords such as “full encryption”, “access control” and “tamper resistance” – without providing any elaboration on what any of these things would help prevent with regard to the issues raised in the media report.

This obfuscation is very troubling, and particularly so for those people who do not actively follow news regarding the troubles of the programme or other media organisations that are not equipped to understand the nuances of security reporting. For both groups of people, the statements issued by the UIDAI would be enough of an assertion to lead them to believe that all is well with the project and that anyone saying otherwise is an “unscrupulous element” with “vested interests”.

After the first few incidents, the authority’s cookie-cutter response seems to be part of the playbook through which they seek to protect their image: by retaining the ability to publicly deny an incident, even if it has already taken place; which is done by never confirming (or even acknowledging) an issue before publication. This is presumably done out of fear of the reputational damage which would inevitably be caused by admittance of a compromise or fault on their part.

Consider what happened with the Tribune breach report. The UIDAI officially denied it (even though some of their lower-level officials were quoted in the story), filed an FIR against the journalist. When the dust settled down, a prominent business newspaper ran a story which strangely enough quoted anonymous officials who highlighted the steps that were taken to fix the problem.

The UIDAI understands that ‘the first step in solving a problem is to recognise that it does exist’. Acknowledging problems within the Aadhaar project would be catastrophically damaging for the authority as well as the public’s perception of them. This is why we are always presented with almost indistinguishable statements of rebuttal and denial from the UIDAI, which too are never backed with any evidence.

Seeing as how the UIDAI’s statements almost always end up backfiring, their decision to employ a social media agency to monitor the internet for chatter on Aadhaar starts to make a little sense. For a while now, the authority has wished to undertake mass digital surveillance through social media and other online forums in order to track “top detractors” of the Aadhaar scheme and counter them to effectively “neutralise negative sentiments” surrounding the project.

This move, however, was challenged by petitioner Mahua Moitra who saw it as “an attempt by the State to overreach the jurisdiction of the Hon’ble Supreme Court in matters where the legality of social media surveillance and Aadhaar itself is under challenge”.

For now, the next time we are hit with a sense of déjà vu when it comes to an Aadhaar-related security incident, we should see through the UIDAI’s statements for what they truly are: hopeless attempts at damage control for a system that is crumbling at its very foundation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-wire-karan-saini-september-12-2018-what-security-breach-the-unchanging-tone-of-uidai-denials

Symposium on Data Privacy and Citizen's Rights

Admin — 2018-09-18T15:18:37Z

Shweta Mohandas was a panelist at the Symposium on Data Privacy and Citizen's Rights on September 9, 2018. The Symposium was organised by the Tech Law Forum of NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.

Concept Note

The National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) University of Law, Hyderabad is organising a Symposium on DATA PRIVACY AND CITIZEN’S RIGHTS to provide multiple stakeholders one platform to discuss and deliberate on the BN Srikrishna Committee Report and Draft Bill.

The Committee headed by Retd. Justice BN Srikrishna released its Report and Draft Bill on the 27th of July, 2018. It comes at a time when there is increasing discussion about the individual privacy and surveillance by both private organisations and state authorities. Especially in light of the 9-judge Puttaswamy judgment affirming the Fundamental Right to Privacy, there was a need to concretise the right in the form of a statute. The Bill proposes an elaborate data protection framework by utilising concepts such as anonymisation, pseudonymisation, data localisation, guardian data fiduciary, among others. While the Bill has been lauded for providing a data protection framework largely similar to the one proposed by civil society, there are several areas of concern with the Bill such as the amendments suggested to the RTI Act, the impact of the Bill on Free Speech and the lack of substantial provisions regarding surveillance. There has been further criticism that the discussions regarding these issues have been conducted in silos, with little to no dialogue taking place between the various stakeholders and experts in the field.

We believe that there is a need to provide a common forum for these stakeholders to interact with each other in providing suggestions that are representative in nature and nuanced in their expression.

Themes

Privacy and Free Speech This interaction aims to examine the juxtaposition of the constitutional right to free speech and the now constitutionally affirmed right to privacy. Will a new data protection law impact the publication of leaked documents or sting operations like the Radia tapes or Tehelka’s ‘Operation Westend’? If so, how can journalists mitigate the risk of getting sued for breach of privacy? While the jurisprudence concerning the right to privacy is in its most nascent state, it becomes important for us to explore its contours in light of already established constitutional guarantees.

Right to Information and Right to Privacy How does the right to privacy impact the right to information? The guarantee of these two rights arise from diametrically opposite ideologies, in that privacy aims to shield from the public domain information and data concerning individuals and institutions while the right to information aims to promote transparency and disclosure of information held by the state. However, the question remains, is the existence of these two rights necessarily mutually exclusive? Will a new data protection law make it difficult to promote transparency under the Right to Information Act? Is there is a possibility of a clash between the Information Commissions and the proposed Data Protection Authority? This panel would analyze the co-existence and competitive nature of these two rights in the context of the Indian legal space.

Surveillance - As we move towards a form of governance that is increasingly capable of surveilling individual movements and actions, it becomes extremely necessary for us to understand the nature of surveillance. Can data privacy be compromised for surveillance that may be necessary for increased safety in our physical and virtual living spaces? Are there any provisions that protects data in cases of it becoming exploitable? What is the interaction of international statutes (like ICCPR) and the latest Indian statute in terms of its recognition of necessity of surveillance in contrast to the necessity of protection of data.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/symposium-on-data-privacy-and-citizens-rights

August 2018 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-09-16T05:08:39Z

CIS newsletter for the month of August 2018.

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights

India houses the second largest population in the world at approximately 1.35 billion individuals. In such a diverse and dense context, law enforcement could be a challenging job. Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda throw light on the CLOUD Act and its implifications for India in a blog post.
On August 9, 2018, the DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2018 was introduced in the Lok Sabha. CIS had commented on some key aspects of the bill in many forums earlier. Elonnai Hickok and Murali Neelakantan in an article published by Bloomberg Quint have voiced their opinion on the bill.
Murali Neelakantan, Swaraj Barooah, Swagam Dasgupta and Torsha Sarkar in an Op-ed in Bloomberg Quint have examined the National Health Stack, an ambitious attempt by the government to to build a digital infrastructure with a “deep understanding of the incentive structures prevalent in the Indian healthcare ecosystem. The authors have argued that collection of health data, without sensitisation and accountability, has the potential to deny healthcare to the vulnerable.
An article titled India's Contribution to Internet Governance Debates, co-authored by Sunil Abraham, Mukta Batra, Geetha Hariharan, Swaraj Barooah and Akriti Bopanna, was published in the NLUD Student Law Journal, an annual peer-reviewed journal published by the National Law University, Delhi.
IT/IT-eS Sector and the Future of Work in India was organized at Omidyar Networks’ office in Bangalore, on June 29, 2018. Torsha Sarkar, Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rath co-authored a report.
Swaraj Barooah and Gurshabad Grover co-authored an article in Livemint that examines a few problematic provisions in the proposed Anti-trafficking Bill. The authors say that it may lead to censorship.
The Researchers at Work programme of CIS had invited abstracts for essays that explore dimensions of offline lives. Selected authors are expected to submit the first draft of the essay (2000-4000 words) by Friday, October 5, 2018.

Articles

Anti-trafficking Bill may lead to censorship (Swaraj Barooah and Gurshabad Grover; Livemint; July 24, 2018). The article was mirrored on CIS website in the month of August 2018.
The National Health Stack: An Expensive, Temporary Placebo (Murali Neelakantan, Swaraj Barooah, Swagam Dasgupta, and Torsha Sarkar; Bloomberg Quint; August 6, 2018).
Digital Native: Double Speak (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; August 12, 2018).
India's Contribution to Internet Governance Debates (Sunil Abraham, Mukta Batra, Geetha Hariharan, Swaraj Barooah and Akriti Bopanna; NLUD Student Law Journal; August 16, 2018).
National Health Stack: Data for Data's Sake, A Manmade Health Hazard (Murali Neelakantan, Swaraj Barooah, Swagam Dasgupta and Torsha Sarkar; Bloomberg Quint; August 17, 2018).
DNA ‘Evidence’: Only Opinion, Not Science, And Definitely Not Proof Of Crime! (Elonnai Hickok and Murali Neelakantan; Bloomberg Quint; August 22, 2018).
Digital Native: Playing God (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; August 26, 2018).

CIS in the News

UNDP joins Tech Giants in Partnership on AI (UNDP; August 1, 2018). CIS is one of the partners.
UIDAI says asked nobody to add the helpline number to contacts (Komal Gupta; Livemint; August 3, 2018).
How Chinese apps are making inroads in Indian small towns (Mugdha Variyar; Economic Times; August 10, 2018).
The Big Eye: The tech is all ready for mass surveillance in India (Anand Murali; Factor Daily; August 13, 2018).
Centre draws red lines for Whatsapp over fake news, says must comply with Indian laws (Nakul Sridhar; Hindustan Times; August 21, 2018).
India steps up vigilance against WhatsApp abuse (Debashree Dasgupta; Straits Times; August 24, 2018).
India’s Biometric Database Is Creating A Perfect Surveillance State — And U.S. Tech Companies Are On Board (Paul Bluementhal and Gopal Sathe; Huffington Post; August 25, 2018).
20 years of Google: Privacy, fake news and the future (Rachel Lopez; Hindustan Times; August 26, 2018).

Access to Knowledge

Wikipedia

Blog Entry

మిసిమి పత్రిక గ్రంథాలయంలో తెలుగు వికీపీడియన్ల కార్యక్రమం (Pavan Santhosh; August 22, 2018).

Events Organized

వికీపీడియా:సమావేశం/గుంటూరు/అన్నమయ్య గ్రంథాలయం - భాగస్వామ్య కార్యక్రమం జూలై 2018 (Organized by CIS-A2K; Annamaya Library; Guntur; July 10, 2018).
Workshop of Publishers and Writers on Unicode, Open Source and Wikimedia Projects (Organized by CIS-A2K; Pune; July 25, 2018).
Workshop of River activists for building Jal Bodh - Knowledge resource on Water (Organized by CIS-A2K; Pune; July 25, 2018).
ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ:ಸಂಪಾದನೋತ್ಸವಗಳು/ಸಂಪಾದನೋತ್ಸವ ತುಮಕೂರು ವಿಶ್ವವಿದ್ಯಾನಿಲಯ ೨೦೧೮ (Organized by CIS-A2K; Tumakur University; July 25, 2018).
Intensive Personalised Wiki Training Session at Pune (Organized by CIS-A2K; August 2018).
Wikisource and Wiki technical session at MKCL (Organized by CIS-A2K; Pune; August 2018).
Wiki technical orientation session with PyLadies group (Organized by CIS-A2K; Cummins College of Engineering, Pune; August 7, 2018).
Indian Independence Struggle Edit-a-thon on Marathi Wikipedia (Organized by CIS-A2K; August 10 - 20, 2018).

Event Participation

వికీపీడియా:సమావేశం/హైదరాబాదు/మిసిమి పత్రిక భాగస్వామ్య సమావేశం, జూలై 2018 (July 24, 2018). CIS-A2K held partnership discussions with Misimi Telugu monthly magazine.

Note: Event reports for all these were published in the month of August 2018.

Internet Governance

Privacy

Blog Entries

Use of Visuals and Nudges in Privacy Notices (Saumyaa Naidu; edited by Elonnai Hickok and Amber Sinha; August 18, 2018).
An Analysis of the CLOUD Act and Implications for India (Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda; August 22, 2018).
Consumer Care Society: Silver Jubilee Year Celebrations (Arindrajit Basu; August 27, 2018).

Event Participation

Celebrating One Year of the Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India Judgment (Organized by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations and Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University - Delhi; India International Centre; New Delhi; August 24, 2018). Shweta Mohandas was a panelist at the event.

Free Speech & Expression

Blog Entry

ICANN response to DIDP #31 on diversity (Akriti Bopanna and Akash Sriram; August 21, 2018).

Event Participation

Feminist Information Infrastructure Workshop with Blank Noise and Sangama (Organized by Sangama and Blank Noise; CIS, Bangalore; August 8, 2018). Akriti Bopanna, Swaraj Paul Barooah and Ambika Tandon conducted the workshop.
Summer School on Disinformation (Organized by Digital Asia Hub, Hans-Bredow-Institut, University of Hamburg, Institute for Technology & Society of Rio de Janeiro - ITS Rio and Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University; Azure Room, Pullman, Jakarta; August 22 - 24, 2018). Sunil Abraham made a presentation on Disinformation and Online Recruitment.
World Library and Information Congress 2018 (Organized by International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions; Kuala Lumpur; August 26 - 27, 2018). Swaraj Paul Barooah was a speaker at two panels. Swaraj's first panel, titled "Intellectual Freedom in a Polarised World" was selected as one of 9 sessions to be live-streamed and recorded, out of 249 sessions in total. The recording can be accessed on YouTube.

Information Technology

Blog Entry

Future of Work: Report of the ‘Workshop on the IT/IT-eS Sector and the Future of Work in India’ (Torsha Sarkar, Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rath; edited by Elonnai Hickok. Akash Sriram and Divya Kushwaha; August 16, 2018).

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:

Call for Essays: Offline (P.P. Sneha; August 6, 2018). Selected authors are expected to submit the first draft of the essay (2000-4000 words) by Friday, October 5, 2018.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/august-2018-newsletter