Centre for Internet and Society

Online Censorship: How Government should Approach Regulation of Speech

sunil — 2012-12-05T07:06:52Z

Why is there a constant brouhaha in India about online censorship? What must be done to address this?

Sunil Abraham's article was published in the Economic Times on December 2, 2012.

Of course, we must get the basics right â€” bad law has to be amended, read down by courts or repealed, and bad implementation of law should be addressed via reform and capacity building for the police. But most importantly those in power must understand how to approach the regulation of speech.

To begin with, speech is regulated across the world. Even in the US â€” contrary to popular impression in India â€” speech is regulated both online and offline.

However, law is not the basis of most of this regulation. Speech is largely regulated by social norms. Different corners of our online and offline society have quite complex forms of self-regulation.

The harm caused by speech is often proportionate to the power of the person speaking â€” it maybe unacceptable for a politician or a filmstar to make an inflammatory remark but that very same utterance from an ordinary citizen may be totally fine.

To complicate matters, the very same speech by the very same person could be harmful or harmless based on context. A newspaper editor may share obscene jokes with friends in a bar, but may not take similar liberties in an editorial.

The legal scholar Alan Dershowitz tells us, "The best answer to bad speech is good speech." More recently the quote has been amended, with "more speech" replacing "good speech".

Censorship by the state has to be reserved for the rarest of rare circumstances. This is because censorship usually results in unintended consequences.

The "Streisand Effect", named after the singer-actor Barbra Streisand, is one of these consequences wherein attempts to hide or censor information only result in wider circulation and greater publicity.

The Maharashtra police's attempt to censor the voices of two women has resulted in their speech being broadcast across the nation on social and mainstream media. If the state had instead focused on producing good speech and more speech, nobody would have even heard of these women.

Circumventing Censorship

Peer-to-peer technologies on the internet mimic the topology of human networks and can also precipitate unintended consequences when subject to regulation. John Gilmore, a respected free software developer, puts it succinctly: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Most of the internet censorship in the US is due to IPR-enforcement activities. This is why Christopher Soghoian, a leading privacy activist, attributes the massive adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies such as proxies and VPNs (virtual private networks) by American consumers to the crackdown on online piracy.

In India, and even when the government has had legitimate reasons to regulate speech, there have been unintended consequences.

During the exodus of people from the North-east, the five SMS per day restriction imposed by the government resulted in another exodus from SMS to alternative messaging platforms such as BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), WhatsApp and Twitter.

In both cases the circumvention of censorship by the users has resulted in a worsening situation for law-enforcement organisations â€” VPNs and applications like WhatsApp are much more difficult to monitor and regulate.

Mixed Memes

Regulation of speech also cannot be confused with cyber war or security. Speech can occasionally have security implications but that cannot be the basis for enlightened regulation.

A cyber war expert may be tempted to think of censored content as weapons, but unlike weapons that usually remain lethal, content that can cause harm today may become completely harmless tomorrow. This is unlike a computer virus or malware. For example, during the exodus, the online edition of ET featured the complete list of 309 URLs that were in the four block orders issued by the government to ISPs.

However, this did not result in fresh harm, demonstrating the fallacy of cyber war analogies. A cyber security expert, on the other hand, may be tempted to implement a 360Â° blanket surveillance to regulate speech, but as Gilmore again puts it, "If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody."

In short, if your answer to bad speech is more censorship, more surveillance and more regulation, then as the internet meme goes, "You're Doing It Wrong".

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-times-december-2-2012-sunil-abraham-online-censorship

Once Upon a Flash

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:25:38Z

The essay was published as a part of Sarai Annual Reader titled 'Turbulence' and explores the aesthetics, politics and form of the flashmobs and their manifestation in India. It looks at the potentials of the flashmob to produce turbulent physical spaces and identities and their encounter with legalities. The essay is also available at http://www.sarai.net/journal/06_pdf/03/04_nishant_shah.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/Sarai%20turbulence.pdf

Once Upon A Flash

nishant — 2012-12-14T10:23:52Z

It was a dark and stormy evening. A young man in a dark blue Adidas jacket, collar turned up, eyes under green-black shades, hopped off a motorbike, tucked his thumbs into the front pockets of his low-slung retro jeans and surreptitiously made his way through a road thronging with rush-hour traffic and irate pedestrians yelping on their cellphones. He skipped across death traps with skilled ease: leaping over potholes, jumping over halfdug trenches, avoiding the occasional pair of doggy jaws that longed to mate with his ankles, ignoring the bikers who were using the pavements as new lanes for driving towards a honking traffic jam bathed in an orange and red neon that made the road look like a piece of burnt toast with dollops of vicious jam on it.

After five minutes of brisk walking, he slowed down as if he had reached just where he wanted to be – nowhere in particular. On his left were the large Acropolis buildings, towering over the world from their gated existence, structured in pompous Greek columns and facades of granite, stone and marble. On his right, on the other side of the road, if you looked over the metal head of the traffic, you could see the small roadside restaurant that announced fresh fish at cheap rates, sitting cosily under a starved-looking tree, happily encroaching upon the pavement, forcing the pedestrians to disembark, navigate the traffic and then come back to the relative safety of the footpath.

Caught between these two ironies, he stayed put for a while, glancing at his chor bazaar Rado model that flashed on his left wrist. He headed towards the mall that rose in glass and neon, false curves and studious lines across the quickly staining sky of a Saturday evening. As he walked into the mall, the automatic doors that sensed his corporeal presence opened up for him and the girl in a polka-dotted blue-and-red dress threw him the smile that desk attendants save for strangers. The gush of cold airconditioned air and the noises of window shoppers greeted him to ease; mannequins in windows, draped in the latest fashions and various states of undress, winked at him; the smell of freshly brewed coffee came and enveloped him. He headed with ungrim determination towards the round performance area in the mall centre. Like many other hangers-out he too loitered without apparent intent around it, just another boy out on a Saturday evening.

Suddenly his cell phone buzzed. His alarm sounded in loud tones to blend with the Britney Spears playing on the mall sound system. He fished out a bright bumblebee-yellow bandana and tied it to his head. As he did that, the performance area turned into a sea of people wearing varied shades of yellow, blasting their cell phone alarms at full volume till all you could hear was a grating disharmony that would have caused comment on a railway station in India. The phones soon faded and a group of about 70 people formed a human ring, holding hands, their heads swathed in yellow, and sang at the top of their voices the first two stanzas of Hum Honge Kamyaab – the Hindi rendering of the famous song We Shall Overcome. Once the song sank into a bewildered silence, the people in yellow bandanas fell on their knees, raised their hands towards heaven and roared with laughter before quickly pulling off their headgear and dispersing, leaving an empty space and a gawking audience who just had their first dose of a ‘flashmob’ – a group of people who assemble together, suddenly, in a public place, perform an unexpected sets of choreographed actions and disperse without as much as a by your leave or with your leave.

Flashmobs trace their history to the early 18th century industrialisation, when a group of women working in the labour shops[1]in Australia used coded messages to meet and discuss the problems they had in their workplaces. These meetings were organised at random, and the women used the very technologies of production that they engaged with at work on a daily basis to fight the oppression and the injustice of the people at the top. The first modern flashmob, however, is attributed to Bill Wasik, editor of Harper’s Magazine, who, after the first failed attempt (May, 2003), managed to pull a successful flashmob where 200 people swarmed over the mezzanine floor of the Manhattan departmental store Macy’s, pretending to buy a ‘love rug’ for their commune where they supposedly all lived together; they left a bewildered audience and a bemused store staff behind them (3rd June, 2003).

Organise, congregate, act, disperse – that is the anatomy of a flash mob. A polymorphous set of people are brought together through the commonality of subscribing to similar technological interfaces or gadgetry. Random e-mails, short messages (sms) on cell phones, discrete messages embedded in public works of art or media, blogs and wikis have now been successfully used to conjure these tenuous group formations that temporarily transform the space that they arrive at – flash sites – into something that neither the audience they perform to nor the state can comprehend, thus producing that space in a condition of social and physical illegality.

In The Name of Fun

One of the most overarching icons of a globalised economy has been the credit card – virtual money that has changed the way we think of money, capital and transactions. Visa Power, as the advertisement goes, is looked upon as the quintessential rhetoric of economic globalisation, where the power to change and to create is manifested through the processes of consumption. While technology has been heavily implicated in the creation of this new invisible money, it has remained on the background. The swiping of the card – the physical act of buying without ‘paying’ has become such a naturalised event that the technology it adopts or the networks it creates are not very visible... Flash mobs, in their construction, execution and ramifications, foreground technology as one of the most powerful tools of creating new formations of grouping and networking that, through their deliberately devised unintelligibility, transform the spaces they occupy.

This is the story of the first flashmob in India, and how it can be understood through the tropes of illegality, enchantment and transformation. The story starts a little before the flashmob itself. In the year 2000, a shopping mall in Mumbai created a furore amongst the public. It was the first ‘genuine’ shopping mall in India. The first space that claimed mallhood was in Bangalore – Kemp Fort, but it was more a large shopping store rather than a mall. This first all American shopping mall – Crossroads, with its promises of unlimited pleasure and brand-tagged shopping – attracted the largest crowd in its opening week. Everybody wanted to see what the mall was like. Everybody was curious about this space. Everybody wanted to be a part of this exclusive zone that clearly demonstrated that modernity and progress had finally come to us. Then everybody found out that they were not allowed to enter the mall. As the director of the mall pointed out in his interview with The Times of India, (23rd August, 2000), “Crossroads is not meant for everybody".

In those days when cell phones were still a novelty and definitely a curio for the upper classes, and when pagers were still struggling for a mass market, Crossroads passed a stipulation which restricted people not carrying a cell phone or a credit card from entering the mall. If you were still eager to enter the space, you paid extra fees of Rs 50 per head and thus made amends for not carrying a cell phone or a credit card. This was the first time a ‘public’ space made it very clear that the public it was looking for and attempting to effectively create was not “everybody”. The issue was talked about, shouted about, screamed at and criticised by all wings of the media, who passionately analysed this instance of discriminatory practices based on socioeconomics. Later, a PIL (Public Interest Litigation) was filed against the mall; it lost, and had to throw its doors open to “everybody” who had been clamouring to get in ever since they found out they were not allowed to enter.

On 4 October 2003, the mall again came into limelight in a manner it had not accounted for. This time it was initiated by an e-mail. About 5,000 original mailers went off to people all around Mumbai and even beyond the city, asking them to have a look at a new blog for Mumbai flashmobs. The blog posted a form asking for name, e-mail address and mobile number. On 3 October several cell phones rang, asking people who had submitted their details in the form to check their inboxes. The eager participants glided to their accounts to find a mail that agonisingly chalked out the time and space of the meeting venue – a flash site. The information was also sent by sms to all members who had volunteered. And then at exactly 5 pm a group of about a hundred participants entered Crossroads. They screamed at the top of their voices and sold imaginary shares belonging to Reliance India. They performed the garba. In the middle of dancing they all froze. And then without so much as a word, after two minutes of historic histrionics, they opened their umbrellas and dispersed, leaving a trail of bewilderment and confusion, as an audience of over a thousand watched with their jaws on the floor.

This was India’s first recorded flashmob. A large crowd of people who did not know each other, did not have any largely political purpose in mind and did not really intend to extend the flashmob contact into relationships, got together to perform a set of ridiculous actions at Crossroads, thus marking it as the first flash site in India. Ironically, the group that converted the mall into mayhem consisted of whom Anne Balsamo calls the hyperreal people – people whose identities are created by the hypervisual and extra physical aesthetics of the digital technologies that they deploy - who were once the only legitimate owners of the space of that mall. This first flashmob sparked off many others all around the nation – most of them marking out spaces such as multiplexes, shopping malls, gaming parlours, body shops, large commercial roads and shopping complexes as their flashsite.

Bill Wasik, the creator of the first flashmob in Manhattan, in a recent interview,[2] looked upon the flashmob experiment as a study in behavioural psychology of people he called “hipsters” – people who would join ‘new’ or ‘cool’ things for no reason or investment but to be visible in the new trends and social fads. To a large extent, Wasik’s surface analysis seems to hold true. While flashmobs have been used as a political weapon by several groups and activists in many areas of human rights, queer rights, feminism, political democracy, etc., flashmobs fundamentally exist, like pre-Raphaelite art, for a solipsist reason. Bijoy Venugopal, who produced one of the most celebrated accounts of the Crossroads flashmob[3], mentions how it was all about having some “serious fun”. Increasingly, the flashmob organisers in and around the country have disavowed any ideological moorings for the gathering, and forcibly shelve it into the realms of entertainment or leisure. Following the banning of flashmobs in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore (Mid-day, 9th oct. 2003), even though they have invoked the right to freedom of speech and expression, the organisers and the participants have largely produced justifications by claiming to have no political agenda or inclinations in the construction or execution of flashmobs.

In this repeated disavowal of the political, one can read the desire for re-enchantment that flashmobs and mobsters bring with them. Flashsites, defined by the organising of the flashmobs, are usually sites of globalised consumption – an enchanted world of brand names and designer lifestyles that can make you feel as perpetually disoriented as Alice in Wonderland. These sites serve as the symbols of enchantment in the logic of the city.[4] The new urban enchantment and mode of fantasy is located in the circuits of consumerism where, with plastic money and unlimited credit, the consuming citizen can buy all that the heart desires. However, flashmobs, outside these networks of consumption, and constituted by the same people who fit the bill of the citizen as imagined and promoted by the state and the market as they embrace globalisation and its technologies, demand a re-enchantment of the city. They force us to acknowledge the need for such public spaces to be accessible to all, and provide a strong critique of the easily accepted globalised dream in which the state is so heavily investing. Flashmobs become a manifestation of how tenuously networked, fragile communities, their collaboration inspired and enabled by cyberspatial technologies, can contest the very forces that promote and proliferate these technologies. Flashmobs become a site upon which the drama of globalisation, consumption, state and space is discursively and recursively enacted.

In The Name of The Law

That flashmobs are in a condition of illegality is perhaps one of the easiest claims to prove. The very fact that the Mumbai Police, after the first series of flashmobs, invoked Section 37(1) of the Bombay Police Act in the name of security and safety, clearly states how flashmobs are considered outside the law in the most literal sense of the word. The then Mumbai Police Deputy Commissioner of Police, Amitabh Gupta, contacted Rohit Tikmany, organiser of the first flashmob and moderator of the flashmob blogging community (http://www.mumbaimobs.org/), asking him to shut down the site and stop all further attempts at organising flashmobs. Following the ban in Mumbai, cities such as Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Delhi have enacted similar bans within the city limits. These censoring forces look at flashmobs as potentially destabilising elements that can be ‘misused’ for violent acts such as riots and bombings by fundamentalist organisations.

However, of greater interest is the way in which flashmobs manage to reproduce flashsites in conditions of social and physical illegality by creative deliberate structures of transient unintelligibility. The leisure infrastructure of malls and multiplexes, cafes and large shopping complexes, gaming zones and commercial roads of consumption, are all aimed at the new citizenry that comes into being with these new urban economies falling into place. These spaces are not only legitimate spaces of self-expression through consumption, but also authorised spaces of public assembly and gathering. They promote an ethos of incessant consumption where the individual is also installed as a consumable product that relates to others in the processes of consumption. They are the locations where brands, accessories and lifestyles all come together as the figureheads of a sanitised economy which strives to make opaque the surrounding subcultures of piracy, theft, copying and distributing that emerge around such nodal points.[5] To belong to the space of a mall or a shopping complex, one needs to almost automatically endorse the original, the authentic, the expensive, as a way of making a conscious statement of style and lifestyle. These potential flashsites become the spaces that the state legitimises as the most visible and sanitised form of urbanisation in contemporary cities.

However, flashmobs definitely subvert the sanctity or the sanity of such spaces by compelling them to suddenly introject disruptive conditions of unintelligibility. Flashmobs force the other participants of the space to enter into a narrative of confusion and chaos; of turbulence, thus rendering the space of consumption incomprehensible for the short time that the flashmob unfolds. Moreover, flashmobs do not fall under globalisation’s rhetoric of consumption, and do not require any special access powers or consumption rites, thus defying the discriminatory protocols that such spaces put in motion under the uneasily hovering sign “Rights of Admission Reserved”. Flashmobs, by rejecting the very use and expectation of the space, in spite of the heavy surveillance, state opposition and hi-tech policing, are able to distort the formulaic narratives of the space, thus creating alternative structures of resistance, of transformation, of transition. State apparatus gets completely paralysed when faced with such a radical reconfiguring, and thus goes out of its way to put a special ban upon flashmobs in a city where even a small defeat in a cricket match, or various emotional events such a public mourning or celebration, bring together crowds much louder, more aggressive, tenuous and destructive than conventional flashmobs. The transient illegality that flashmobs produce is not only at the level of the law but also at the level of legibility and comprehension.

"What do the mobsters do when they come together for a flashmob?" is a wrong question to ask. While the actions of the mobsters might be bizarre and lacking in meaning, often uninformed by any obvious ideology, flashmobs do produce new modes of signification and networking patterns, unprecedented in modern history. The ephemeral nature of the flashmobs, the improbably pseudonymous identities of the participants, the technologically mediated communication and networking patterns, all hint towards a certain notion of technosociality, where the social world around us is profoundly affected by the technologies that we adopt. In these unexpected eruptions, flashmobs create a new relationship between actors, audience and the spaces that they inhabit, including all the three into the circuits of digital technologies. As a form of radical localised performance, flashmobs offer a way to question the hierarchical intentionality of the spaces that they transform; they embody new ways in which technologies interface with our daily life, producing new forms of technosocial living.

This paper was published in Academia.edu. Click here to read the original. Download the file here. [PDF, 129 kb]

[1].These were probably the precedents to the modern day sweat shops that have characterized Globalisation in the 21st century. The ‘labour shops’ were large stone and concrete buildings which housed workers working around the clock towards incessant production. Women and children were often preferred because they were given lesser wages than men and considered more easily malleable.

[2].The transcript of the interview is available at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php

[3].Venugopal, himself a prolific blogger, blogged about the flashmobs at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php

[4]. Po Bronson, in his spectacular analysis of the Silicon Valley in The Nudist on the Late Shift, talks about how in a post-industrial city, the quantifiable icons of enchantment and progress – large factories, smoke spewing chimneys and huge barricaded stone and iron constructions have given way to small and homelike offices which are almost human and hence negligible. In his search for the new symbols of enchantment, Bronson conjures the figure of the nudist on the late shift – an eccentric double billionaire who works and lives in a cubicle and rides on the crest of the IT boom. In the case of third world countries like India, these symbols might well be these new sites of consumption that have come with globalization.

[5].One of the more exciting facets of digital technologies and globalization has been the debate over property, ownership and theft. Easy duplication of brands and bypassing the traditional circuits of distribution or sale of property have created the glorified figure of the pirate who straddles the worlds of the legal and the illegal, the digital and the physical, the ephemeral and the tactical with great ease. Within the sanctuarised spaces of malls and shopping complexes, these referents to the other world of cheap duplicates and mobile consumables hang uneasily. There is a constant attempt at establishing the original and the legitimate over the fake or copied replicas which are available in the grey markets that emerge around them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/once-a-flash

October 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-12-06T04:53:41Z

CIS newsletter for October 2019:

Highlights for October 2019
Gurshabad Grover has been nominated through the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to be a member of the Advisory Group on Open Source Software for ISO/IEC JTC 1. In the wake of the Christchurch terror attacks, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and the President of France, Emmanuel Macron co-chaired the Christchurch Call to Action in May 2018 to “bring together countries and tech companies in an attempt to bring to an end the ability to use social media to organise and promote terrorism and violent extremism.” CIS sent its comments to the Call. Over the past decade, a few private online intermediaries, by rapid innovation and integration, have turned into regulators of a substantial amount of online speech. Such concentrated power calls for a high level of responsibility on them to ensure that the rights of the users online, including their rights to free speech and privacy, are maintained. CIS has analyzed the companies' transparency reports for government requests for user data and content removal. The Department of Labour convened an interaction program of sorts at Vikas Soudha in Bangalore on 21st October, 2019 to hear the issues plaguing the emergent gig economy. Bharath Gururagavendran has thrown more light on this in a blog post. CIS presented a response to the ‘Gender issues arising in the digital era and their impacts on women, men and individuals of diverse sexual orientations gender identities, gender expressions and sex characteristics. CIS made a submission to the draft Code on Social Security, 2019 prepared by the Government of India’s Ministry of Labour and Employment. On October 17, 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, released his thematic report on digital technology, social protection and human rights. Understanding the impact of technology on the provision of social protection – and, by extent, its impact on people in vulnerable situations – has been part of the work CIS has been doing. A case study titled Farming the Future: Deployment of Artificial Intelligence in the agricultural sector in India was published as a chapter in the joint UNESCAP-Google publication titled Artificial Intelligence in Public Service Delivery. In response to our call for contributions and reflections on ‘Decolonising the Internet’s Languages’ in August, we are delighted to announce that we received 50 submissions, in over 38 languages! From all these extraordinary offerings, we have selected nine that we will invite and support the contributors to expand further. In a case study undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development (BD4D) network, Ambika Tandon evaluates the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) as data-driven initiative in reproductive health at the national level in India.

CIS and the News

The following articles and research papers were authored by CIS secretariat during the month:

Setting International Norms of Cyber Conflict is Hard, But that Doesn't Mean that We Should Stop Trying (Arindrajit Basu and Karan Saini; Modern War Institute; September 30, 2019).
Digital mediation of domestic and care work in India: Project Announcement (Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi; Feminist Internet Research Network, APC; October 1, 2019).
Doing Standpoint Theory (Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi; Gender IT; October 10, 2019).
We need a better AI vision (Arindrajit Basu; Fountainink; October 12, 2019).
Farming the Future: Deployment of Artificial Intelligence in the agricultural sector in India (Elonnai Hickok, Arindrajit Basu, Siddharth Sonkar and Pranav M B; UNESCAP-Google publication titled Artificial Intelligence in Public Service Delivery; October 16, 2019).
The Mother and Child Tracking System - understanding data trail in the Indian healthcare systems (Ambika Tandon; Privacy International; October 17, 2019).
Facial recognition at airports promises convenience in exchange for surveillance (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; October 20, 2019).
“Politics by other means”: Fostering positive contestation and charting ‘red lines’ through global governance in cyberspace (Arindrajit Basu; Global Policy and ORF; October 21, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS secretariat was consulted for the following articles published during the month in various publications:

Why conviction rate for cyber crime cases in Karnataka is abysmally low (Theja Ram; News Minute; October 1, 2019).
Will FASTag raise privacy concerns? (Shreya Nandi and Prathma Sharma; Livemint; October 15, 2019).
India's HIV-positive trans people find 'new strength' in technology (Annie Banerji; Reuters; October 17, 2019). Also mirrored in Jakarta Post and ETHealthworld.com.
Dystopia vs development: The Kashmir paradox (Asmita Bakshi; Livemint; October 19, 2019).
Trending Hate Against Muslims: Is Twitter Complicit? (Puja Bhattacharjee; News Central; October 21, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

Access to Knowledge is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape.

Wikipedia

Under a grant from Wikimedia Foundation we are doing a project 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.

Blog Entry

Analysis on the strategies of Mozilla and Wiki communities on gender gap aspects (Bhuvana Meenakshi; October 3, 2019).

Internet Governance

The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society has defined internet governance as the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles of shared principles, norms, rules, decision making procedures and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet. As part of internet governance work we work on policy issues relating to freedom of expression primarily focusing on the Information Technology Act and issues of liability of intermediaries for unlawful speech and simultaneously ensuring that the right to privacy is safeguarded as well.

Freedom of Speech & Expression

Under a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, CIS is doing research on the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government and contribute studies, reports and policy briefs to feed into the ongoing debates at the national as well as international level. As part of the project we bring you the following outputs:

Research Paper

Designing a Human Rights Impact Assessment for ICANN’s Policy Development Processes (Collin Kure, Akriti Bopanna and Austin Ruckstuhl; October 3, 2019).

Submissions / Analysis

Through the looking glass: Analysing transparency reports (Torsha Sarkar, Suhan S and Gurshabad Grover; October 30, 2019).
CIS’ Comments to the Christchurch Call (Tanaya Rajwade, Elonnai Hickok, and Raouf Kundil Peedikayil; October 31, 2019).

Blog Entry

Department of Labour Interaction Program: Online Business Platforms (Bharath Gururagavendran; edited by Ambika Tandon; October 29, 2019).

Participation in Events

Roundtable Discussion on Intermediary Liability (Organized by SFLC and the Dialogue; New Delhi; October 17, 2019). Tanaya Rajwade participated in a roundtable discussion on intermediary liability.

Gender

Participation in Event

Due Diligence Project FGD by UN Women (Organized by UN; UN House, New Delhi; October 11, 2019). Radhika Radhakrishnan attended a focussed group discussion.

Privacy

Under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC we are doing a project on surveillance. CIS is researching the history of privacy in India and how it shapes the contemporary debates around technology mediated identity projects like Aadhar. As part of our ongoing research, we bring you the following outputs:

Submissions

Comments to the United Nations Human Rights Commission Report on Gender and Privacy (Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon and Pallavi Bedi; October 24, 2019).
Comments to the Code on Social Security, 2019 (Aayush Rathi , Amruta Mahuli and Ambika Tandon; October 27, 2019).

Participation in Events

BSides Delhi 2019 Security Conference (Organized by Bsides Delhi; New Delhi; October 11, 2019).
ISO/IEC JTC 1 SC 27 meetings (Organized by ISO/IEC JTC; Paris; October 14 - 18, 2019). Gurshabad Grover participated in the meetings.
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Privacy Consultation on 'Privacy and Gender' (Organized by UN Special Rapporteur; New York University, New York; October 30 - 31, 2019).

Artificial Intelligence / Digital Technology

With origins dating back to the 1950s Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not necessarily new. However, interest in AI has been rekindled over the recent years due to advancements of technology and its applications to real-world scenarios. We conduct research on the existing legal and regulatory parameters:

Blog Entry

AI for Good (Shweta Mohandas and Saumyaa Naidu; edited by Elonnai Hickok; October 9, 2019).

Participation in Events

NIPFP Seminar on Exploring Policy Issues in the Digital Technology Arena (Organized by Indian Institute of Advanced Study; Shimla; October 10 - 11, 2019). Anubha Sinha participated in this seminar as a discussant.
AI Opera- AI as a total work of art (Organized by Goethe; Bangalore; October 11, 2019). Shweta Mohandas and Mira were panelists.
Launch of Google-UNESCAP AI Report (Organized by Google; United Nations Convention Centre; Bangkok; October 16, 2019). Arindrajit Basu was a speaker.
Discussion at CyFy on Technology, Policy and National Security: Building 21st Century Curricula in India’s Law Schools (Organized by Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi and Observer Research Foundation; Villa Medici, Taja Mahal Hotel, Man Singh Road, New Delhi; October 20, 2019).

Researchers@Work

The researchers@work programme at CIS produces and supports pioneering and sustained trans-disciplinary research on key thematics at the intersections of internet and society; organise and incubate networks of and fora for researchers and practitioners studying and making internet in India; and contribute to development of critical digital pedagogy, research methodology, and creative practice.

Announcement

State of the Internet's Languages 2020: Announcing selected contributions! (P.P. Sneha; November 1, 2019).

Case Study

Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System (Ambika Tandon; October 17, 2019).

Participation in Event

Decolonizing the Internet’s Languages 2019 - From Conversations to Actions (Organized by Whose Knowledge; London; October 23 - 24, 2019). P.P. Sneha participated in this meeting.

Blog Entries

Mobilizing Online Consensus: Net Neutrality and the India Subreddit (Sujeet George; October 1, 2019).
How Green is the Internet? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (Aishwarya Panicker; October 11, 2019).

About CIS

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 CIS on:

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 CIS:

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.

Collaborate with CIS:

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-2019-newsletter

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).

-----------------------------------
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.

►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).

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

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

►Privacy

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).

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

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

Article

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

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.

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

► Follow us elsewhere

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

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

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

October 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-01-10T00:53:03Z

October 2017 Newsletter

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
CIS submitted its comments on mobile accessibility guidelines to the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Govt. of India. Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online. Manasa Rao captured the developments in a blog post. Padma Venkataraman in a blog entry chronologically mapped CIS’ efforts at enhancing financial transparency and accountability at ICANN, while providing an outline of what remains to be done. Shyam Ponappa's article on NPAs and structural issues was published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2017.

Highlights

CIS submitted its comments on mobile accessibility guidelines to the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Govt. of India.
Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online. Manasa Rao captured the developments in a blog post.
Padma Venkataraman in a blog entry chronologically mapped CIS’ efforts at enhancing financial transparency and accountability at ICANN, while providing an outline of what remains to be done.
Shyam Ponappa's article on NPAs and structural issues was published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2017.

CIS in the News:

Attempted data breach of UIDAI, RBI, ISRO and Flipkart is worrisome (DailyO, October 4, 2017).
Sex, drugs and the dark web (Hindu; October 7, 2017).
Ahead of data protection law roll out, experts caution that it shouldn't limit collection and use of data (First Post; October 12, 2017).
#NAMAprivacy: The economics and business models of IoT and other issues (Medianama; October 18, 2017).
#NAMAprivacy: Data standards for IoT and home automation systems (Medianama; October 18, 2017).
Majority of top politicians' Twitter followers fake: audit (Furquan Moharkan; Deccan Herald; October 24, 2017).
Awards for those working on employment opportunities for disabled (Eastern Mirror; October 24, 2017).
Nibbling away into your bank account, salami attackers cart away a fortune (New Indian Express; October 25, 2017).
Nirmita Narasimhan wins the 18th NCPEDP-Mindtree Helen Keller Award 2017! (National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People; October 31, 2017).

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Odia Wikisource Turns 3 (Manasa Rao; October 22, 2017).
Wikimedia Workshop at Ismailsaheb Mulla Law College, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at MGM Trust's College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Aurangabad (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Orientation Program at Kannada University, Hampi (A. Gopalakrishna; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Solapur University (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Discussion on Creation of Social Media Guidelines & Strategy for Telugu Wikimedia (Manasa Rao; October 24, 2017).

►Openness

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

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

►Freedom of Expression

ICANN’s Problems with Accountability and the .WEB Controversy (Padma Venkataraman; October 24, 2017).
Why Presumption of Renewal is Unsuitable for the Current Registry Market Structure (Padma Venkataraman; October 29, 2017).
CIS’ Efforts Towards Greater Financial Disclosure by ICANN (Padma Venkataraman; October 29, 2017).

►Cyber Security

Participation in Event

CyFy 2017 (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; New Delhi; October 2 - 4, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

►Privacy

Blog Entry

GDPR and India: A Comparative Analysis (Aditi Chaturvedi; October 17, 2017).

Participation in Event

Securing The Digital Payments Ecosystem (Organized by NITI Aayog; October 9, 2017).

►Big Data

Blog Entry

Revisiting Per Se vs Rule of Reason in Light of the Intel Conditional Rebate Case (Shruthi Anand; October 4, 2017).

Event Organized

Emerging Issues in the Internet of Things (CIS, Bengaluru; October 23, 2017). Andrew Rens gave a talk.

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

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

Article

NPAs & Structural Issues (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; October 4, 2017).

Articles

Digital Native: There is no spoon, There is no privacy (Nishant Shah; October 9, 2017).
Digital Native: Finger on the buzzer (Nishant Shah; October 22, 2017).

-----------------------------------
About CIS
-----------------------------------

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

► Follow us elsewhere

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

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

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

October 2016 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-02-06T12:52:02Z

Welcome to the October 2016 newsletter of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

Dear readers,

We are pleased to bring you the Centre for Internet & Society's October newsletter. The month of October was fervent for CIS as can be gauged from the number of outputs in various publications and our overall presence in the media. A research paper co-authored by Prof. Arunachalam has shed light on the contribution of Indian researchers in open access journals which has been considerably higher as against contributions from rest of the world.

Vipul Kharbanda and Elonnai Hickok in continuance of their research on mutual legal assistance treaties, examined a new approach to international bilateral cooperation being suggested in the United States, by creating a mechanism for certain foreign governments to directly approach the data controllers.

CIS also published the impact report form for receiving the Annual Plan Grant from Wikimedia Foundation.

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
In a research paper jointly authored by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan, published in the National Medical Journal of India and on the eprints@IISc repository, Prof. Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan have stated that ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, makes research more discoverable. It helps ensure that one’s grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed. It helps the research community not just in aggregating publications, but in every stage of research, viz. publishing, reviewing, profiling, metrics, accessing and archiving. In a research paper jointly authored by Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekharan, and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam published in the Indian Institute of Science Repository, the authors have raised the financial and ethical issue of paying for getting papers published in professional journals. The paper has thrown light on the fact that Indian researchers have published more than 37,000 papers in over 880 open access journals from 61 countries in the five years 2010-14 as seen from Science Citation Index Expanded. This accounts for about 14.4% of India’s overall publication output, considerably higher than the 11.6% from the world. The second iteration of Wikipedia Asian Month (WAM), a month-long edit-a-thon to create and improve Asia-related articles on Wikipedia began on November 1, 2016. Tito Dutta in a blog post revisited the stats of the 2015 iteration of the event and also spoke to Addis Wang, an organizer of WAM, to know more about their progress and preparation. CIS published the impact report form for receiving the Annual Plan grant from Wikimedia Foundation. The time period of this report is the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). RBI directions for account aggregator services in India seem to lay great emphasis on data security by allowing only direct access between institutions and do away with data scraping techniques, wrote Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda in a blog post. The recent security breach in an Indian payment switch provider, was confirmed by National Payments Corporation of India. This forced domestic banks into damage control mode over the past few days. Udbhav Tiwari analyzed the developments in a blog post published by Bloomberg.

CIS in the news:

Eye on Mumbai (Tariq Engineer; Mumbai Mirror; October 2, 2016).
Indian language localization community meets in New Delhi (Mayank Sharma; Opensource.com; October 3, 2016).
An 'app'ening world (Chetana Divya Vasudev; Deccan Herald; October 4, 2016).
Changing Wikipedia’s (and society’s) male bias is work in progress (Shrabonti Bagchi; Factor Daily; October 5, 2016).
A Market Structure for Digital India (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard and Organizing India Blogspot; October 5, 2016).
If all goes well, Indian IT Act may enter 21st century (Surabhi Agarwal; Economic Times; October 6, 2016).
Tech for the blind: How app developers can help end the ‘disturbing touchscreen trend’ (Naina Khedekar; First Post; October 10, 2016).
Tech companies like Gmail, WhatsApp may be asked to store user information (Surabhi Agarwal; Economic Times; October 14, 2016).
Here is why government twitter handles have been posting offensive and partisan messages (Danish Raza; Hindustan Times; October 15, 2016).
Digital Native: The Future is Now (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; October 16, 2016).
New regulations in place; Aadhaar Card records to be preserved for 7 yrs by Centre (Financial Express; October 17, 2016).
Govt to keep Aadhaar record for 7 years, activists worried (Aloke Tikku; Hindustan Times; October 17, 2016).
The Big Debit Card Breach: Three Things Card Holders Need To Understand (Alex Mathew; Bloomberg; October 20, 2016).
Intelligence agencies will not have open access to Aadhaar data: UIDAI chief (Aloke Tikku; Hindustan Times; October 20, 2016).
‘Entrepreneurship will become a common, respectable profession’ – 25 quotes from Indian startup journeys (Madanmohan Rao; Your Story; October 23, 2016).
Some Key Words Are Missing (Arindam Mukherjee; Outlook; October 23, 2016).
Bridging the gap: Tech giants bring the internet to women in rural India (KumKum Dasgupta; Hindustan Times; October 28, 2016).
Behind Modi’s Heartwarming Diwali Ad for Soldiers, An App That’s Primed for Political Messaging (Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty; The Wire; October 29, 2016).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Request for Specifics: Rebuttal to UIDAI (Hans Varghese Mathews; Economic & Political Weekly; September 3, 2016; Volume 51, Issue No.36). This was mirrored on CIS website in the month of October.
Love in the Time of Tinder (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; October 2, 2016).
IANA Transition: a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes? (Vidushi Marda; Digital Asia Hub; October 6, 2016).
Internet democratisation: IANA transition leaves much to be desired (Vidushi Marda; Hindustan Times; October 6, 2016).
Services like TwitterSeva aren’t the silver bullets they are made out to be (Sunil Abraham; Factor Daily; October 6, 2016).
Why Open Access Has To Look Up For Academic Publishing To Look Up (Anubha Sinha; October 12, 2016).
What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India (Subhashish Panigrahi; Your Story; October 20, 2016).
How Long Have Banks Known About The Debit Card Fraud? (Udbhav Tiwari; Bloomberg; October 22, 2016).
How Open Access Content helps Fuel Growth in Indian-language Wikipedias (Subhashish Panigrahi; Opensource.com; October 24, 2016).

Jobs

CIS is presently seeking applications for the following positions

Policy Officer (Cyber Security)
Senior Policy Officer (Cyber Security)
Programme Officer (Communications)
Intern (Pervasive Technologies Project) - Application accepted throughout the year
Internship - Application accepted throughout the year
Survey Participants for Research on Musician Livelihood

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

►NVDA and eSpeak

Our project with the Hans Foundation got over this month. Archives of the reports can be accessed on this page.

►Pervasive Technologies

Participation in Events

Workshop on Innovation, Economic Development and IP in India and China (Co-organized by the Singapore Management University, O.P. Jindal Global University, and Renmin University of China; September 27 - 28, 2016). Anubha Sinha and Rohini Lakshané made presentations. The event details were published on the website in the month of October.

Workshop on Competition Law and Policy (Co-organized by National School of Law India University and the Delegation of European Union to India; New Delhi; October 19 - 21, 2016). Anubha Sinha and Rohini Lakshané participated and made presentations.

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015 round2/The Centre for Internet and Society/Impact report form (Tanveer Hasan; October 9, 2016).
UTF-8, Indic and Stub Length Article in Wikipedia (Dr. U.B. Pavanaja; October 20, 2016).
Querying Wikipedia Data (Dr. U.B. Pavanaja; October 21, 2016).

Wikipedia Asian Month — 2016 iteration starts on 1 November (Tito Dutta; October 30, 2016).

►Openness

Journal Articles

Adopting ORCID as a Unique Identifier will Benefit all Involved in Scholarly Communication (Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Muthu Madhan; National Medical Journal of India, Vol. 29, No.4, 2016 and Indian Institute of Science Repository; October 28, 2016).
Should Indian Researchers Pay to Get their Work Published (Muthu Madhan, Siva Shankar Kimidi, Subbiah Gunasekharan, and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam; Indian Institute of Science Repository; October 29, 2016).

Participation in Events

OpenData Week in Madrid - OD4D Summit, Open Data Charter Meetings, and IODC16. Sumandro Chattopadhyay took part in three open data events in Madrid in the first week of October 2016:

OD4D Summit (Organized by IDRC; October 3, 2016).
Open Data Charter Meeting (Organized by Open Data Charter Lead Stewards; October 5, 2016).
4th International Open Data Conference (IODC 16) (Organized by red.es, IDRC, the World Bank and Open Data; October 6-7, 2016).

Blog Entries

(Lack of) Representation of Non-Western World in Process of Creation of Web Standards (Harsh Gupta; October 20, 2016).
Technical Alternative to Encrypted Media Extensions (Harsh Gupta; October 20, 2016).

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

Not Everyone Plays by the Rules in the Digital Playground: Addressing Online Child Sexual Exploitation (Organized by International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children, Singapore (ICMEC) and TULIR - Centre for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Sexual Abuse, India; October 3 - 4, 2016; India Habitat Centre, New Delhi). Japreet Grewal was a speaker.

►Privacy

Participation in Events

The Future of Privacy in the Age of Big Data (Organized by Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom; September 3 - 10, 2016; Berlin and Hamburg). Vanya Rakesh was one of the participants from South Asia.
LITD 17 Committee, Bureau of Indian Standards Meeting (Organized by Bureau of Indian Standards; September 23, 2016; Bengaluru). Vanya Rakesh attended the meeting.

Blog Entries

MLATs and the proposed Amendments to the US Electronic Communications Privacy Act (Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda; October 20, 2016).
RBI Directions on Account Aggregators (Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda; October 21, 2016).

►Big Data

Event Organized

Workshop on Big Data in India: Benefits, Harms, and Human Rights (India Habitat Centre, New Delhi; October 1, 2016).

Upcoming Event

Workshop on 'Privacy after Big Data' (Co-organized by CIS and the Sarai Programme, CSDS; New Delhi; November 12, 2016).

►Cyber Security

Participation in Event

National Cyber Defence Summit 2016 (Organized by National Cyber Safety and Security Standards in association with State & Central Governments, Ministry of Defence, Government of India, AICTE & Anna University; Chennai; September 30 and October 1, 2016). Vanya Rakesh attended the event.
Hakon 2016 (Organized by by Ninja Information Security Systems; Indore; September 30 - October 2, 2016). Udbhav Tiwari attended the conference.

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

Participation in Events

Seminar on Quality of Services in Telecom and Data Services: Issues, Challenges and Solutions (Organized by National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi; September 21, 2016). Shyam Ponappa was a speaker. This was mirrored on CIS website in October.
Free data, net neutrality: Discussion on TRAI paper (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; Hyderabad; October 24, 2016).

Event Organized

CISxScholars Delhi - William F. Stafford (CIS, New Delhi; November 3, 2016). William F. Stafford, PhD candidate in UC Berkeley, made a presentation on "Public Measurements, Private Measurements, and the Convergence of Units.

Participation in Event

Learning through Archives: A Colloquium on Digital Scholarship (Organized by FLAME University; Pune; October 16, 2016). P.P. Sneha participated in the dialogue.

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

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

► Follow us elsewhere

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

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2016-newsletter

October 2015 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2016-06-18T17:59:14Z

Our newsletter for the month of October is below.

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) is happy to share the tenth issue of CIS newsletter (October 2015). It has been a significant month for us. There have been crucial public debates on the violation of digital privacy of individuals and institutions, discussions on India’s national policy on access to knowledge rights, and re-examination of bans on access to internet services imposed by various state governments in India. CIS kept itself engaged with research on these topics from a public interest perspective. Previous editions of the newsletter can be accessed at http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters.

-------------------------------
Highlights
-------------------------------

NVDA team conducted a training programme in West Bengal in the month of September. Fourteen delegates attended the programme. Nirmal Verma was the trainer.
Nehaa Chaudhari authored an article that provides insights into the final draft of India’s National IPR Policy.
Odia Wikisource celebrated its first anniversary in Bhubaneswar. The event was prominently covered in various news channels. Subhashish Panigrahi wrote a blog post.

In 2013, the interview project “WikipediansSpeak” was launched in response to observations that many noteworthy Wikimedians were being underrepresented both locally and globally. For improving their visibility and reach, CIS-A2K interviewed Telugu Wikimedian Viswanadh B.K.

CIS initiated an effort to crowdsource incidents of violation of digital, online and telephonic privacy of persons and organizations in India and shared the full list of public incidents under CC-BY-SA international license.

Sunil Abraham wrote a column in the Week telling readers that internet of things phenomenon is based on a paradigm shift from thinking of the internet merely as a means to connect individuals, corporations and other institutions to an internet where all devices in (insulin pumps and pacemakers), on (wearable technology) and around (domestic appliances and vehicles) humans beings are connected.

Pranesh Prakash, Padmini Baruah and Jyoti Panday wrote a blog post that questions the division of the three IANA functions — names, numbers and protocols — given that there is no no real technical stability to be gained from a unified Post Transition IANA.

CIS analysed five main mailing lists where the IANA transition plan was formulated. The research found that the discussions around IANA transition have not been driven by the “global multi-stakeholder community”, but mostly by males from industry in North America and Western Europe.

In recent months, there was a spree of bans on access to Internet services in Indian states, for different reasons. State governments relied on Section 144 of Criminal Procedure Code for imposing the bans. Geetha Hariharan and Padmini Baruah in a blog post argued that Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 should be evoked if necessary and not that of the Criminal Procedure Code.
Zero Draft of the UN General Assembly's Overall Review of implementation of WSIS Outcomes was released on October 9. CIS responded to the call with its comments.
Shyam Ponappa’s monthly column published in the Business Standard talks about Digital India and the Prime Minister’s visit to the Silicon Valley.

CIS has announced the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC 2016), an annual conference series. The first edition is expected to take place from February 25 to 27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). CIS invites you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 15, 2015.

----------------------------------------------
Accessibility and Inclusion
----------------------------------------------
Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing a project on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

# Monthly Updates

October 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; October 31, 2015).

# Event Report

Training in use of eSpeak Bengali with NVDA (Organized by CIS; Turnstone Matruchaya, Siligudi, West Bengal; September 7 – 9, 2015). The report was published in the month of October.

-----------------------------------------------------------
Access to Knowledge
-----------------------------------------------------------
As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Pervasive Technologies

# Blog Entries

Compilation of Mobile Phone Patent Litigation Cases in India (Rohini Lakshané; March 15, 2015). This post was recently updated.
Comparison of National IPR Strategy September 2012, National IPR Strategy July 2014 and Draft National IP Policy, December 2014 (Amulya Purushothama; October 15, 2015).
National IPR Policy Series: Quick Observations on the Leaked Draft of the National IPR Policy (Nehaa Chaudhari; October 18, 2015).

# Participation in Event

IPEX 2015 (Organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry, APTDC and TDPC; September 25 - 26, 2015; Hotel Westin, Chennai). Rohini Lakshané attended the event.

►Wikipedia

# Blog Entries

WikipediansSpeak: Telugu-language library catalog project helps Wikipedia grow (Subhashish Panigrahi; October 11, 2015). This was published on Wikimedia blog in two languages English and Ukranian.
A Kannada Wikipedia brochure for newbies (U.B. Pavanaja; October 19, 2015).
Odia Wikisource to Celebrate Its First Anniversary in Bhubaneswar (Subhashish Panigrahi; Mybhubaneswar.com; October 24, 2015).

# Op-ed

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାରର ଆବଶ୍ୟକତା (Need for an Odia-language Wikisource) (Subhashish Panigrahi; Samaja; October 25, 2015).

# Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following:

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପାଠାଗାରର ଆବଶ୍ୟକତା ସମାଜ (Full Odisha.com; October 24, 2015).
Odia Wikisource celebrates 1st anniversary this 25th October (Bhubaneswar Buzz; October 24, 2015).
Odia Wikisource to celebrate its first anniversary tomorrow! (Odisha Sun Times; October 25, 2015).
Odia language classics could now be read from phones, tablets and of course from computers! (Orissadairy; October 25, 2015).
Odia Wikisource to Hold 1st Anniversary (Pioneer; October 26, 2015).
Otago Southland are the Coolest (Library and Information Association of New Zealand; October 26, 2015). The submission was accepted for Wikimania 2015.
India & France to digitise manuscripts, artworks & archives (Medianama; October 29, 2015).

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

►Big Data

# Article

Connected Trouble (Sunil Abraham; November 1, 2015).

# Upcoming Event

Big Data in the Global South International Workshop (Organized by Institute for Technology and Society of Rio de Janeiro; Hotel Windsor Florida, Rua Ferreira Viana, Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; November 16 – 17, 2015). Sunil Abraham and Vipul Kharbanda will be speaking at this event.

►Privacy

# Blog Entries

Contestations of Data, ECJ Safe Harbor Ruling and Lessons for India (Jyoti Panday; October 14, 2015).
Crowdsourcing Incidents of Communication Privacy Violation in India (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; October 16, 2015).

# Event Organized

Communication Rights in the Age of Digital Technology (Organized by CIS; Deck Suite Hall, 5th Floor, Habitat Centre, Lodhi Road, Near Air Force Bal Bharti School, New Delhi; October 30, 2015).

# Participation in Events

The Changing Landscape of ICT Governance and Practice - Convergence and Big Data (Co-organized by Innovation Center for Big Data and Digital Convergence, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan; August 24 – 25, 2015). Sharat Chandra Ram was granted the Young Scholar Award 2015 to attend the Young Scholar Workshop followed by main CPRSouth2015 conference (Communication Policy Research South) conference.
Porn. Panic. Ban: A Conversation on Sexual Expression, Pornography, Sexual Exploitation, Consent (Organized by Point of View and the Internet Democracy Project; New Delhi; October 28 - 30, 2015). Rohini Lakshané was a speaker. Tanveer Hasan also attended this conference.

►Free Speech and Expression

# Submission

Comments on the Zero Draft of the UN General Assembly’s Overall Review of the Implementation of WSIS Outcomes (WSIS+10) (Geetha Hariharan with inputs from Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Pranesh Prakash, Sunil Abraham, Japreet Grewal and Nehaa Chaudhari; October 16, 2015).

# Blog Entries

The Legal Validity of Internet Bans: Part I (Geetha Hariharan and Padmini Baruah; October 8, 2015).
The Legal Validity of Internet Bans: Part II (Geetha Hariharan and Padmini Baruah; October 8, 2015).
Peering behind the veil of ICANN's DIDP (II) (Padmini Baruah; October 15, 2015).
The 'Global Multistakholder Community' is Neither Global Nor Multistakeholder (Pranesh Prakash; October 20, 2015).
Do we need a Unified Post Transition IANA? (Pranesh Prakash, Padmini Baruah and Jyoti Panday; October 23, 2015).

# Event Organized

Cyber Security Policy Research (CIS, New Delhi; October 18, 2015). Tim Maurer gave a talk.

# Participation in Events

Cyfy 2015: The India Conference on Cyber Security and Internet Governance (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; Hotel Tajmansingh; New Delhi; October 14 – 16, 2015). Sunil Abraham was a panelist in the session "Protection of Intellectual Property and Business Secrets in the Knowledge Economy".
ICANN 54 (Organized by ICANN; INEX - Ireland’s Internet Neutral Exchange, Dublin; October 18 – 22, 2015). Pranesh Prakash, Snehashish Ghosh, Jyoti Panday and Padmini Baruah participated in the event.

--------------------------------
Telecom
--------------------------------

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

# Op-ed

Digital India - Now to Work (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; October 1, 2015; Organizing India Blogspot; October 2, 2015).

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

# Submission

Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015 (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; October 1, 2015). CIS is contributing to this submission.

# Blog Entry

Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective (Vivian Lewis, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne; October 16, 2015). CIS was featured in this report.

# Upcoming Event

First Edition of Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Organized by CIS; New Delhi; February 25 – 27, 2016).

---------------------------------
News & Media Coverage
---------------------------------
CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

The rise and rise of slacktivism (Divya Gandhi; Hindu; October 3, 2015).
Modi's Valley hug sparks swadeshi talk (Sujit John and Shilpa Phadnis; The Times of India; October 6, 2015).
CIS in Top 50 Tech Blogs of India (rebateszone; Ocotber 7, 2015).
Access at the cost of Net neutrality? (Suhrith Parthasarathy; Hindu; October 8, 2015).
Dadri reopens debate on online hate speech (Amulya Gopalakrishnan; The Times of India; October 9, 2015).
How To Win Friends, FB Style (Arindam Mukherjee; Outlook; October 12, 2015).
Supreme Court provides partial relief for Aadhaar (Apurva Vishwanath and Saurabh Kumar; October 15, 2015).
Digital India: Did Modi get it wrong in Silicon Valley? (Ayeshea Perera; BBC News; October 16, 2015).
Net advocacy body probing linkages between telcos and Facebook’s auto-play video option (Prabhu Mallikarjunan; Financial Express; October 28, 2015).

---------------------------------
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 diverse abilities, 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
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 / 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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2015-bulletin

October 2014 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-11-23T16:40:23Z

Welcome to the tenth issue of the newsletter (October 2014).

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcome you to the tenth issue of the newsletter (October 2014). Archives of our newsletters can be accessed at: http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters

Highlights

CIS sent its comments and recommendations on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill, 2014. It was submitted to the Parliamentary Standing Committee in October 2014.
CIS has published the Central Guidelines and Schemes.
CIS was one of the signatories of a letter sent to the Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi sharing its concerns on India's position on intellectual property, particularly in the context of bilateral relations between the United States of America and India. The letter was sent on October 22, 2014.

In 2013, the Indian Patent Office released Draft Guidelines for the Examination of Computer Related Inventions, in an effort to clarify some of the ambiguity. Shashank Singh analyses the various responses by the stakeholders to these Guidelines and highlights the various issues put forth in the responses.

Subhashish Panigrahi wrote an op-ed in the Samaja (Odia daily) on the hurdles that the Odia language has been facing and the potential aspects of the language including it being used massively on the Internet, Wikipedia and other media platforms.

International Telecommunications Union is hosting its Plenipotentiary Conference this year in South Korea. India introduced a new draft resolution on ITU's Role in Realising Secure Information Society. The Draft Resolution has grave implications for human rights and Internet governance. Geetha Hariharan analyses this.

Vipul Kharbanda analyses the possible implications of the public interest litigation that has been placed before the Supreme Court petitioning for the establishment of a DNA database in respect to unidentified bodies in his latest blog entry.
In a blog post published in Lila Interactions P.P.Sneha explores the possibilities of redefining the idea of access through the channels of education and learning.

►Job

Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge - Institutional Partnerships): CIS is seeking applications for the post of Programme Officer for its Access to Knowledge (A2K) Programme. The position will be based in its Bangalore office. Programme Officer will collaboratively work with the A2K Team and would report to the Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at CIS.

Accessibility and Inclusion

Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. CIS in partnership with CLPR (Centre for Law and Policy Research) compiled the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (29 states and 6 union territories). The updated draft is being reviewed by the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities. The draft chapters and the quarterly reports can be accessed on the project page. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

►NVDA and eSpeak

Monthly Update

October 2014 Report (Suman Dogra; October 31, 2014).

►Other

Submission

Comments to the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Bill , 2014 (Nirmita Narasimhan and Anandhi Viswanathan; October 30, 2014).

Blog Entries

Central Guidelines and Schemes (Anandhi Viswanathan, October 14, 2014).
The Legal Framework for Enforcement of Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CLPR; October 14, 2014).

Media Coverage

Communication technology opens 'doors' for everyone, not only people with disabilities (John D. Kemp and Brandon M. Macsata, The Hill, October 13, 2014).

Access to Knowledge

As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) 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.

Blog Entries

Letter to the Prime Minister on Indo-US Bilateral Relations on Intellectual Property (Nehaa Chaudhari; October 22, 2014).
Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions: Mapping the Stakeholders' Response (Shashank Singh; October 29, 2014).

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଭାଷା ବିକାଶରେ ପ୍ରତିବନ୍ଧକ ଓ ସମ୍ଭାବନା (Subhashish Panigrahi, Samaja; October 13, 2014).
Bharat Majhi Writings Now Available Under a Creative Commons License (Subhashish Panigrahi; October 14, 2014).
More Than 40 Million People Await the Launch of Odia Wikisource (Subhashish Panigrahi, Global Voices and Wikimedia Blog; October 21, 2014).
Odia Littérateur Ramakrushna Nanda's 4 Books Now Available Under a Creative Commons License (Subhashish Panigrahi; October 22, 2014).
Open Access Platform to Save the Odia Indian Language (Subhashish Panigrahi, Opensource.com; October 22, 2014).
Odia Wikisource Goes Live! (Subhashish Panigrahi; October 26, 2014).
Samskrita Vaibhavam (Sanskrit Wiki Outreach Program) (Shubha and Sayant Mahato; October 30, 2014).
Tulu Wikipedia Workshop cum Editathon at Udupi (Dr. U.B.Pavanaja, October 31, 2014). The event was covered by V4News.com and Mangalore Today.
Converting from nonUnicode (Nudi, Baraha, ...) font encoding to Unicode Kannada (Dr. U.B.Pavanaja; October 31, 2014).

Events Co-organized

Sangeet Baithak: A Hindustani Music Resource Donation Event in Mumbai (Organized by CIS-A2K and Khayal Trust; Shivaji Park, Dadar, Mumbai; October 7, 2014).
Indian Women in Science Wiki edit-a-thon (Organized by IndoBioScience and CIS-A2K; Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; October 11, 2014).
Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon 2014 (Organized by IndoBioScience and CIS-A2K; Urban Solace; October 14, 2014).

News and Media Coverage

CIS-A2K team gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Enliven the Tulu Viki Fidia first and then add Tulu to the 8th Schedule : Dr.UG Pavanaja, Bangalore Rep. in Udupi (V4News.com; October 15, 2014).
Wikipedia can establish Tulu in a wider way (Mangalore Today; October 17, 2014).
Pushing women scientists (Renuka Phadnis; Hindu; October 19, 2014).
Wiki Media Foundation keen on developing Urdu Wikipedia (Nisar Ahmed Syed; October 22, 2014).
Wiki Media Foundation keen on developing Urdu Wikipedia (Siasat Daily; October 24, 2014).

Participation in Event

Barcamp Bangalore (Organized by SAP Labs; Bangalore; October 12, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja and Rahmanuddin Shaik took part in the event.

Internet Governance

►Privacy

As part of our Surveillance and Freedom: Global Understandings and Rights Development (SAFEGUARD) project with Privacy International we are engaged in enhancing respect for the right to privacy in developing countries. We have produced the following outputs during the month although these may not be part of the SAFEGUARD project:

Blog Entries

The Gujarat High Court Judgment on the Snoopgate Issue (Vipul Kharbanda; October 27, 2014).
DNA Database for Missing Persons and Unidentified Dead Bodies (Vipul Kharbanda; October 31, 2014).

Upcoming Event

CPDP 2015 : The eighth international conference on computers, privacy and data protection will be held in Brussels from January 21 to 23, 2015. CIS is a moral supporter of CPDP.

Participation in Events

Training for Internet Governance Activists (Organized by Global Partners Digital, UK; Cambridge; September 23 - 24, 2014). Geetha Hariharan attended the event. The event was held in September and the details published in October.
The India Conference on Cyber Security and Cyber Governance (Organized by FICCI and CYFY; October 15 - 17, 2014; New Delhi). CIS was a knowledge partner. Sunil Abraham was a panelist in the session "Privacy is Dead".
Expert Consultation on Cyber Security, Justice and Governance (Organized by Hague Institute for Global Justice, Observer Research Foundation and STIMSON; October 18, 2014). Sunil Abraham was a speaker in the session "Internet Access, Freedom Online, and Development in the Global South".

►Free Speech

Good Intentions, Recalcitrant Text - I: Why India's Proposal at the ITU is Troubling for Internet Freedoms (Geeta Hariharan; October 28, 2014).
Good Intentions, Recalcitrant Text - II: What India's ITU Proposal May Mean for Internet Governance (Geeta Hariharan; November 1, 2014).

News & Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Is India the next frontier for Facebook? (Rama Lakshmi; Washington Post; October 9, 2014).
If MNCs make early inroads, they will keep market share: Sunil Abraham, CIS (J.Anand; Financial Express; October 23, 2014).

Digital Humanities

CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia:

Blog Entry

Rethinking Conditions of Access (P.P.Sneha, Lilainteractions; October 15, 2014).

About CIS

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

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge
E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration:

We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, atsunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director - Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2014-bulletin

October 2013 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2014-01-04T04:31:01Z

Our newsletter for the month of October 2013 can be accessed below.

Highlights

The National Resource Kit team is pleased to bring you its research for the states of Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, and the Union Territory of Daman and Diu.
The Department of Electronics and Information Technology invited comments on the Framework on the proposed adoption of Open Source Software in E-Governance Systems. CIS gave its feedback.
The Access to Knowledge team in collaboration with the Goa University re-released the Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA-3.0.
Sunil Abraham, Pranesh Prakash and Chinmayi Arun participated in the Internet Governance Forum held in Bali, Indonesia from October 21 to 25. Overall CIS spoke in 7 panels.
In an article on Spy Files, Maria Xynou examines the legality of India’s surveillance technologies and their potential connection to India’s central monitoring system.
A clause-by-clause comments on the Working draft version of the Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012 was sent to the Ministry of Science and Technology.
CIS started the first Privacy Watch in India. The map includes data on the UID, NPR and CCTNS schemes, installation of CCTV cameras and the use of drones throughout the country.

Accessibility

As part of our project (under a grant from the Hans Foundation) on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India, we bring you draft chapters for the states of Madhya Pradesh and Arunachal Pradesh, and the union territory of Daman and Diu. With this we have completed compilation of draft chapters for 24 states and 5 union territories. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the following chapters:

National Resource Kit

The Daman and Diu Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, October 28, 2013).
The Arunachal Pradesh Chapter (by CLPR, October 29, 2013).
The Madhya Pradesh Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, October 30, 2013).
The Delhi Chapter (by Anandhi Viswanathan, October 31, 2013).

Note: All of these are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated.

Survey (Other Organisation)

Accessibility of Banks and Financial Services Institutions: A Global Survey (posted by Nilofar Ansher, October 20, 2013). G3ict and Scotiabank, requests senior managers, COO / CEOs, Managing Directors, IT Directors, HR Directors, and accessibility professionals from banks and financial services companies to participate.

Blog Entry

Bengali eSpeak Aids in Disaster Management (by Anirudh Sridhar, October 15, 2013).

Access to Knowledge

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers and human rights, and critically examines Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, and Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software. We produced a column in the Economic and Political Weekly, submitted our feedback on Framework on Open Source Software Adoption in E-Governance Systems, and conducted 3 Wikipedia workshops:

Article

The Fight for Digital Sovereignty (by Sunil Abraham, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol-XLVIII No. 42, October 19, 2013).

Blog Entries

Mobile Phone Patents: Prior Art Survey (by Nehaa Chaudhari, October 23, 2013).
Ambiguity in the App Store: Understanding India’s emerging IT sector in light of IP (by Samantha Cassar, October 24, 2013).

Submission

Feedback on the Framework on OSS Adoption in E-Governance Systems (by Nehaa Chaudhari, October 26, 2013). In September, 2013, the DeitY invited comments on the Framework on the proposed adoption of Open Source Software in E-Governance Systems. CIS gave its feedback.

Events Participated In

OSOD 2013: International Workshop on Open Science and Open Data (organised by Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore, October 7, 2013). Nehaa Chaudhari participated as a panelist and gave a presentation on Government Accessibility and Copyright Conundrum.

National Conference on Opening up by Closing the Circle: Strengthening Open Access in India (co-organised by UNESCO, Central Library, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia, October 21, 2013). Nehaa Chaudhari was a panelist in the discussion on "Why Open Access?". She gave a presentation on 'Pondering Copyright and Recasting Openness'.

Note: The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation (http://bit.ly/SPqFOl). As part this project (http://bit.ly/X80ELd), we held 3 Wikipedia workshops in October:

Event Co-organised

Re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (organised by Goa University and CIS-A2K, Goa University Conference Hall, September 26, 2013). Nitika Tandon has blogged about the event.

Events Organised

Workshop on Wikipedia in the Indian Undergraduate Language Classrooms (October 1, 203, Christ University, Bangalore). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.
Train the Trainer — Four-day long Residential Programme (October 3 – 6, 2013, CEO Center, Gubbi, Bangalore. CIS-A2K Team conducted the workshop. Seventeen people participated in the event.
Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization (Goa University, October 19-20, 2013). CIS-A2K team conducted the workshop. Thirty-seven people participated in the event.

Events Participated In

Re-sourcing Indian Cinema: Humanities Research, New Archives and Collaborative Knowledge Production (organised by the Centre for Contemporary Studies and the Centre for Study of Culture and Society, October 29, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk on “Let Cinephiles Collaborate: Pleasures and Perils of Indian Film History on Wikipedia”.

Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs for the following media coverage:

Mangalore: Konkani writers resolve to form all-India forum at JKS conference (Daijiworld, October 1, 2013).
Wikipedia in Indian Languages on Mobile Phones (by Megha Prakash, Sci Dev Net, October 15, 2013).
कोंकणी विश्‍वकोश ‘विकिपीडिया’वर (Navprabha Daily, October 22, 2013). A detailed article about the digitalization of Konkani Vishwakosh.

Internet Governance

CIS is doing a project (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) on conducting research on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). So far we have organised seven privacy round-tables and drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill. This month we bring you clause-by-clause comments on the Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012, and a map monitoring privacy in India. As part of its project (funded by Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the IDRC) on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia we did an interview with Anja Kovacs on cyber security. With this we have completed a total of 10 video interviews:

Internet Governance Forum

Sunil Abraham, Pranesh Prakash and Chinmayi Arun participated in the Internet Governance Forum held in Bali, Indonesia in the month of October. Overall, CIS spoke in 7 panels:

Charting the Charter: Internet Rights and Principles Online (organised by IRP Coalition, October 22, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist.
Fair process frameworks for cross-border online spaces (organised by the Internet & Jurisdiction Project, Civil Society of France, Western Europe and Others Group and Internet & Jurisdiction Project, Civil Society of Germany, Western Europe and Others Group, October 22, 2013). Sunil Abraham and Chinmayi Arun were panelists for this workshop.
Removing Barriers to Connectivity: Connecting the Unconnected (organised by Internet Society and ETNO, October 23, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist.
FOSS: Smart Choice for Developing Countries (organised by TechNation and Open Source Alliance of Central Asia, October 23, 2013). Sunil Abraham spoke on FOSS and IT Growth Policies in South Asia.
Privacy: from regional regulations to global connections? (organised by Internet Society, Bali, October 24, 2013). Sunil Abraham was one of the panelists.
Human rights, freedom of expression and free flow of information on the Internet (a Focus Session on Openness, October 24, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was a speaker at this event.
Taking Stock: Emerging Issues - Internet Surveillance (a session on Internet Surveillance, October 25, 2013). Pranesh Prakash made intervention in this session.
Tweets from Bali IGF 2013: To enable research by those who didn't want to mess around with Twitter's APIs, CIS has made available tweets from the IGF as downloadable .CSV files.

Privacy

Magazine Article

What India can Learn from the Snowden Revelations (by Elonnai Hickok, Yahoo, October 23, 2013). The title of the article was changed in the version published by Yahoo.

Blog Entries

Concerns Regarding DNA Law (by Bhairav Acharya, October 9, 2013): http://bit.ly/1aoxXM9.
Interview with Big Brother Watch on Privacy and Surveillance (by Maria Xynou, October 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cRDMbV.
Interview with Bruce Schneier (by Maria Xynou, October 17, 2013): http://bit.ly/GS6oDX.
An Interview with the Tactical Technology Collective (by Maria Xynou, October 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/1i1lVNo.
Interview with Dr. Alexander Dix (by Maria Xynou, October 23, 2013): http://bit.ly/1a7dgtQ.
Open Letter to Members of the European Parliament of the Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee (by Elonnai Hickok, October 23, 2013): http://bit.ly/17eZntz.
An Interview with Jacob Kohnstamm (by Elonnai Hickok, October 25, 2013): http://bit.ly/17NcQmD.
Spy Files 3: WikiLeaks Sheds More Light on the Global Surveillance Industry (by Maria Xynou, October 25, 2013): http://bit.ly/1d6EmjD.

Comments

Re: The Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012 (by Bhairav Acharya, October 9, 2013). CIS provided clause-by-clause comments on the on the Working Draft version of the Human DNA Profiling Bill: http://bit.ly/17Jpp63.

Announcement

The India Privacy Monitor Map (by Maria Xynou with assistance from Srinivas Atreya, October 9, 2013). CIS has started a first of its kind Privacy Watch in India. The map includes data on the UID, NPR and CCTNS schemes, as well as on the installation of CCTV cameras and the use of drones throughout the country: http://bit.ly/19A5mCZ.

Event Organised

Privacy Round-table, New Delhi (organised by FICCI, DSCI and CIS, FICCI, Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, October 19, 2013): http://bit.ly/GAsStr.

Event Participated In

'Free Speech and Media in South Asia: Human Rights Concerns in a Globalizing World (organised by the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy, Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, in collaboration with the Centre for Media and Governance, National Law University, Delhi, Oxford University, October 25, 2013). Chinmayi Arun spoke about “Privacy and Surveillance in India” in a panel discussion: http://bit.ly/18bRGi5.

Cyber Security

Laird Brown, a strategic planner and writer with core competencies on brand analysis, public relations and resource management and Purba Sarkar who in the past worked as a strategic advisor in the field of SAP Retail are working in this project:

Part 11: An Interview with Anja Kovacs (October 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/15EAZOE.

Other IG Updates
Event Organised

Mapping Digital Media: Broadcasting, Journalism and Activism in India (co-organised by Alternative Law Forum, Maraa and CIS, Bangalore International Centre, October 27, 2013). Samantha Cassar has blogged about the event: http://bit.ly/17EVtdw. It was covered by the New Indian Express (http://bit.ly/1dGENE6) and Hindu (http://bit.ly/1bcVUIU) on October 28.

Events Participated In

Religious Pluralism and the Tensions between Freedom of Expression and Respect for the 'Other’ (organised by Reset-Dialogues on Civilizations project, in cooperation with Jamia Millia Islamia, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, October 10, 2013). Chinmayi Arun was a speaker at the session on “Democracy and the Tension between Freedom of Speech and Respect for the Other’s Religion, Culture, Identity, India and Europe”: http://bit.ly/194dtI7.
Fragmentation in a Democracy: The Role of Social Movements and the Media (organised by the Observer Research Foundation, Delhi and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Berlin at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi, October 16, 2013). Sunil Abraham was a panelist in the session on “Impact of Media, Social Media & Technology on Democracy / Governance”: http://bit.ly/17e3PZ9.
Internet, Mobile & Digital Economy Conference (IMDEC) 2013 (organised by FICCI, in association with the Ministry of Communications & IT, Government of India, New Delhi, October 25, 2013). Sunil Abraham participated as a speaker in the session on "The Internet We Want: A Multistakeholder Approach": http://bit.ly/1b8QHDD.

New and Media Coverage

CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:

Decline in web freedom steepest in India: Report (by Javed Anwer, The Times of India, October 3, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cVOJ99.
Google survey: 37% of urban Indian voters are online (by Anuja and Moulishree Srivastava, Livemint, October 8, 2013): http://bit.ly/1gtqqDY.
The quest for genuine clout on the internet (by Karthik Subramanian, October 13, 2013): http://bit.ly/1b8TdKa.
India believes in Complete Freedom of Cyber Space: Kapil Sibal (by Elizabeth Roche, Livemint, October 14, 2013): http://bit.ly/1fZgwd1.
Location Tracking: Why the Govt-Mobile Manufacturer War Won’t End Soon (by Danish Raza, FirstPost, October 15, 2013): http://bit.ly/HkIvF7.
Bouquets & brickbats for Google's new privacy policy (by Indu Nandakumar, Economic Times, October 18, 2013): http://bit.ly/18Rzkqm.
Bali meet to discuss Internet governance issues (by Moulishree Srivastava, October 22, 2013): http://bit.ly/17I4r3M.
Indian politicians yet to tap voters online: CIS’s Abraham (by Venkatesh Upadhyay, Livemint, October 22, 2013): http://bit.ly/17HRV4s.
Beyond the Searchlight (by Debarshi Dasgupta, October 23, 2013): http://bit.ly/17IitlZ.
Nowhere to hide: Govt making your personal details public (by FirstPost editors, FirstPost, October 28, 2013): http://bit.ly/1dGE6KJ.
Your private data may be online, courtesy govt (by Somesh Jha and Surabhi Agarwal, Business Standard, October 29, 2013): http://bit.ly/HpQRMp.
Saving privacy as we knew it (by Somesh Jha and Surabhi Agarwal, Business Standard, October 29, 2013): http://bit.ly/16HNYwu.
E-governance hopes rise as India crosses 1 billion transactions (by J Srikant, Economic Times, October 29, 2013): http://bit.ly/1cnJIKd.

Digital Humanities

Events Participated In

GFM 2013 (organized by the University of Luneberg, Germany, October 3 – 5, 2013). Dr. Nishant Shah participated in a panel discussion with Wendy Chun, Tom Levine and Geert Lovink, around 'The End of Bibliographies: New Media and Research'. Nishant also participated as a panelist in a panel discussion on 'Open Up: Pragmatism and Politics of Open Access': http://bit.ly/1f9LCOH.
Digitalization of Culture (organized by Leuphana University, Luneberg, October 8, 2013). Dr. Nishant Shah did an introduction keynote to 1600 undergraduate students. A video of the lecture can be accessed here: http://bit.ly/1enWQPv.
RENEW: The 5th International Conference on the Histories of Media Art, Science and Technology (hosted by RIXC Centre for New Media Culture in Riga in partnership with the Art Academy of Latvia, Stockholm School of Economics in Riga and Danube University’s Center for Image Science, October 8 - 11, 2013). Dr. Nishant Shah was a part of the selection committee for the conference and chaired a session on Network Art on October 9: http://bit.ly/17e41aJ.

Blog Entry

A Hitchhikers Guide to the Cyberspace (by Anirudh Sridhar, October 4, 2013): http://bit.ly/1ga8yfH.

Knowledge Repository on Internet Access

CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at the Internet Institute website: http://bit.ly/1iQT2UB.

Modules

World Intellectual Property Organisation (by Anirudh Sridhar and Snehashish Ghosh, October 31, 2013). WIPO is a specialized agency of the United Nations which deals with issues related to intellectual property rights throughout the world. Find out more at http://bit.ly/17a8WEk.
An Interview on Internet Governance with Professor Milton Mueller and Jeremy Malcolm (by Anirudh Sridhar, October 31, 2013). Professor Milton Mueller from the Syracuse University School of Information and Jeremy Malcolm, an Information Technology and Intellectual Property Lawyer, spoke about current issues and debates surrounding internet governance: http://bit.ly/17ix3Ro.

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

Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CISA2K

Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k

Visit us at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge

E-mail: a2k@cis-india.org

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

Request for Collaboration:
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org

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

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

NTIA to give up control of the Internet's root

pranesh — 2014-03-18T18:21:40Z

On Friday evening the U.S. government's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that it was setting into motion a transition to give up a few powers that it holds over some core Internet functions, and that this would happen by September 2015. Pranesh Prakash provides a brief response to that announcement.

As it noted in the NTIA's press release:

NTIA’s responsibility includes the procedural role of administering changes to the authoritative root zone file – the database containing the lists of names and addresses of all top-level domains – as well as serving as the historic steward of the [Domain Name System (DNS)]. NTIA currently contracts with [the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN] to carry out the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions and has a Cooperative Agreement with Verisign under which it performs related root zone management functions. Transitioning NTIA out of its role marks the final phase of the privatization of the DNS as outlined by the U.S. Government in 1997.

This move was welcomed by "Internet technical leaders".

While this announcement cannot be said to be unexpected, it is nonetheless an important one and is also a welcome one. The NTIA seems to have foreclosed any option of the US government's role being performed by any government-led organization by noting in their press release, "NTIA will not accept a proposal that replaces the NTIA role with a government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution," once again reaffirming their belief in American exceptionalism: the NTIA could fulfil its role despite being a government, but now even a body involving multiple stakeholders can't replace the NTIA's role if it is going to be government-led.

Unfortunately, this announcement to relax American "stewardship" or "oversight" over some aspects of the Internet's technical functioning cannot restore the trust that has been lost due to actions taken by the US government and US companies. This new announcement won't change the US government's ability to 'tap' the Internet, nor will it affect their ability to unilaterally seize .com/.net/.name/.org/.edu/.tv/.cc/.us and other US-based domain names. Nor will a shift away from NTIA oversight lead to any of the chilling visions that some believe might lie in our future: the fears of the Association of National Advertisers and of some politicians and members of the US Congress is based on ignorance of what NTIA's role is.

The European Commission in a communiqué last month noted: "recent revelations of large-scale surveillance have called into question the stewardship of the U.S. when it comes to Internet governance". Unfortunately, the U.S. giving up that stewardship role will not prevent the continuation of their large-scale surveillance, just as the lack of such a stewardship role has not prevented other governments — U.K., India, Canada, Sweden, France, etc. — from engaging in large-scale surveillance.

There are three main benefits from the U.S. giving up this role.

First, it will put an end to the political illegitimacy of the U.S. government having a core authority in a global system, somehow making it first among equals;
Second, will focus light on ICANN, which under US oversight performs the IANA functions, and might, one hopes, lead to needed reform in ICANN's other functions;
Third, it will allow us to collectively move on from this dreaded political issue at the heart of Internet governance, which nevertheless is of little practical consequence if ICANN's accountability mechanisms are strengthened. As difficult as it may be, ICANN has to be accountable not just to one government or another but to the world, and ensuring that accountability to all doesn't become accountability to none, as NetChoice's Steve DelBianco put it, is the formidable task ahead of us.

Yet, all the ICANN reform in the world will still not lead to a less spied-upon, more open, and more equitable Internet.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/ntia-to-give-up-control-of-internets-root

NSA leaks helping India become 'Big Brother' state?

praskrishna — 2013-11-19T09:45:13Z

While the US and Britain fend off accusations of Big Brother-style spying, other countries are learning lessons from fugitive ex-US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden's leaks and, critics say, developing the same kind of mass-surveillance.

This post was published in BBC on October 31, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

India is one of those in the frame.

Its authorities are bringing in new measures against foreign cyber-snooping, including a plan to move internet traffic inside its borders and banning officials from using Gmail and other external email services.

Simultaneously, campaigners say the Indian government is loosening controls on electronic snooping by its own spies.

It is also stepping up efforts to build its own mass-surveillance system, which critics have dubbed "India's PRISM" - a reference to one of the US spy programmes revealed by Mr Snowden.

This is the downside of Mr Snowden's leaks, says Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society, an Indian advocacy group.

"Governments like India are now cherry-picking the worst practices, in a race for the bottom in terms of human rights".

Documents released by Mr Snowden to journalist Glenn Greenwald showed America's National Security Agency (NSA) was hoovering up billions of chunks of Indian data, making the country its fifth most important target worldwide.

'Not actually snooping'

But unlike other states that have discovered the US is siphoning off their secrets, India has conspicuously avoided joining the chorus of criticism. That may be because it doesn't want to draw attention to its own activities.

Its foreign minister Salman Khurshid even appeared to excuse American monitoring, saying it "was not actually snooping".

When the German chancellor Angela Merkel erupted over reports the NSA had been bugging her mobile phone, the Indian prime minister's office was untroubled by the possibility he too had been targeted.


Indian PM Manmohan Singh does not use a mobile phone or Gmail, his spokesman says

"There are no concerns", a spokesman for Manmohan Singh told the BBC, because "he does not use a mobile phone or Gmail".

Many Indian officials do. But from this December the government is planning to bar them from using their private email accounts for any official business - in direct response to evidence of US prying. Instead, they will have to use government email.

The latest reports of even deeper NSA penetration of Google is likely to further spur such moves.

It won't be an easy change to make though, judging from the BBC's own experiences dealing with Indian officials. Many prefer to use Gmail or Yahoo rather than their official accounts because the government email system so often crashes.

More ambitious still is a plan to bring all internal Indian internet traffic inside its borders. Currently, an email sent from say Delhi to Calcutta is more likely to travel via the US or Europe, partly because of the way the internet is designed but also because of a lack of Indian capacity.

But at a summer meeting to assess Mr Snowden's leaks, one of India's security chiefs called for "100%" of emails and files sent between Indians to stay in the country to limit snooping by "foreign elements".

As other governments take similar measures, these changes may not just mean a tougher job for spies but also a more fragmented internet under tighter state control.

Critics say India was already on the road to creating a Big Brother state, long before anyone had heard of Edward Snowden.

Their biggest concern is a secret mass-surveillance project the government has reportedly been building for the past few years. The Central Monitoring System (CMS) is supposed to give security agencies the ability to listen or record all communications nationwide and track individuals, in real time - like some of the US programmes that have been revealed.

If the few details that have emerged are correct, Indian cyber-spies would have even more freedom, bypassing internet and telecom companies and tapping straight into the cables and servers carrying the traffic.

Mirroring America's defence of its spying programmes, the government says the monitoring system is to protect against terrorists and other national security threats. But a lack of concrete information has only heightened fears about its intentions.

A draft privacy bill which was supposed to allay some concerns has been watered down in the light of Mr Snowden's revelations.

According to Sunil Abraham, "India's intelligence agencies argued: Look at what the US can do. Why curtail what we can do?"

In any case, India's spies are not troubled by any parliamentary or judicial oversight. In the world's largest democracy, the intelligence agencies still report straight to the prime minister and the home minister.

India needs to "protect its sovereign rights", says Pavan Duggal, a Supreme Court advocate and cyber-law specialist. But these are "unprecedented powers".

Right now, these are minority concerns in India, which is far more consumed with the early political sparring before next year's elections.

Meanwhile, the Indian government is learning many lessons from the NSA's troubles. But Mr Duggal says, "Sooner or later it will have to address the issue of greater accountability."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bbc-october-31-2013-nsa-leaks-helping-india-become-big-brother-state

Now, police use apps to catch a criminal

Ketaki Desai — 2019-03-31T15:47:00Z

Recently, Punjab police detained three suspects on a tip-off. The cops clicked their photographs, uploaded them on an app called the Punjab Artificial Intelligence System or PAIS which uses facial recognition, and immediately got the lowdown on their criminal history, which involved a contract killing and looting. Four stolen vehicles and five weapons were recovered from them.

The article by Ketaki Desai with inputs from Sanjeev Verma in Chandigarh was published in the Times of India on March 31, 2019. Arindrajit Basu was quoted.

Police forces around the country are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence as both a crime-busting and prevention tool despite concerns about the inbuilt biases of algorithms, and the worry that policing may win over privacy.

Atul Rai, founder CEO of Gurgaon-based firm Staqu Technologies, which developed the app used by Punjab police, says they collect data from various state agencies and have built a database on criminals. “An NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) report showed that 70% of crimes are committed by repeat criminals. Our facial recognition software works even on low-resolution photos and videos.” Police departments in UP, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan are armed with similar apps. And how likely is it that this facial recognition tech makes mistakes? It has 98% accuracy, claims Rai.

Other companies are also in the fray. Chennai’s FaceTagr has built a database of 75,000 photographs, and claims its app – currently being used in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry – is able to identify faces with an accuracy of 99.4%.

Facial recognition doesn’t just help catch the bad guys, it can also help trafficked kids reunite with their families. Vijay Gnanadesikan, CEO of FaceTagr, says they have begun to work with the Indian Railways to facilitate this. “Often, a child is not able to tell police officers where they are from. Now if a child is reported missing in Mumbai, and found in Bengaluru, the parents can be found if both police departments upload his or her photo.”

UP’s Trinetra app, developed by Staqu Tech, was launched in December, 2018. I-G (crime) S K Bhagat says, “We didn’t have any centralised criminal database in UP before this.” The app informs the cops of the status of each person in custody, and whether they are out on bail. This means that if a chain-snatching takes place in Lucknow, they can filter suspects and also show the victim their photos for identification. “Right now we’re in the first phase of using the app; beat officers still don’t yet have direct access but their SHO does.” To prevent misuse, a centralised monitoring system has been developed.

Staqu also offers predictive analytics— they collect data from news sites and blogs, aggregate information about crime patterns across the country, and create a ‘heat map’ for law enforcement agencies. Using this, they are able to make predictions about where, how and by whom a crime might be committed.

But predictive policing is problematic, points out Vidushi Marda of human rights organisation Article 19. “Data is often imperfect, and it’s easy for a deeply unequal, biased outlook of society to be embedded in data. This means that people who have always been arrested for no reason will continue to be arrested for no reason. And because it’s an algorithm, we can’t refute it,” she says.

Uncanny Vision, a Bengaluru-based company, makes smart CCTVs that are deployed in ATMs and number plate readers that are used on national highways in Kerala to curb speeding. Co-founder Navaneethan Sundaramoorthy says, “Our ATM CCTVs don’t use facial recognition, they just look at the actions. We take the video, convert it into information and toss away the video.” He thinks that privacy concerns are important. “Is it possible for the government to use it in any big-brother scenario? Yes, but that has always been the case. With this technology, we can control who has access to the information that comes from CCTVs, and there is a clear footprint about who has accessed the information,” he says.

Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, points out that there are no regulatory safeguards in place. “The first thing surveillance needs is a statutory framework—what is its purpose, how is it being carried out, and what limits they cannot go beyond. These surveillance systems are being made without adequate civil society engagement. There needs to be a third-party data protection authority to audit their activities.”

Arindrajit Basu, senior policy officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, says the advantages of AI in tracking crime have to be balanced with accountability. “The government can be taken to court for violation of a fundamental right, including the recently recognised right to privacy. But, most of this tech is being rolled out in collaboration with private actors. You can’t take a private company to court for this.” The solution might lie in private companies sharing liability with the government, he says. “That will ensure that they consider the ethical consequences of their products.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-march-31-2019-ketaki-desai-now-police-use-apps-to-catch-a-criminal

Now, Aadhaar details displayed in Mizoram too

praskrishna — 2017-04-27T16:59:37Z

Contrary to the Centre’s assurances, government websites are revealing digital details of the poor, leaving them vulnerable to financial frauds and identity theft.

The article by Sebastian PT was published in the National Herald on April 26, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Could there be a method to the madness? Or is it just carelessness? From the Jharkhand Government to the Union Territory of Chandigarh to the Union Ministry of Water and Sanitation to even Mizoram’s Food and Civil Supplies Department, government websites are found to have displayed Aadhaar details of citizens, a crime under the law.

In Jharkhand, details of 16 lakh beneficiaries – their bank account details, ration card and the 12-digit Aadhaar number – were displayed on the website of the Directorate of Social Security. Similar blunders were witnessed from different corners of the country from Chandigarh to Kerala, where details of 35 lakh people have been breached. This flies in the face of the Government’s repeated claims on data privacy, that Aadhaar details are completely safe.

The law doesn’t allow this. The displaying of the Aadhaar data, for instance, is in clear violation of Section 29 of the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016. The provision clearly says that “no” Aadhaar number or core biometric information of an Aadhaar number holder shall be “published, displayed or posted publicly”.

“There appears to be no regulation worth the name as far as the Aadhaar project is concerned,” says economist Reetika Khera from IIT Delhi.

So, will these officials responsible be punished according to the Act? More importantly, what about the damage of leaking such sensitive, apparently confidential data?

Irreparable Damage

Several cyber security experts have been warning of the possibility of precisely such leaks and Opposition parties were vociferously pointing this out while the Centre was brazenly violating the Supreme Court’s orders and forcibly extending Aadhaar to almost everything – including it being linked to one’s Permanent Account Number (PAN), used for filing income tax.

“What has been broken through technology, can’t be fixed with the law,” says Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of Bangalore-based research organisation, the Centre for Internet and Society.

The data breach just made it easy for players in the black market for ID (identification) documents to be lapped up to create false ID cards, for instance.

When demonetisation was being implemented, sources say that black money hoarders apparently bought fake IDs which were made from stolen Aadhaar details to get the old notes exchanged – one way for doing this was perhaps by opening new bank accounts or to, say, utilise unused Jan Dhan accounts to deposit the money. Now, one can only imagine what terrorists can do with these details.

So far, perhaps, the only solace is that the biometric details of the beneficiaries weren’t leaked. But, in the backdrop of the lax attitude of the various government departments, even that too is just waiting to happen, fear experts.

Abraham warns that Aadhaar was always a risky proposition as it was based on biometrics, which “made it very insecure”. He terms it as a “mass surveillance technology” – that too a poorly-designed technology – which, in fact, “undermines security”. Once biometric data are compromised, it cannot be secured again. Instead of biometrics, he suggests the UIDAI shift to using smart cards.

The unfettered forcible linking of almost everything – from bank accounts to one’s PAN card – to Aadhaar only makes things worse. “The Centre is ‘seeding’ the various data bases with the Aadhaar number, which is a very bad move. And, involving various private and public agencies in this only makes the entire thing very precarious,” warns Abraham. He points out that, for instance, when the PAN cards are linked with the Aadhaar number, breach made possible.

Instead, he says, the government should adopt the ‘tokenisation approach’, instead of the ‘seeding approach’. What this means is that, say, if the PAN card is to be linked to Aadhaar, then UIDAI issues a token number and not the original 12-digit Aadhaar number. So, even if a breach happens, the hacker will not be able to get all the Aadhaar details, he says.

However, the government does not seem to be taking the issue of privacy very seriously. What perhaps is not being understood is that this is not just a privacy issue, but making the masses vulnerable to frauds. Instead of treading cautiously in implementing Aadhaar, the government seems to be in a hurry to extend it to almost every possible silo in an individual’s life.

“Given the callous attitude of central and state governments, I hope that the Supreme Court will stop the government from a forced linking of Aadhaar, on the one hand, and bank accounts and PAN numbers on the other hand,” says Khera.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/national-herald-sebastian-pt-april-26-2017-now-aadhaar-details-displayed-in-mizoram-too

Now Streaming on Your Nearest Screen

nishant — 2011-12-24T08:58:13Z

Digital cinema, especially the kinds produced using mobile devices and travelling on Internet social networking systems like YouTube and MySpace, are often dismissed as apolitical and ‘merely’ a fad. Moreover, content in the non-English language, due to incomprehensibility or lack of understanding of the cultural context of the production, is labeled as frivolous, or inconsequential, writes Nishant Shah in this peer reviewed essay published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2009.

Contextualising new digital cinema through Kuso[1]

Deploying the aesthetic framework of kuso as political engagement, this essay analyzes how its ‘aesthetic’ form of expression offers spaces of political participation and negotiation for the ‘Strawberry Generation’ digital natives in Taiwan. This paper draws from various youth phenomena like the emergence of the ‘BackDorm Boys’ as iconic representations of flawed stardom, the adoption of kuso lifestyles and the consumption/distribution cycles of cinema on the web to see the possibilities they offer for political engagement and participation through cultural expressions and productions, that are otherwise dismissed in contemporary discourse.

New digital technologies, initially developed for surveillance and strategic communication, because of the proliferation of the internet/s and the cyberspaces, have now become freely available at very inexpensive rates around the world. The easy availability of these technologies enables new conditions of production of hitherto privileged art forms. The new globalised circuits of un-contextualized distribution lead to the imagination of a deterritorialized community of consumers who share common systems of making meaning and receiving these objects. As has been noted in earlier cybercultures studies, objects found on the internet/s – the people and the narratives that they produce - are often consumed as outside of time and geographical space. William J. Mitchell (1996) in his now much critiqued conception of the ‘Infobahn’, conflates all geographical distinction in his imagining of the larger neural circuits of digital information and economy. Similarly, in his extraordinary book. Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger (2007), explores the role that digital dissemination and distribution (as also storage and archiving) play in evolving a new miscellaneous form of sorting and classification, thus deconstructing established coda of knowledge determination. Weinberger, despite the keen insight into the importance of metadata and user-based personalised galaxies of information, is unable to talk of the entire range of phenomena as rooted in particular geo-political contexts. In fact, as Gasser and Palfresy (2008) make evident in their book Born Digial, whenever a body is referred to within cybercultures studies, it is the body of a white, upper class, masculine body; whenever a place is evoked, it is unequivocally the economic centres of the North-West; Time, which is an affiliate of the space and the body, is also then the linear and historical time determined by these concrete referents.

The West, with its wide consumer base and widespread proliferation of new digital technologies, often becomes the hegemonic legitimising authority as objects produced elsewhere are understood through ‘foreign’ aesthetics and logistics. Imagining the internet/s as residing outside of the time-space continuums, allows for a cyclical re-assertion of the Western paradigms as credible and authentic, and other forms as parodic or derivative in nature. New forms of cultural expression and narrativisation, received outside of the context of their production or the circuits of distribution and reception, are often mis-read and interpreted to fit the existing modes of making meaning.

This paper is an attempt to look at a specific form of new digital cinema in North East Asia that challenges the west-centric modes of understanding these objects. New digital cinema is a category that needs to be more sharply defined. In the last three decades of extensive technological advent and deployment in the fields of cinematic production, many different forms have claimed the space of new digital cinema. Post-celluloid cinema,[2] production of movies augmented by technologies, studio house experiments in animation and 3D technologies, distribution of movies and the networks of piracy that come into being with peer2peer networks,[3] conditions of reception and movie watching with digitally owned copies of movies,[4] the emergence of multiplex cinema and conditions of consumption,[5] etc. have been looked upon by different theoreticians and practitioners as new digital cinema.

I use the term ‘new digital cinema’ in the rest of the paper in a very specific sense of the phrase to make a very clear point of departure from the aforementioned approaches, which, though exploring the possibilities that digital technologies offer, still, often, stay with contained and unquestioned understanding of the established cinematic practices of production, authorship, distribution and spectatorship. New digital cinema is located in the new wave of cinematic forms produced by people who are enabled to do so by the easy availability of conditions of production and distribution that are framed by new digital technologies. Instead of looking at movies being produced by ‘film-makers’ or ‘film-studios’, maintaining the distinctions of authorship, readership and distribution circuits, I explore movies which are produced by people who are otherwise relegated to the realm of spectatorship and consumption. For the scope of this paper, new digital cinema refers to the cheaply produced cinematic forms, shot through inexpensive and slowly-becoming ubiquitous camera enabled devices. Geared towards an almost obscene abundance of details and demanding an untiring self-narrativisation,[6] these sites of social networking and expression have led to the production of videos and distribution of the self in unprecedented ways. These videos are further marked in their distribution through cyberspatial forms like YouTube, MySpace, and Google video, Television based reality shows based that run on user based programming consisting of personal videos, personal webcam sites, and MMS forums, to millions of users who enter into an interaction that is no longer limited to spectatorship.

There are three dialectic processes around the ‘personal’ videos broadcast on such sites of digital social networking and sharing, that need to be mapped in order to understand the impulse of this paper as well as to look at the dialectic reconstruction of earlier categories as understood by non-digital, pre-internet cultural forms. The first trope of dialectic comes in the form of continuity. Histories of technology taking the When Old Technologies were New (Marvyn, 1988) approach, often produce these digital moving images as bearing a relational value with the emergence of earlier technological forms and the use of these forms to produce personal narratives – print, camera, video, to name the three most influential forms of self expression and narrativisation. Such a historical narrative, unless carefully inflected with the growth and development of indigenous technologies and the indigenisation of these technologies, reads both, the technological development as well as the cultural forms thus produced, only through a West-centric paradigm of aesthetics, glossing over the differences that might be present in the very process and methods of reading such technologised forms. This non-disruptive, uninterrupted historicisation, while it is fruitful in questioning some presumed categories in the process of cultural production,[7] still reinforce these digital moving images as merely a new form of old cinema.

The second tension that needs to be mapped out occurs in the form of carefully maintained distinctions between the Sacred Cow of originality and the much maligned miasma of derivative, plagiarised, copied (left, right, centre), forms that have been facilitated by the proliferation of copy-paste digital technologies and internet networks. In the public as well as the theoretical discourse around these digital moving images, there is almost a Universal original (generally Western, otherwise canonised by the Western gaze in other geo-political contexts), to which everything else has a relation that is either praodic or uniformly derivative in nature. Even within the West, these videos on youtube and myspace are easily dismissed as plagiarised or unoriginal, often leading to a wide range of public controversy and exchange.[8]

The third dialectic is in the blurring of the pre-digital accepted terms of producers, spectators and processes of reading that these digital moving images produce. It is necessary to realise that the context of not only the production but also that of the reader is crucial to understanding the aesthetics of cyberspatial forms. The author in the digital world is as digital and ephemeral as the object itself. The tension between the corporeal and the digital has been effectively resolved by conceptualising the ‘interface’ – the space between the two conflicting and tense oppositional ideas- as the bearer of thought, idea, meaning and intention for digital objects. Such a complex structuring challenges the earlier crystalised practices authorship, spectatorship, distribution and reception, thus marking new digital cinema as not merely a cinematic practice augmented by technology but as a new form of cinema that challenges, quite radically, the earlier cinematic forms, in very much the same way that, in another historical and cultural moment, the print did to the manuscript.

This paper locates itself in these three dialectical flows to explore new digital cinema as a form of popular and cultural expression in Asia, specifically in Taiwan. It hopes to dismantle the myth of the universal/accessible/west-centric view of new digital cinema and demonstrate the need to assert the geo-socio-cultural contexts of their origin through exploring the aesthetics and genre of Kuso.

Knowing Miso from Kuso

Kuso, though it is a relatively new term, is highly popular in describing the new cybercultural forms that emerged with the proliferation of the internet/s. Anime fans are familiar with Kuso as an expletive or an interjection, used as the English equivalent of ‘Shit!’ Though Japanese in origin, it was made popular as a word, an aesthetic and a lifestyle in Taiwan around 2000, subsequently spreading to Hong Kong and China. Now, Kuso, along with other N.E. Asian products like Hentai,[9] and Manga, is a popular way of identifying cybercultural forms. The wikipedia mentions that

[t]he roots of Taiwanese “Kuso’ was Kuso-ge’s from Japan. The word Kuso-ge is a portmanteau of Kuso and game, which means, quite literally, “shitty games.” The introduction of such a category is to teach gamers how to appreciate and enjoy a game of poor quality – such as appreciating the games’ outrageous flaws instead of getting frustrated at them.
(Wikipedia, 2006)

It was an attempt to not only identify or locate flaws but to celebrate them and encourage an active production of them. Kuso, for the younger generation in Taiwan (and the thousands of fans all around the world, who subscribe to Kuso Bulletin Boards and discussion forums) is not just a cursory form of parody but a lifestyle. A Taiwanese artist, Yeh Yi-Li, in her solo exhibition, seems to suggest that as well. Her introduction to her exhibition titled ‘KUSO – Red, Spring Snow, Orange Flower’ says

In Taiwan’s pop culture, internet subculture and video gamers’ communities, it (Kuso) became a trendy term that suggests “making fun of anything, playing practical jokes on everything.” KUSO subverts conventional values and turns things into garbage. It has no limits, history, agendas or logic. Like an amoeba, it is a subculture phenomenon that has no rules. (Yi-Li, 2006)

Making a list of characteristics of what might be Kuso is futile. As Yi-Li seems to suggest, Kuso, on the surface, is located on the ‘fun’ and ‘hilarity’ of an object. However, Kuso actually resides in the processes of subversion and resistance. Kuso not only makes ‘things into garbage’ but also, by logical corollary, turns ‘garbage into things’. It started as a subculture phenomenon but is now highly popular in mainstream cultures – on reality TV on youth oriented channels like MTV and Channel V, in local performances and spectacles, and in Stephen Chou movies. Kuso seems to refer to not just the discourse around a particular object but a subjective mode of representing the self into different narrative conditions enabled by new digital technologies. Kuso is about the ability to create fluid and transitory spectacles of the self as a trope of social interaction and communication. While Yi-Li might look upon Kuso as without ‘limits, history, agendas or logic’, she forgets that Kuso has been the way for organising political protests, flash mobs and social awareness collectives in many part of Asia.[10] It is in this very ‘free’ and ‘excessive’ structure of Kuso that one can locate the politics and processes by which New Digital Cinema can be understood.

In her Kuso exhibition, Yi-Li created the ‘Worm-man’ that

drags its body and slithers in the ever-changing world. In different kinds of worlds, the Worm-man develops into different phases. As phenomena are happening, it is also transforming. The Worm-man has multipe possibilities, multiple personalities and multiple identities.
(Yi-Li, 2006)

While Kuso is often understood as parody, trash culture or camp humour, and is even attributed to MTV style movies by enthusiasts, for the large section of Kuso consumers, it is the governing principle for social interaction, dressing and appearance, hair and accessories, consumption of products and modes of expression. Kuso seems to be a way in which they produce themselves as parodic forms of themselves – producing themselves in conditions of constant transformation with ‘multiple possibilities, multiple personalities and multiple identities.’ As Yi-Li suggests in her art, Kuso is not just about producing parodies and mimicking popular art forms but it is also a way of producing the spectacle of the self. It is not surprising then, that Kuso emerges as an aesthetic with the proliferation of technologies and tools which allow for a narrativisation of the self for distribution and consumption in the public.

Contexualising Kuso

I look at two specific instances of Kuso to understand and frame the concept in this paper. The first emerged out of my own involvement with some of the students and their scheduled performances at the annual sports day.[11] My Chinese language teacher Mandy Hua, who is an undergraduate student at the NCU, is also a professional hip hop dancer. For her annual day performance at the university, Mandy chose (with some inputs from me) a popular Bollywood song that was creating raves in India at that time.[12] Mandy chose the song, edited the audio to make it tighter and shorter in duration and started the practice. Along with a flock of dancers from other schools on the campus, Mandy replicated an ‘Indian’ aesthetic for the song, doing elaborate costumes which included a lot of flowing skirts, veils, sequins and shimmer – the kind that was shown in the song. The female performers were in a state of erotic relationship – not only in their imitation of the seductive postures and movements of the dance sequence in the original movie song but also in presenting themselves as eroticised objects of glamour and desire to a young audience made primarily of students. The expected reactions of cat calls, of hooting, of lascivious laughter and of gasps of wonder and awe were all present in the crowd. However, a brief minute into the performance, their narrative of seduction, eroticism and obvious parody-imitation was disrupted and somehow harmoniously irrupted by a group of boys, wearing glasses, their bodies far from the perfectly sculpted eroticised bodies of the female performers, wearing clumsy looking ill-fitting karate dresses and making unrehearsed animal movements around the female performers.

It was the introduction of these dancers that completely displaced the element of parody within which I understood the performance. The male performers, who were completely unfamiliar with the original song, were imitating the female dancers on the ground. They were not interested in replicating either the movements of the female dancers or the sequences they were following. They were more interested in undermining the very aesthetic that the female dancers were trying to replicate or produce. Their movements were jerky, unpractised, bordering on the ridiculous. Their half naked bodies were un-sculpted and uneroticised. These were not the college hunks or super jocks coming out to parade their masculinities but the ‘geeks’ or the ‘dorks’ who were ravelling in their un-eroticised status and celebrating it with gusto.

What was more interesting was the way in which the audience was receiving these male performers. In spite of the engaged erotic relationship with the female performers, the audience was extremely appreciative of the male performers’ attempts at overthrowing the female performers’ spectacle. The audience was egging them to constantly be more ridiculous, be more flamboyant, be more self mocking, guiding their movements and actions, leading to a final mock chase sequence, where the male performers chased the female performers off the ground, stripped themselves to their shorts, flexed their un-muscled bodies and made their exit among huge cheering and applause. They were obviously the star attraction of the performance. Such a response was puzzling. It was the women who had put in hours of practice to produce themselves as erotic objects of consumption. The audience, in the beginning had engaged with them at that level. And yet, it was this bunch of slightly ‘with an L on my head’ guys who emerged in their buffoonery and antics as the heroes of the minute.

My first impulse was to read in it, the dynamics of a gendered space and a certain mock valorisation of this hyper masculinity. While gendered readings of the performance are indeed valuable and might offer an entry into looking at the construction of eroticism, desire, spectacle and the performative self, I am going to focus on the Kuso in this performance. My own gendered impulses were quickly overshadowed by the repeated use of the word Kuso that the members of the audience were using in order to explain the male performances. It was obvious that these male performers, in spite of their actions, were not really clowns but some sort of heroes and embodying this peculiar word – Kuso.

When I started asking around for Kuso, people pointed at several different objects, from Stephen Chou movies to Reality TV on Channel V, from personal videos to popular Kuso shows where people engaged in a set of ludicrous, often bizarre performances to make a public spectacle of themselves. The more I encountered these Kuso forms, the more difficult and incomprehensible it became to understand either the appeal or the aesthetic of the form. It looked like cheesy camp or an extension of a certain MTV aesthetic as a result of vulgarisation of technologies. When I crawled on the web looking at discussion forums that were devoted to Kuso, I found a huge number of people sharing my incomprehensibility and raised eyebrows at the Kuso objects, trying to figure out what it was that was attracting thousands of users to produce and consume Kuso with such dedication.

Especially in the context of Taiwan, Kuso belongs to the realm of what is called the ‘Strawberry Generation’ (Tsao-Mei Yi-Dai). The Strawberry generation in Taiwan refers to the people born between 1981 and 1991, and, despite its suggestions in English, carries negative connotations with it. The three most popular characteristics of the Strawberry generation – a phrase that has huge currency in popular media – have been severally explained. Rachel, who writes on the National Central University’s (Taiwan) website, explains:

In Taiwan, the Strawberry Generation refers to those who were born between 1981 and 1991, ranging from the 22-year-old university students to the 12-year-old junior high school students. This generation is labeled as “strawberry” due to two reasons: first, this generation of youth was raised in a better environment, as strawberries grown and nourished in a greenhouse, than the earlier generation. Second, strawberries are known for their beauty, delicacy and high price, suggesting that the young people can not withstand pressure, difficulties, and frustration as they grew up in a nice and comfortable environment and are able to get almost whatever they ask for.
(Rachel, 2008)

Henrry (2006), a student who also belongs to the Strawberry Generation, writes in his classroom assignment, ‘People of this generation are said to be fragile when facing pressure, just like the strawberries.’ He further goes on to suggest that the problems of the Strawberry Generation are largely economic in nature and might lead to serious problems for Taiwan’s economy. Myr Lim (2006) also looks at the economic and political instability of this generation and describes them as ‘Like the fruit, they look extremely good and sinfully juicy, who wouldn’t want one? But they have a very limited shelf life.’ Built into this criticism is also the understanding that the Strawberry Generation is also in a state of political disavowal.

And yet, when introduced to the different manifestations of Kuso, there was a very clear idea of resistance, subversion and mobilisation. A local incident, which made temporary heroes of two teenage boys who stripped in Public, on a university campus, was read as a sign of resisting the University’s attempts at regulating dress-codes for the students.[13] Other videos which were made for internet circulation had the digital natives refusing the Western models of masculinity or heroism and producing buffoon-like images to correspond with the glorified pop icons from the West – often producing infantile and juvenile forms of behaviour to exaggerate the effect. Other Kuso manifestations were in consumption, as different objects which were seemingly ‘cute’ (se-jiao) or ‘innocent’ were invested with sinister or often ludicrous intent.[14] The same kinds of aesthetics were also seen on the ‘LOL Cat’[15] and ‘All your base are belong to us’[16] internet memes which have gained currency online. It is while browsing through these worlds that I was introduced to a Kuso phenomenon which was garnering huge media and popular attention globally. This was a phenomenon which has now popularly been dubbed as the Backdorm Boys.

BackDorm Boys were three graduate students, two of whom became instant celebrities – Huang Yi Xin and Wei Wei - from the Guangzhu Academy of Fine Arts in China, who shot to instant fame when, in a state of boredom, they made a lip-sync cover version of popular Backstreet Boys singles, using nothing more than cheap digital cameras on their computers, in the restrictive space of their dormitories, and distributing them through video sharing spaces like YouTube, MySpace and other blogs (The Full Plate, 2008). These weren’t, at a first glance, very different from the ‘funny’ videos that one encounters online all the time – cheaply produced, shot with a webcam mounted on the screen, an almost unedited, uninterrupted full frontal frame, and an exaggerated attempt creating a certain Kitsch video that have gained popularity in the past. However, within my own contexts, the BackDorm Boys had strong resonances with the earlier dance performance I described. Once again, the three students in the videos were not the hyper eroticised masculinities that the boy bands like Backstreet Boys have embodied in popular cultures. Given the Confucian model of academia and studentship, students are not easily granted such erotic value to begin with. These were also not students who were particularly talented at singing. In fact, they were not singing at all, they were lip synching the songs in their videos. The videos did not involve any attempts at shooting but were in the full-frontal, almost pornographic frames of spectacle where the camera was mounted over the screen and the two performers were being caught in that frame. Dressed in identical clothes, the two main performers sang with extraordinary histrionics, the otherwise mellow and slightly cliché ridden love ballads that the Backstreet Boys had made their signature. In the background, one of their other dorm mates, played a Kuso-ge called Quaker throughout the video. He occasionally simulated the actions of a music mixer or a DJ or sometimes helped them with props.[17]

There was, at the first glance, nothing spectacular about the Backdorm Boys. As one of the responders on a blog dedicated to the Backdorm Boys very succinctly puts it:

Let’s face it: it doesn’t take a lot of talent to make faces. They didn’t write the song, didn’t sing the song, didn’t play any musical instructions, etc. Their sole accomplishment is they made faces at a camera. That’s not talent, man!!! And if they weren’t Chinese—i.e., didn’t have the freak factor of Chinese boys lip-synching to Backstreet Boys songs—NOBODY will notice this.
Da Xiangchang 2005

And yet, the Backdorm Boys, apart from cults developing around them and various internet memes devoted to them,[18] were featured live on NBC and both dropped out of their academic programmes to become hugely successful brand ambassadors and spokespersons for some of the largest mass media brands in China. They have both acquired a celebrity status and are role models and now popular media persons on TV channels, hosting their own shows.[19] In trying to understand these Kuso products in the realm of parody one starts asking the wrong kind of questions: where is the talent? Several respondents, including Da Xiangchang very pointedly pointed out that ‘it takes very little talent to make a fool out of yourselves.’ The more interesting question to ask would be the question that Yi-Li asked in her exhibition: How does Kuso manage to make garbage out of things? And further, is it possible, to read into Kuso, a new politics which guises itself as ‘fun’ or ‘hilarity’.

Differentiating between parody and Kuso

The Western gaze will only allow Kuso to be understood in a relationship of parody. However, looking at the contexts within which Kuso emerges and its ability to ‘make garbage out of things’, Kuso changes the relationship between the ‘original’ and the ‘discursive’ objects. parody, as a literary and a narrative form, resides more in the object being parodied (original) rather than in the parodic creation (discursive). To understand, appreciate or enjoy the discursive object, it becomes necessary to be familiar with, sometimes at a very intimate level, with the original object. The chief aim of a parody is to invoke the original object by introjecting it into new frames of references and meaning making, establishing a tenuous relationship of invocation between the original and the discursive objects. Parody seeks, not to replace the original but add to the ‘aura’ of the original object. Legends, myths, cult-stories and folklores can be understood as parodic in nature as they add to the understanding of the original or the core object. In the case of cinema especially, parody is not simply a process of poking fun at an earlier cinematic form or object but is an effort to evoke the original as a way of making meaning and seeking sense in the narrative.

The relationship between the original object and the discursive object is one of invocation where the parody invokes, glorifies and seeks justification for its existence through the original object. parody also resides in a certain historical reading of cinema as it produces often unintentional but present residues of earlier forms. parody can be looked upon as enabling a certain genealogical reading of cinematic narratives and forms. In the non-linear consumption patterns of cinema reception, especially with cable television and global distribution, the boundaries between the original and the discursive are often blurred and reconfigured. Often the audiences and consumers encounter the discursive before they get familiar with the original and hence they change the way in which the original object is understood or received, often mis/reading it through the lens of the parody instead of the other way round. Cinema also makes more visible, the ways in which the parody can also work through different genres and media – be it in the production of books that try to appropriate the cinematic language of telling stories or in the production of movies that are based on books or sometimes try to deploy the narrative conditions of books in the cinematic narratives. The only way to talk of parody is to read it in the cinematic object itself and in the invocations that it produces with the imagined or the real object. The concept of an original is necessary to the understanding of the parody.

It is exactly this relationship between the original and the parody that Kuso disrupts from the within. Kuso does not produce the definitive terminal points of the original and the discursive objects that parody requires. In the instance of any Backdorm Boys video, there is no presumed knowledge of either the Backstreet Boys videos or the kind of globalised consumption that they can be contextualised under. While there are many references – almost at the level of invocation, in the clothes that they wear, in the choices they make in songs etc. – they are not necessarily the frameworks through which their videos can be made meaning of. If it was merely a question of parody of Backstreet Boys, their subsequent videos where they also ‘Kuso-ed’ other performers and local artists would not have worked for their fans.

Like a network, the relationship between the original and the discursive objects of Kuso is masked so that each constantly feeds back into the other. Hence, in the case of the Backdorm Boys, if you tried to understand their work as simply a Chinese/Asian parody of a Western form of popular culture, you end up bewildered, unable to account for the huge popularity and success. However, if we place their production as Kuso, it allows us to realise that the objects being parodied in the videos, are not American popular cultural forms or specifically Backstreet Boys videos. What is being parodied is the original self of the performers.

Instead of the framework of parody or intertextuality, we can locate the Backdorm Boys Kuso videos as embedded in a particular lifestyle choices and consumption of cultural forms, accessories, appearances, class differences, language and most importantly the conditions made available by technologies. The original object is the three boys and their ‘real’ or ‘original’ status in their lived practices. The discursive object is also the three boys and their projected selves or desired selves which they are expected to either appropriate or wish for. The Kuso is in exaggerating the differences between these two and celebrating the obvious flaws in them and making them available as a public spectacle. While I shall steer away from discussions of talent, it becomes more evident that Kuso allows for us to recognise the aesthetics, politics and proliferation of these new digital cinema artefacts which earlier notions of parody did not.

Kuso establishes more non-linear, sometimes disruptive relationships, between different objects that it refers to in its production. The relationship between the various objects is not invocative but evocative in nature. The Kuso narrative does not presume specific knowledge of some other object being invoked. Instead, it produces a redolent relationship where the different objects mutually explain each other. Like any cyberspatial form, Kuso seems to produce a system of self-referential, almost cannibalistic meaning making where a range of objects seem to co-exist in improbably frames of non-real and in-credible, each forming a node through which the others are understood. The references Kuso makes in its narrative, are not to the other, original object in a wistfully reconstructed or imagined past but to the other back-tracking objects present in the narrative itself. This produces an almost infinite chain of inter-referencing objects that justify each others’ existence. Kuso thus disrupts the more linear and historical constructions that parody (and the subsequent attempts to read parody as a relationship between new digital cinema and Cinema) establishes. It is located in the materiality of the object, its reception, its manipulation, its distribution, its transformation and its ability to escape the more effective-causal circuits of meaning making.

While parody seeks to reaffirm the similarities between the original and the discursive objects, Kuso emphasises the inability of the original to explain the discursive, thus producing a relationship of difference rather than one of similarity. While parody deals with the questions of representation, Kuso enters into conditions of simulation. It is this evocative relationship that allows me to locate Kuso as an aesthetic of understanding New Digital Cinema in Asia and to materialise it as a lifestyle and as a condition of reception in the body of the Asian consumer.

Politicising Kuso

An uncontextualised notion of Kuso only allows for a relationship at the level of the Parodic. Hence, the discussants of the Backdorm Boys were always in a condition of unintelligibility about why these slightly clownish characters would become imitable heroes for a particular generation. Given the highly polarized nature of political orientations in Taiwan, it has been the despair of many educators and practitioners that the Strawberry Generation, which is also the largest subscriber base to Kuso, has no apparent interest in politics. It is a generally lamented as a generation that is unashamedly devoted only to having fun. I propose, in my reading and understanding of Kuso objects and Kuso as an aesthetic, that the participatory and performative nature of Kuso paradigm, offers space for negotiation and expression of political intent. I shall demonstrate this particular argument at two levels – the level of the body and the personal, and at the level of the public and the national.

The question of the body becomes central to almost all representation studies. Analysis of Kuso videos or objects lends itself easily to see how the accessorisation and the freedom to produce unsupervised spectatorial narratives of the self lead to new spaces of negotiation. There is also, very clearly, a definite deconstruction of the traditional, masculine and often imported forms of masculinity, femininity and sexuality which the videos lend themselves to. Cross dressing, excessive make-up, exaggerated actions, etc. all create a fluid world where gender structures used to define the body are dismissed and indeed, enter into parodic relationship with traditional perceptions or expectations. However, for the scope of this paper, I shall more narrowly focus on the construction of the heroic body in the Kuso videos.

The body comes to materialise Kuso through various practices and becomes the site upon which the Kuso self is enacted. As Kuso celebrates the flaws and exaggerates the imperfections, it allows for a certain masked relationship between the private self and the public politics. As is demonstrated in the case of the Backdorm Boys, Kuso, with its self referential boundaries, allows for a critical engagement with the very practices of the generation that subjects them to sever criticism. The Kuso bodies or the narratives of self are not longer in relation with the imagined body of the star or the aura of the star vehicle but in masked relationship with the larger politics of its time. The bewilderment or unintelligibility that the discussants of the Backdorm videos exhibit, is not particularly about why or how the video was created but how heroism or stardom was created by the celebration of the un-iconic or the unheroic.

And it is to answer this question that we go back to the Strawberry Generation again. The Strawberry Generation in Taiwan was not merely marked by economic transitions and infidelity. It is also a generation that has seen a severely politicised state of nationalism and national identity in Taiwan. The younger generation that grew up after the removal of the martial law has engaged in serious consumerism as a part of their national identity. As Chen Kuan Hsing (1998) points out, ‘From 1994 onwards…the cultural atmosphere was mediated through commodity structures.’ Chen further goes on to explain how the political economy and the question of the national are intrinsically linked. Given the hegemonic presence of the West in the cultural galaxy of Taiwan and the constant negotiations between the political position vis-à-vis China as well as the cultural imperialism of Japan, the Taiwanese Strawberry Generation finds itself without a particular model of national identity to follow. Along with these are the allegations of widespread corruption and the complete disinterest of the current political parties in the ill-effects of liberalisation (Asian Economic News, 2007) which contribute to a high rate of mental ill-health and suicides in the Strawberry Generation (The China Post, 2008). Given such a murky situation, the Strawberry Generation has indeed withdrawn from active political participation of fighting in the streets and has taken to new forms of expression, which, outside of the context, appear as solipsistic or merely for fun.

Kuso, as an aesthetic then, transcends the analysis of gender and sexuality, performativity and spectatorship, and becomes a site of national representation and subversion and the Kuso stars like the BackDorm boys embody these positions for a Strawberry Generation in Taiwan. The notion of flawed heroism, which simultaneously mocks the ubiquitous presence of the pop-culture from the West, the inability of the local cultural industries to produce original works of art, the apathy of the younger generation caught in the mechanisms of a liberalised globalisation, and the unavailability of spaces for political negotiations that they are built in. This is the defence that many of the Taiwanese and other Chinese speaking individuals produce on the discussions around Kuso. On the discussions on the Sinosplice blog, one of the most vocal defenders, John, who starts with calling this condition, a ‘rare talent’ goes on to say,

Have you ever tried to make a funny video? It’s much harder than you give these boys credit for. The fact that they were able to do it merely by lip synching is testament to their talent. If they’re using certain cultural expectations for humorous effect, then that’s further evidence of talent.
(John, Sinosplice, 2005)

However, John’s idea of ‘playing with cultural expectation’ remains a solitary voice. The other discussants go on to talk about how this particular series is only interesting because of the ‘freak value’ of the videos. Karen, another participant who introduces herself as a student in the West, writes

I have to reluctantly admit, as politically incorrect and offensive (sic) some of the comments may be, they are mostly valid in my opinion. I’m not saying that the “Back Dormitory Boys’” talent doesn’t play a part in why it’s so funny but the fact that the they’re Chinese with no doubt plays a huge role in the humour that that you could easily find elsewhere. How hard is it to find a few college students making goofball videos and putting them on the internet?
(Karen, Sinosplice, 2005)

The opinions that Karen and XiangChang express, resonate with the general perception of the BackDorm boys on many different discussion groups and media talks around the world. As they gained more popularity and exposure, there were more and more people exclaiming at why these antics were being heralded as heroic. However, there were no explanations which were forwarded. The interesting part is that a similar predecessor called the ‘Numa Numa Boy’ (Wolk, 2006), who also had a parodic relationship with the Romanian song, while he gained equal amounts of popularity, was not at the centre of any debate. His claim to fame was slapstick humour and very clearly complied with the Western understanding of parody. However, in the case of the Backdorm Boys, the debates continue as the existing understanding of parody as a universal value fail to account for the aura that surrounds them.

Kuso, as a way of looking at it, offers that the Backdorm Boys were not mere imitators. Imitation would have been in them trying to do a representation of the original Backstreet Boys videos. Instead, the Backdorm Boys are in a world of simulation, where they are simulating the flawed masculinities and identities that are excluded within popular cultures. In this method of simulation, they are able to produce a new and perhaps more believable ‘reality’ which needs to be dealt with in the larger context of the production.

The reason why Kuso makes garbage of things is because that is the only way to deal with the way things are – demolish them, look at their flaws, and find, within those flaws, interstices of negotiation and interaction, which are no longer available. The Kuso, refuses to identify a homogeneous way of understanding digital cinema on the web and insists on thus, contextualising the cultural products through their geo-political status. Because of the geographical origins of digital technologies – the West, and the generally assumed audience and paradigms of understanding it – the West again, most of these new digital cinema forms are looked upon as derivative or engaging in a parodic relationship with the original which is placed in the West. Kuso is a way of complicating the relationship between the two.

This is the first step in thinking about ways in which one can formulate a digital aesthetic which does not presume a homogenised community online but asserts, not only the physical bodies that are behind the production of these narratives but also the geographical boundaries and socio-cultural locations, without which the objects become incomprehensible and indecipherable. Moreover, it is necessary to rescue such ‘popular’ ‘aesthetic’ forms from discussions that confine them to the realms of performance or solipsism and look at the larger potential they have in creating new conditions of political engagement. For Taiwan’s Strawberry Generation, Kuso is a lifestyle, by which they are able to establish discursive and subversive relationships with the very actions and practices which subject them to sever criticism. The wave of new digital cinema, streaming on a screen near us, thus emphasise the need to revisit the relationship between aesthetics and politics on the one hand and the connections between the universal and the contextual on the other.

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[1].A first draft of this article was first presented at the ‘New Cinemas in Asia’ conference organized by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society at the Christ University, Bangalore. The paper owes its gratitude to S.V. Srinivas for his support both for my journey to Taiwan and for the confidence required to write such an essay on cultures and phenomena that I cannot with confidence claim to be my own.
[2]. The Jadavpur University Film and Media Lab, as recently as November 2008, organized a conference to discuss The Future of Celluloid,where, there were many engrossing presentations on what celluloid can mean in the digital age and where its futures reside. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his key-note speech, made a significant remark that the Celluloid is the original object that the digital shall always invoke in its manifestation; not merely in its aesthetics, which might change, but in the sheer capacity that the digital has to pay unprecedented attention to the moving image and reconstruct it for new meanings.
[3]. Hervé Fischer, in The Decline of The Hollywood Empire, arrives in a long line of prophets who have been announcing the demise and the end of Celluloid Cinema as we know it. Fischer announces, quite early in the book, ‘[d]igital distribution will end this archaic system of distribution and hasten the decline of the Hollywood Empire: Two giant steps forward for film in one fell step!’
[4]. The large undivided screen gets replaced by a small ‘Window’ on the right hand corner of the monitor which also houses various other contesting media forms that vie for the users’ attention. Sherry Turkle, in her study of MUD users also talks of how the Window has become a metaphor of our times.
[5].In a much more measured tone, Kim Soyoung, in her formulation of a trans-cinema and new public spheres simulated by Korean Cinema, suggests that ‘new digital cinema…attentive to the transformation of its production, distribution and reception modes as shown by independent digital filmmaking and its availability on the net’. She further goes on to propose ‘digital and net, cinema LCD screens (installed in subways, taxis and buses) and gigantic electrified display boards (chonkwangpan in Korean) should be seen as spaces into which cinema theories and criticism should intervene.’ This paper adds to the list, the extremely personalised but virtually public and shared space of the computer monitor and portable media devices.
[6]. In another essay exploring the aesthetics of social networking and blogging (especially with the increasing implementation of Web 2.0), I make a claim at these sites being sustained through a constant and incessant production of both the virtual persona of the author as well as the body of the author that serves as an anchor to the virtual reality. I further suggest that this process of continuous translation leads to the self as being recognised and gratified only in a state of performativity over inter-looped surfaces.
[7]. Lawrence Liang, in his forthcoming essay, “The History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century”, examines the history of the print and pre-print cultures, to make a brilliant argument around the questions of knowledge, the authority of the knowledge, and the problems of legitimacy or authenticity that have surrounded the Wikipedia in recent years.
[8]. The anxiety around such objects primarily circulates around questions of copyright infringements and piracy. The Music And Film Independent Association, for instance, claims that due to the re-mix, unlicensed distribution, and/or re-working of their material, they are suffering a heavy financial loss, leading to ridiculous legal cases that seem to hold no legitimacy in their sense or sensibility. Lawrence Lessig looks at a recent controversy on youtube where a mother, who broadcast digital moving images of her 13 month old son dancing to Prince’s song Let’s go Crazy was accused of copyright violation by the License owners who demanded the withdrawal of the video from YouTube.
[9]. In A short History of Hentai, Marc Mclelland, defines Hentai as follows: “Hentai is a Sino-Japanese compound term widely used in modern Japanese to designate a person, action or state that is considered queer or perverse, particularly in a sexual sense. Unlike the English term 'queer', however, hentai does not have predominantly homosexual connotations but can be used to describe any sexual acts or motivations other than what might be termed 'normal' sexual relations. Indeed the loanword nōmaru (normal) is sometimes used as an antonym for hentai. Apart from this general use of the term hentai, it can also be used to designate a specific genre of Japanese manga and animation that features extreme or perverse sexual content and it is in this sense that hentai has become well-known among western fans of Japanese popular culture.”
[10]. Professor Yu-Fen Ko (2000) at the Hsih-Shin University in Taipei, locates similar receptions of the ‘Hello Kitty’ phenomenon in Taiwan. Yu-Fen Ko examines how, the larger reception of popular cultural artifacts fail to look at the political potential that these objects have in the way they reconfigure the existing relationship between the personal and the political.
[11]. This paper owes great intellectual and emotional debt to many people. Mandy Hua, who, apart from teaching me Chinese, also helped me get introduced to the intricacies of youth fashion and trends in Taiwan. Ted Cheng, who introduced me to many different Kuso objects and helped, whenever my own skills at access or analysis flailed. Amie Parry, Naifei Ding, David Barton, Chen Kuan-Hsing and Josephine Ho who made my stay in Taiwan so fruitful, providing emotional support, and listened to me patiently, correcting me when I was wrong and directing me to people and resources that helped me frame this argument and understand the entire new digital cinema phenomenon in a new light.
[12]. After much screening and watching of Indian movie songs from Bollywood, we finally narrowed down to “Kajrare Kajrare” from the movie Bunty aur Bubly, with Aishwarya Rai doing a special dance number.
[13]. The particular video can be viewed at http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=9NlZaDGPEOg The original video that is supposed to make this particular kind of Kuso-streaking is the video which also shot two young men into becoming Television celebrities and can be viewed at http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=0caIbkYfWTY
[14]. One of the most popular icons of such consumption is in the popularity of Hello Kitty – a young female cat without a mouth (and hence without speech or the need to eat) - and has elicited much popular discourse. An example of how Hello Kitty is used as a way of also resisting the Western, Disneyfied, Barbie concepts of femininity can be seen in the video available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFBHPbEtfqA
[15]. LOLCat started as an internet meme which displayed a set of cat pictures, with cheeky captions, parodying ot only the internet slang known as ‘netspeak’ but also reflecting upon how central internet discussions and arguments were to the lives of the digital natives. Some of the most famous examples of LOLCat captions are ‘I can haz cheezburger’, ‘Ceiling Cat’ and then subsequently ‘Basement Cat’. More information and almost an exhaustive range of pictures can be seen at http://icanhascheezburger.com/ More interesting LOLCat phenomena also include the under construction LOLCat Bible translation project available at
http://www.lolcatbible.com/
[16]. ‘All your base are belong to us’ started as a successful parody of the obsession with UFO and space travel in the late nineties. The meme borrows this slightly cryptic line from European Sega Mega Drive Version of the video game Zero Wing, where it signified victory and total takeover of enemy territories by aliens, and specializes in putting up the caption on different familiar images taken from contemporary as well as historical times. A large collection of ‘All your base are belong to us’ images can be found at http://www.allyourbasearebelongtous.com/
[17]. A full list of their videos is available to view and download at http://twochineseboys.blogspot.com/
[18]. A quick glimpse of their popularity can be obtained on fan and internet monitoring sites like http://www.milkandcookies.com/tag/backdormboys/ and http://www.tian.cc/2005/10/asian-backstreetboys.html
[19]. This trajectory from Reality TV to popular cultural icons is not unfamiliar or new. Various popular shows like American Idol in the USA, Big Brother in the UK, SaReGaMaPa in India, and Kuso Kuso in China, have all spawned instant celebrities who have cashed their media presence and fame to bag roles in featured television programming, cinema, etc. This particular ability of making one’s self popular and recognizable, often by using the internet as a medium for the same, and then penetrating more corporatized and affluent mass media markets, is a ploy that many aspiring media professionals are employing these days.

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