Centre for Internet and Society

Biometric Identification: Specified Error, Accuracy and Efficiency, Considered for the Operations of the UIDAI — A Talk by Hans Varghese Mathews

praskrishna — 2012-09-10T08:07:28Z

Hans Varghese Mathews gave a public lecture on biometric identification at the Centre for Internet & Society office in Bangalore on August 17, 2012 at 5.00 p.m.

Click to read UID Summary by Hans Varghese Mathews

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/biometric-identification

Respite from Internet Censorship?

praskrishna — 2012-08-10T15:51:30Z

Of late, a lot of the blocked websites have started reappearing. So should we sit back and relax? We take a look at how it's not really the start of something beautiful...writes Nimish Sawant. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Published in thinkdigit on June 2, 2012

In April, Chennai based Copyrights Labs got a John Doe order (An order against no one in particular) from Madras High Court which ordered ISPs to block several video hosting websites such as Vimeo and Dailymotion along with a string of torrent sites such as Isohunt and Pirate Bay. The motive was to prevent illegal sharing of the movies 3 and Dhammu. The ISPs went on this whole website blocking spree welcoming users with messages such as, “This website has been blocked as per instructions from the Department of Telecom (DoT)”.

In June, the Madras High Court issued an order which made it mandatory for complainants to provide exact URLs where they find illegal content, such that ISPs could block only that content and not the entire site.

This order is definitely a relief for Indian internet users, who were facing a variety of blocked websites for a couple of months. In the May-June period there was a lot of media coverage around Internet censorship and then there was the much-hyped Anonymous protest (http://goo.gl/YCQod) that saw a not-so-great participation. Just like most media stories, it is slowly departing from the public conciousness. So does this mean our censorship woes are behind us?

Far from it.

The dark cloud of Intermediaries Guidelines
The Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011 were added to the IT Act 2000. According to it, the intermediaries (website, domain registrar, blog owner and so on) guidelines allows the government to pull up any website that hosts “objectionable” content. It gives anyone the right to send “content removal notice” to an intermediary, asking it to be removed within 36 hours. Terms describing such content - grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, obscene - are those that are open to interpretation. So, Facebook can be hauled up for derogatory content or pages on its site. Hell, even if you own a blog and someone else posts a derogatory comment, you can be pulled up.

This is a rather smart move by the government to force self-censorship down our throats. Just try imagining - Every 60 seconds: on YouTube there are 48 hours worth of videos uploaded; Wordpress users publish 347 blogs; Twitter users send over 100,000 tweets among others. (Source: http://goo.gl/U7qT8) How on earth is monitoring such a vast amount of data even possible?

Karnika Seth, Cyberlaw Expert	"Any content which is illegal can be blocked by ISP or on directions of a court.A person who uploads illegal content does not have a right to claim that it should not be blocked. But if harmless content is blocked arbitrarily by government or by an ISP, a person can approach the court for a direction that content should not be blocked from public access. No specific section in IT Act entitles a person to sue in such cases . However freedom of speech and expression is our fundamental right guaranteed under Art.19 of the Constitution of India and it is our constitutional right to seek legal redress for its protection by approaching the court."

Karnika Seth, Cyberlaw Expert

"Any content which is illegal can be blocked by ISP or on directions of a court.A person who uploads illegal content does not have a right to claim that it should not be blocked. But if harmless content is blocked arbitrarily by government or by an ISP, a person can approach the court for a direction that content should not be blocked from public access. No specific section in IT Act entitles a person to sue in such cases . However freedom of speech and expression is our fundamental right guaranteed under Art.19 of the Constitution of India and it is our constitutional right to seek legal redress for its protection by approaching the court."

Every site has internal checks and balances in the form of a 'Report Abuse' option, where users raise flags against content which they may find objectionable and the site takes a call. But with the intermediary rules, the content has to be removed within 36 hours. And here's the kicker – the content can be removed without informing the owner or giving him or her a chance to defend. A political cartoon website cartoonsagainstcorruption.com was a victim of such rules. In March this year, Rajya Sabha MP, P. Rajeeve, had moved a motion calling for the annulment of the intermediaries rules sometime in April. This motion, as would be expected, was defeated by a voice vote.

“Any content which is illegal can be blocked by the ISP or on directions of a court. A person who uploads illegal content does not have a right to claim that it should not be blocked. But if harmless content is blocked arbitrarily by government or by an ISP, a person can approach the court for a direction that content should not be blocked from public access,” said cyberlaw expert Karnika Seth. When asked if there is a clause in the IT Act which enables a person to drag the government or the ISP for blocking access to their harmless content on the web, Seth said, “No specific section in the IT Act entitles a person to sue in such cases . However, freedom of speech and expression is our fundamental right guaranteed under Art.19 of the Constitution of India and it is our constitutional right to seek legal redress for its protection by approaching the court.”

So what should one do if his or her content is blocked due to the blanket ban on websites? “If I am blocked access to my content on the web (say by blocking sites such as Vimeo or Blogspot for instance) I should file an appeal against the John Doe order in the higher court or to the division bench of High court if earlier order has been passed by single bench of the same High court. These provisions are there for any citizen in Procedural Law of India. The IT Act, 2000 need not be invoked,” says Advocate Prashant Mali, President, Cyber Law Consulting.

Google Transparency report clearly established a link between internet censorship and the government. According to the report, between January and June 2011 Google received 1739 requests for disclosure of user data from the Indian government whereas from July to December 2011, the number of requests by the government went up to 2207. Thankfully Google's compliance rate has come down, but the requests will keep increasing. And this is just Google products we are talking about. Is it then right for just the government to go ahead and draft the rules regarding internet usage? Are there provisions for you, the user to play a part in drafting of these rules. According to Advocate Mali, laws are generally put up for debate on various Government websites. But in the case of the Intermediaries Guidelines, the government used the two-thirds majority to pass the rules.

According to Sunil Abraham, Director, Centre for Internet and Society – a Bangalore-based internet advocacy group, we are very far in terms of Internet policies. “Dr. Gulshan Rai of CERT-IN has not taken even the public feedback process seriously and does not hold public consultations. This is very unlike TRAI, the telecoms regulator that has a very sophisticated approach towards transparent and participatory policy formulation.” He says that in India there is little transparency in some areas of policy articulation and our representatives do not seem sufficiently interested in protecting the public interest.

Also according to Adv. Mali, the recent Madras High Court directive asking the ISPs to block only the ‘pirated content’ and not the entire website, is just half the battle won for the ISPs. “If ISP's feel they have won, then that's just half the victory, because if they don't implement the order with full might and even if one copyright gets infringed because of there weak enforcement, then it would amount to Contempt of Court which will land ISP's into soup,” he says.

“The Madras High Court judgement which essentially directs ISPs to block “pirated content”, and not the website as a whole, is a good judgment with respect to Internet users, but implementing it selectively would be a mammoth task for ISP's. If ISP's feel they have won, then it's just half the battle won, because if they don't implement the order with full might and even if one copyright gets infringed because of weak enforcement, then it would amount to Contempt of Court which will land ISP's into soup."

Advocate Prashant Mali, President, Cyber Law Consulting

Is the Anonymous way, the right way?
In June, we saw the global hactivist organisation - Anonymous attacking a string of Government websites and that of ISPs such as Reliance communications, which had blocked access to websites. On June 9, there was a street protest across various metros in India. While the participation was not very encouraging, the sympathy for what Anonymous hackers were doing to those opposing Internet censorship was immense.

According to Advocate Mali, though the agenda of Anonymous was good, their means of achieving that end were wrong. “One cannot put a gun on the Government’s head in a democracy. If they keep doing this, they will be outlawed. If Anonymous really wants to work for the netizens, they should find better ways to protest instead of those which are cognizable cyber crimes in India.” said Mali.

According to Abraham, Anonymous are embracing the civil disobedience movement to protest against unjust laws. He feels that it is pertinent for Anonymous to retain the moral high ground. “Breaking into servers, leaks of personal information and defacement of websites is both illegal and also unlikely to win them more supporters from within the policy formulation space,” concurs Abraham.

Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet & Society

“The government ie. the government in power, does only frame subsidiary rules. For example – the draconian rules related to reasonable security measures, cyber cafes and intermediaries were drafted in April last year. The main Act in this case the Information Technology Act is framed in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha. Even though the elected government may dominate the proceedings, if they have a clear majority, the opposition parties must debate every detail especially in laws that affect our civil liberties. Unfortunately, since the Internet is not used by the majority of the population it is politically still an insignificant issue. The private sector cannot frame laws that regulate itself – that would be a contradiction in terms. Citizens cannot be asked to vote in referendums each time laws have to be passed, that would just be too slow. Transparency representative democracy is the online option – unfortunately in India there is little transparency in some areas of policy articulation and our representatives don't seem to be sufficiently interested in protecting the public interest.”

Where do we go from here?
So it is safe to say that even though the issue of censorship is not making headlines everyday, it will never will be behind us. “This is just a temporary lull in the storm. Governments are always keen to crack down on free speech and privacy online,” feels Abraham. According to him, projects such as Unique Identification (UID) and National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID) means the death of anonymity and pseudonymity for Internet and mobile users in the country.

On the other hand, Adv. Mali says that so long as the Intermediaries guidelines are part of the IT Act, it will only mean bad news for regular netizens. “Till the rules are effective, censorship and blocking would be a weapon in the hands of the Government, even though it may violate certain Fundamental Rights enshrined by Indian Constitution to Indian Citizens,” he said.

“Indian Internet users have to be very vigilant – if not, we will loose all our rights and freedoms one by one,” warns Abraham.

We can just hope that the issue does not get completely out of hand.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-thinkdigit-com-nimish-sawant-02-06-2012-respite-from-internet-censorship

July 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-10-09T11:46:15Z

Welcome to the newsletter issue of July 2012 from the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). The present issue features a constitutional analysis of the Information Technology (Intermediaries' Guidelines) Rules notified in April 2011, an analysis of the Indian Draft DNA Profiling Act and CIS statement on Exceptions and Limitations for Libraries and Archives made at WIPO.

Jobs

CIS is seeking applications from interested candidates for the following posts:

Research Manager: CIS is seeking an individual, full-time, for a period of 12 months, beginning from October 2012. The Research Manager is expected to contribute to conceptualising, managing and executing research projects in the field of Internet and Society, build knowledge networks of researchers towards collaborative and open knowledge production and dissemination, developing and executing the monitoring and evaluation processes for humanities and social sciences based research, supporting and managing academic, popular and hybrid publishing projects from existing and new research and initiate innovative and creative areas and methodologies of studying the Internet and its practices in India and the larger Global South, to develop key research clusters and networks. Send in your applications by September 5, 2012 to admin@cis-india.org.
Programme Director – Access to Knowledge: CIS is seeking a Programme Director for its New Delhi office. The Programme Director will manage CIS’s Access to Knowledge programme which is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, to support the growth of Wikipedia and its sister projects and to advance access to free knowledge in India. The Programme Director will partner with the large Wikimedia community in India to focus on Indic and English languages and will manage a team of four staff members.
Programme Officer – Access to Knowledge and Openness: CIS is seeking an individual with a strong background in policy research and advocacy to be part of its Openness and Access to Knowledge programmes. The candidates must have knowledge of Indian and international law on copyright, demonstrable research skills, public-speaking skills, open to travel and work independently.
Programme Officer – Internet Governance: CIS is seeking an individual with a strong background in legal research and policy work to be part of its internet governance (IG) programme. The candidates must have good knowledge of Indian and international law on freedom of expression and privacy, demonstrable research skills, have strong communication skills and be media savvy with the ability to convey complex legal issues clearly to a general audience, open to travel and work independently.

To apply for the posts of Programme Director and Programme Officers, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) or Pranesh Prakash (pranesh@cis-india.org) with three references.

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes:

Featured Research

Constitutional Analysis of the Information Technology (Intermediaries' Guidelines) Rules, 2011 (by Ujwala Uppaluri): Ujwala Uppaluri provides a constitutional analysis of the Information Technology (Intermediaries' Guidelines) Rules notified in April 2011, and examines its compatibility with Articles 14, 19, 21 of the Constitution of India.
Overview and Concerns Regarding the Indian Draft DNA Profiling Act (by GeneWatch UK & the Council for Responsible Genetics, US): The 2007 DNA Profiling Bill pending before the Parliament attempts to create an ambitious centralized DNA bank that would store DNA records of virtually anyone who comes within any proximity to the criminal justice system. The Bill contains provisions limiting access to and use of information contained in the database, and provides for the deletion of a person’s DNA profile upon their acquittal.

Columns

Internet Censorship: Anonymous Can’t be Just Harmful Hackers (Nishant Shah, FirstPost, July 13, 2012): If there was ever an interesting time for people concerned with freedom of speech and expression to live in, it is now, and it is definitely in India. It has been a series of battles the last couple of years, where a slightly out-dated government machinery has been trying to control and contain the burgeoning online spaces, only to be put in their place by the new-age tech-ninjas that have risen as the new heroes in our digital times.
Open letter to Hillary Clinton on Internet Freedom (Sunil Abraham, Thinking Aloud, July 17, 2012): Sunil Abraham’s open letter to Hillary Clinton was based on a presentation made during a panel discussion at a Google sponsored conference titled Internet at Liberty 2012 in Washington DC on May 24, 2012. The present article published in Thinking Aloud is an updated version of the blog entry published by CIS earlier this year.

Event Report

Privacy Matters — Medical Privacy (Yashwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration, Pune, June 30, 2012): Privacy India in partnership with the Indian Network for People living with HIV/AIDS, CIS, IDRC, and Society in Action Group with support from London-based Privacy International, held a public discussion on "Medical Privacy". Elonnai Hickok introduced the draft book Privacy in India: A Policy Guide that Privacy India had been compiling. The participants discussed medical privacy in India, the legal aspects of medical privacy, Supreme Court views on medical negligence, confidentiality and privacy, best practices on medical privacy in various health settings, etc.

Ongoing Event

The Asian Edge: 2012 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society Summer School: The 2nd Biannual Inter Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) Summer School is being hosted in Bangalore, India by CIS and the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society. The IACS Summer School brings together South and East Asian experts from different disciplines as faculty for graduate and advanced research students to engage with key issues of larger social, cultural and political concerns in cultural studies in Asia.

Upcoming Event

Role of the US Tech Companies in Government Surveillance: A Lecture by Christopher Soghoian (Centre for Internet and Society, 194, 2-C Cross, Domlur Stage II, Bangalore (Near Domlur Club and the TERI Complex)): Your internet, phone and web application providers are all, for the most part, in bed with US and other foreign government agencies. They all routinely disclose their customers' communications and other private data to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Worse, firms like Google and Microsoft specifically log data in order to assist the government — How? — Find out — Christopher Soghoian will give a lecture on the role companies play in assisting government surveillance.

Events Organised

Privacy Matters — Consumer Privacy (India International Centre, New Delhi, July 7, 2012): Privacy India, in partnership with the Centre for Internet & Society, International Development Research Centre, Society in Action Group and Privacy International, invite you to a public conference focused on discussing the challenges and concerns to consumer privacy in India.
The Fifth Elephant (NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore, July 27 and 28, 2012): The event was organised by HasGeek and supported by CIS. The first day covered the technology track and talks from business and industry were held on the following day.

Events Participated

Speak Easy: Citizenship, Freedom of Expression and Online Governance (American Centre, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi, July 31, 2012): Chinmayi Arun, a Fellow at CIS spoke at this event organised by the YP Foundation, Youth Ki Awaaz, Change.Org and RTI Anonymous.
Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum 2012 (Aoyama Campus, Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo, July 20, 2012). Sunil Abraham was a speaker in the session on international public policy and internet governance issues pertaining to the internet. The event was organised by APrIGF.Asia.
Fifth Meeting of the two Sub-Groups on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah (New Delhi, July 22, 2012): Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting held under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court.
Fourth Meeting of the two Sub-Groups on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah (Committee Room No. 228, Yojana Bhawan, Planning Commission, New Delhi, July 9, 2012): Sunil Abraham participated in the fourth meeting on privacy issues under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court.

News & Media Coverage

A Net of Hatred (Samar Khurshid, Hindustan Times, July 14, 2012): “The problem is...that internet conversations become extreme. Liberals don’t get embroiled in heated arguments while fundamentalists, dedicated to extreme ideologies, tend to win out." Web censorship...is in vain as the net is too vast to control.”— Pranesh Prakash.
Post-website attack, cops hot on pursuit of Anonymous hackers (The Times of India, July 11, 2012): “Anonymous consists of a large bunch of activists who gained some credibility in India after they organised offline protests. But this operation doesn't serve any purpose and brings down their credibility as details of those who filed complaints have been revealed.” — Pranesh Prakash.
The kids are all on Facebook (Shikha Kumar, Daily News & Analysis, July 8, 2012): “Children’s interaction online should always be under parental supervision. Censorship and control is not the responsibility of the government, but of parents.” — Sunil Abraham.
Freedom debate takes a new course (Deepa Kurup, The Hindu, July 1, 2012): “Under Indian copyright law, ISPs cannot be liable for copyright infringement committed by their users. So while it is good that the court clarified that its order was limited in its scope, it is possible to read even this as going far beyond that which is allowed under the law.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Access to Knowledge

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge:

WIPO

CIS participated at the 24^th session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights held in Geneva from July 16 to 25, 2012. The outcomes are listed below:

India's Opening Statement on the Treaty for the Visually Impaired at SCCR 24: The opening statement of the Indian delegation was delivered by G.R. Raghavender on July 19, 2012. The statement called upon all countries to conclude textual work on the treaty and call for a Diplomatic Conference to finalize it.
CIS's Statement on the Treaty for the Visually Impaired: Pranesh Prakash read out CIS statement on July 20, 2012.
CIS's Statement on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty: Pranesh Prakash read out CIS statement specifically on the Chair's Non Paper on the Protection of Broadcasters which was released on July 23, 2012.
CIS's Statement on Exceptions & Limitations for Libraries and Archives: Pranesh Prakash delivered the statement on the issue of exceptions and limitations for libraries and archives on July 25, 2012.
Transcripts of Discussions at WIPO: The proceedings were live streamed. Copies of the unedited transcripts are hosted for archival purposes.

International Press Coverage

U.S. support sought for treaty to allow blind people access to copyrighted works (Rama Lakshmi, Washington Post, July 24, 2012): “The vast majority of visually disabled people live in poor, developing countries where very little money is spent on converting books into accessible formats, while they are much more readily available elsewhere...The treaty would end the book famine that they currently face.” — Pranesh Prakash.
US and EU blocking treaty to give blind people access to books (Paige McClanahan, The Guardian, July 30, 2012): “We in developing countries have found our voice and we are not going to back down. When people are demanding their basic rights, no power in the world is strong enough to stop them getting what they want.”— Rahul Cherian.

National Press Coverage

EU stalls treaty talks to allow copyright waiver for print disabilities (The Hindu, Priscilla Jebaraj, July 25, 2012): “[The treaty] would allow organisations working for the blind to import and export accessible works without seeking the copyright holder's permission, since very little money is spent in developing countries on converting books into accessible formats, while they are much more readily available elsewhere.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Accessibility

Blog Entry

Accessibility of Government Websites in India — Test Results

Openness

The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:

Blog Entries

Unpacking Openness: From Seemingly Transparent to Definitely Opaque: Nishant Shah was in Netherlands recently and as part of his trip had given a public lecture to an audience at Kennisland. One of the respondents wrote a small write-up of the talk. This was originally published on the Kennisland website on July 25, 2012.
2012 Conference on Trends in Knowledge Information Dynamics (by Rebecca Schild): The 2012 Conference on Trends in Knowledge Information Dynamics convened a panel on Open Access. There was consensus amongst the panelist that the “big question” facing the open access movement no longer remains "if" or "why" open access, but rather "how" open access. The panel proved instructive for shifting the discussion away from ideology towards concrete questions facing the open access agenda and its implementation.
Open Government Data (by Pranesh Prakash): Pranesh Prakash provides an analysis of the chapter that CIS published in this report with Transparency & Accountability Initiative.

Grant Award

Wikimedia Foundation awards grant to Centre for Internet and Society to expand Access to Knowledge in India: Wikimedia Foundation has approved a grant to the Centre for Internet and Society to expand their Access to Knowledge program in India. This information was published by Barry Newstead, Chief Global Development Officer on the Wikimedia Foundation website on August 1, 2012.

Digital Natives

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

Book Review

Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies: Nishant Shah was invited to do a book review of a new anthology 'Deconstructing Digital Natives', edited by Michael Thomas. The review was published in Routledge's Journal of Children and Media on July 18, 2012.

Digital Natives Newsletter

Citizen Activism the Past Decade: The deadline for contribution to the Digital Natives newsletter expires on August 15. Nilofar Ansher gives a list of topics that contributors can explore in this blog entry.

Columns

Across Borders (Nishant Shah, Indian Express, July 5, 2012): “Digital Natives are not only a mobile-wielding generation, but also a mobile generation. They are fluid, not necessarily tied to the geographies of their origin, and often imagine themselves, as travelling across different networks and systems, like the information traffic on the internet. This dislocation of the fixity of where we are from and who we are is one of the most exciting results of the digital turn.”
Revisiting Techno-euphoria (Nishant Shah, DML Central, July 5, 2012): “The gadgets and tools we use are, actually, only material manifestations of the digital — which operates at the level of a paradigm or a context, through which we are slowly reshaping the material, social, and cultural notions of who we are and how we connect to the world around us.”

Event Participated

10th International ISTR Conference (Universita Degli Studi Di Siena, Italy, July 10 – 13, 2012): Nishant Shah was a panelist in the session, "Theoretical Grounding of Civic Driven Change". He gave a public lecture on Beyond Normative Citizenships: Exploring the ‘New’ in Digital Activism.

Telecom

While the potential for growth and returns exist for telecommunications in India, a range of issues need to be addressed. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the other is a countrywide access to broadband which is low. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum:

Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policy in India

Ford Foundation has given a grant of USD 200,000 to CIS to build expertise in the area of telecommunications in India. The following are the latest outputs:

Fixed Line Telephones (by Jürgen Kock): This module discusses the features and the various stages of the development of fixed line telephones, its early history, the basic principle of a fixed line telephone system, plain old telephone service, digital telephones, cordless phones to today's features of fixed line telephones.
Different Forms of Video Communication (by Tina Mani): In this module, Tina Mani takes us through some of the common forms of video communication such as video calling, video conferencing, telepresence and video sharing.
Broadband Policy, 2004 (by Snehashish Ghosh): In this module, Snehashish Ghosh tells us that the Policy was laid down by the Government of India in order to realize the potential of broadband services. It aimed at enhancing the quality of life by implementation of tele-education, tele-medicine, e-governance, entertainment, etc.
Cable Television Networks Regulation Act, 1955 (by Snehashish Ghosh): In this module, Snehashish examines the purpose of the legislation, the persons affected by it, the administrative bodies which come under the Act, the penalties (including the consequences in case of non-compliance), appeal process and the debates surrounding the legislation.
The Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1933 (by Snehashish Ghosh): In this module, Snehashish Ghosh throws light on the main objective of the Act — that of regulating the possession of wireless telegraphy apparatus.

RTI Application

Use of DPI Technology by ISPs — Response by the Department of Telecommunications : Smiti Mujumdar on behalf of CIS filed requests under the Right to Information with the Department of Telecommunications, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, BSNL and MTNL, asking a number of questions related to the use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology by Internet Service Providers (ISP) in India and corresponding regulations. A scanned version of the response from the Department of Telecommunications is hosted online.

Column in Business Standard

Decision Analysis for Interest Rates (Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, July 5, 2012): The discipline of systematic evaluation through applying process-flow and decision analysis — in this example, of financial logic — can help make reasoned, practical decisions, whether for interest rates, or for resolving issues in power supply, or in telecommunications, spectrum and broadband.

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. Over the last four years our policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos. With the Government of India we have done policy research for Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, NIA Bill, etc.

CIS is an accredited NGO at WIPO and has given policy briefs to delegations from various countries, our Programme Manager, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
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Visit us at http://cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, 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/july-2012-bulletin

Post-website attack, cops hot on pursuit of Anonymous hackers

praskrishna — 2012-08-06T09:51:11Z

The cyber crime wing has formed special teams to nab the hackers who attacked and stole data from the Tamil Nadu police website.

The article was published in the Times of India on July 11, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

"We have submitted a formal complaint to trace the hacker," said additional director general of police (ADGP-State Crime Records Bureau) Ashish Bhengra after a high-level meeting on Tuesday led by director general of Police K Ramanujam. The meeting discussed the precautionary steps to prevent similar incidents.

The hacktivist collective Anonymous said on Tuesday that they hacked the TN police's website to protest internet censorship by the government of India. On July 8, the group released a set of files containing complaints made by public to the TN police and action taken by officials. "This is less about TN police and more about a continuing protest," said members of the group in an internet relay chat to TOI. The group said apart from certain Internet service providers, the government continued to censor the internet.

"If our protest is not respected for the very real and constitutional questions it raises, then we throw more and more areas open where wrongdoing may be found," said a member.

The group's India wing posted links to the leaked documents under its Twitter handle 'opindia_revenge' on Sunday night. The files show a range of complaints filed by the public -- from fleecing of passengers by autorickshaw drivers, property disputes, grouses from police personnel and instances of missing mobile phones and people. The complaints have been filed from across Tamil Nadu, including Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai, and even places such as Uttarakhand and Kuwait.

The group has redacted phone numbers and email ids in some cases but has left other data like name and address. The documents also have details of action taken by the police -- from forwarding the case to the respective police station to digging up information on accused persons.

Anonymous India, which has done a series of virtual sit-ins on government and corporate websites, has only a few high-profile hacking operations in India. In May, it hacked the servers of Reliance Communications, preventing users from accessing social media websites. The group also released a list of websites that were allegedly blocked by Reliance. The group started attacking official websites to protest what it called 'censorship' of the internet that snowballed after a Madras High Court 'John Doe' order to prevent movie piracy. Anonymous also organised a protest march on June 9 at various Indian cities.

However, the latest attack inconveniences public and damages the cause, said users. "Anonymous consists of a large bunch of activists who gained some credibility in India after they organised offline protests. But this operation doesn't serve any purpose and brings down their credibility as details of those who filed complaints have been revealed," said Pranesh Prakash, lawyer and programme manager at The Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based research organisation.

According to a member of Anonymous, people are afraid of thinks that they are not aware of. "Some were angry at us for leaking data from Reliance. But if criticism is justified, we will make sure it doesn't happen again," said the member.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/post-website-attack

The Asian Edge: 2012 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society Summer School

praskrishna — 2012-08-02T13:23:14Z

The 2nd Biannual Inter Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) Summer School will be hosted in Bangalore, India by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) with the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium. The event will be held in the first and second week of August 2012.

The IACS Summer School brings together South and East Asian experts from different disciplines as faculty for graduate and advanced research students to engage with key issues of larger social, cultural and political concerns in Cultural Studies in Asia. Any student registered in a post-graduate degree program is eligible for the IACS Summer School. There are limited seats and students will be selected based on their applications. Students registered at universities participating in the Consortium of Inter Asia Cultural Studies Institutions will be given first preference.

The Summer School 2012 proposes to integrate the teaching with core IACS faculty with the larger realities of change in South and East Asia. It proposes a 10 + 4 day structure.

Core Course: Methodologies for Cultural Studies in Asia: The Summer School offers a 10 day core course that works through seminars, taught classrooms, tutorials, open spaces, field trips and workshops. The core course shall address questions of Cultural Identity, Modernity, Nationalism, Gender, Class, Revolution and Asianism to frame an argument about relocating methods, concepts and ideas in contemporary Cultural Studies in Asia.

Day/Date	Time	Session	Instructors	Readings
Aug 02 (Thu)	09:30-10:00	Introduction to Course/Orientation
	10:00-1:00	Session 1: The Question of Knowledge	Instructors: Daniel PS Goh Nithin Manayath	The Epistemological Value of East Asian Perspective – Sun Ge Knowledge Production in the Era of Neo-Liberal Globalisation – Kuan-Hsing Chen Teaching versus Research? – Meaghan Morris
	3:00-5:00	Student Presentations	Choi, Ji Yeon Ajinkya Shenava Khetrimayum M Singh Vincent Chung Jaime Fang-Tze Hsu
Aug 03 (Fri)		Culture Industries workshop
		Workshop party
Aug 04 (Sat)	10:00-1:00	Session 2: The Question of Culture	Instructors: Asha Achuthan Ratheesh Radhakrishnan	Hind Swaraj – Chs IV, VI, XII, XIII – MK Gandhi Value Typology of Chinese Peasants and Its Transformation in Contemporary China – He Xuefeng An Elaborative Argumentation of a Nong-Country – Zhang Shi Zhao
	3:00-5:00	Student Presentations	Annisa Beta Ying-Tzu, Liu (Eva) Li, Yen-Chieh Sharib Aqleem Ali Li, Cho Kiu (Joseph)	Venue: 1 Shanti Road
	6:00-8:00	EVENING SALON	Tejaswini Niranjana and Kuan-Hsing Chen	Venue: 1 Shanti Road
Aug 05 (Sun)		HOLIDAY
Aug 06 (Mon)	10:00-1:00	Session 3: Nationalism and Modernity	Instructor: Milind Wakankar Student Presentations: Mai Thi Thu Baidurya Chakrabarti Zhang, Bing Musab Iqbal Meng Hsien Lu	On Nation – Zhang Tai Yan Nationalism in India – Rabindranath Tagore New Dominant Ideology and Changes of Urban Space in Today's Shanghai – Wang Xiaoming The Twilight of Certitudes: Secularism, Hindu Nationalism and Other Masks of Deculturation – Ashis Nandy A National Culture for Pakistan: the political economy of a debate – Saadia Toor
	3:00-5:00		Instructor: Madhuja M Student Presentations: Pan Yifan Zhang Zhihui Se Young Oh
		EVENING SALON	Stephen Chah and Ashish Rajadhyaksha	Venue: Centre for Internet and Society
Aug 07 (Tue)	10:00-1:00	Session 4: Culture and Economy	Instructors: Radhika P Raghu Tenkayala	In the Margin of the Capital: From ‘Tjerita Boedjang Bingoeng’ to ‘Si Doel anak sekolahan’ The Emergent Culture of Consumption – Chua Beng Huat ‘Bollywood’ 2004; When Was Bollywood – Ashish Rajadhyaksha Peasant Cultures of the 21st Century – Partha Chatterjee
	3:00-5:00	Student Presentations	Chan Ka Yi Kim Yoon Young Tanna Shilpa Shirishkumar Ruchi Jaggi Haesook Yong
Aug 08 (Wed)	10:00-1:00	Session 5: Gender and Culture	Instructors: Navaneetha Mokkil Nitya Vasudevan	Why Culture Matters – Tejaswini Niranjana Prostitutes Parasites and the house of state feminism – Naifei Ding Women and Freedom – Firdous Azim Letters to the Editor: The domestic violence act and conflict Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the labour mobility of rural young women in post-Mao China – Yan Hairong
	3:00-5:00	Student Presentations	Elmo I-Che Hsu Pang Ka Wei (Janet) Li-Fang Lai Kris Yu-Shiuan Chi Samia Vasa Shwetha D Ryu M-Rye Sabreena Ahmed
	6:00-8:00	EVENING SALON	Firdous Azim and Naifei Ding/Siddharth/Arvind in conversation	Venue: Alternative Law Forum
Aug 09 (Thurs)	10:00-1:00	FIELD TRIP	SURESH JAYARAM – Pettai Tour
Aug 10 (Fri)	10:00-1:00	Session 6: Understanding Popular Cultural Practice	Instructors: Namita Malhotra Nishant Shah	Hong Kong Action film in the Indian B Circuit – SV Srinivas Inter-Asia Comparative Framework: Postcolonial Film Historiography in Taiwan and South Korea Kim Soyoung Fan Bhakti and Subaltern Sovereignty – Madhava Prasad
	3:00-5:00	Student Presentations	Samhita Sunya Khatija Sana Khader Ayesha Maria Mualla Antoreep Sengupta
Aug 11 (Sat)		UNWORKSHOP DAY (Writing)	Evening: Final Party

Optional Courses: 2 Additional 4-days parallel Courses shall be offered to participants interested in specialised inquiries of their research practice.

Course A. The Digital Subject: Science, Technology and Society in Asia

Course Coordinator: Nishant Shah

Course Instructors: Nishant Shah, Lawrence Liang and Ashish Rajadhyaksha

Course B. Research Seminar on Technology, Culture & the Body

Course Coordinator: Nitya Vasudevan

Course Instructors: Tejaswini Niranjana, DING Naifei, Audrey Yue, Wing-Kwong Wong, Hsing-Wen Chang, Nitya Vasudevan

Nandy

A National Culture for Pakistan: the political economy of a debate – Saadia Toor

Nandy

A National Culture for Pakistan: the political economy of a debate – Saadia Toor

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/iacs-summer-school-2012

Speak Easy: Citizenship, Freedom of Expression and Online Governance

praskrishna — 2012-08-01T04:56:36Z

The event organised by the YP Foundation, Youth Ki Awaaz, Change.Org and RTI Anonymous was held at the American Centre in Kasturba Gandhi Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi on July 31, 2012. Chinmayi Arun, a Fellow at the Centre for Internet & Society

The event focused on exploring the freedom of expression vis-a-vis its impact on accessibility and connectivity across multiple youth movements focused on gender, speciality, education, governance and arts.

There were group discussions with Venkatesh Nayak (Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative), Anja Kovacs (Internet Democracy Project), Chinmayi Arun (Centre for Internet & Society) among others.

Agenda

2.00 2.30	Registrations open for workshops!
2.30 2.45	Getting started – ‘Why Speak Easy?’
2.45 4.30	Speak Easy \| Learn: Workshops on advocating online, citizenship journalism, filing the Right to Information (RTI) application, and participating in online legislation with Youth Ki Awaaz, Change.Org, Get Up 4 Change, The YP Foundation and PRS Legislative.
4.30 6.00	Speak Easy \| Converge: Exploring the Freedom of Expression vis-à-vis its impact on accessibility and connectivity across multiple youth movements focused on gender, sexuality, education, governance and arts. Group Discussions with Venkatesh Nayak (Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative), Anja Kovacs (Founder, Internet Democracy Project), Chinmayi Arun (Centre for Internet and Society) and many others.
6.00 7.00	Speak Easy \| Demand: How can young people dialogue with decision makers?

Venue Partner: The American Center
Read the original published in the YP Foundation here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/speak-easy

Role of the US Tech Companies in Government Surveillance: A Lecture by Christopher Soghoian

praskrishna — 2012-08-26T11:03:19Z

Christopher Soghoian will deliver a lecture on the role US tech companies play in assisting government surveillance at the Centre for Internet & Society office in Bangalore on August 27, 2012, from 5.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m.

Your internet, phone and web application providers are all, for the most part, in bed with US and other foreign government agencies. They all routinely disclose their customers' communications and other private data to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Worse, firms like Google and Microsoft specifically log data in order to assist the government. How many government requests does your ISP get for its customers' communications each year? How many do they comply with? How many do they fight? How much do they charge for the surveillance assistance they provide? Who knows? Most companies have a strict policy of not discussing such topics.

The differences in the privacy practices of the major players in the telecommunications and internet applications market are significant. Some firms retain identifying data for years, while others retain no data at all; some voluntarily provide the government access to user data, while other companies refuse to voluntarily disclose data without a court order; some companies charge government agencies when they request user data, while others disclose it for free. For an individual, later investigated by the police or intelligence services, the data retention practices adopted by their phone company or email provider can significantly impact their freedom.

Unfortunately, although many companies claim to care about end-user privacy, and some even that they compete on their privacy features, none seem to be willing to compete on the extent to which they assist or resist the government in its surveillance activities. Because information about each firms' practices is not publicly known, consumers cannot vote with their wallets, and pick service providers that best protect their privacy.

This talk will pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding these practices. Based upon a combination of Freedom of Information Act requests, off the record conversations with industry lawyers, and investigative journalism, the practices of many of these firms will be revealed.

Christopher's Personal Experience

In the year 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Christopher’s home at 2.00 a.m. seizing his personal documents and computers. Two attorneys, Stephen Braga and Jennifer Granick came to his defence. With their expert assistance, Christopher was able to get back his possessions within three weeks, and FBI’s criminal and TSA’s civil investigations were closed without any charges being filed.

Jennifer Granick came to Christopher’s assistance once again (joined by Steve Leckar) in 2010 after the Federal Trade Commission’s Inspector General investigated Christopher for using his government badge to attend a closed-door surveillance industry conference. It was at that event that Christopher recorded an executive from wireless carrier ‘Sprint’ bragging about the eight million times his company had obtained GPS data on its customers for law enforcement agencies in the previous years.

To know more, read Christopher Soghoian’s dissertation titled "The Spies We Trust: Third Party Service Providers and Law Enforcement Surveillance". [PDF, 1056 Kb]

About Christopher Soghoian

Christopher Soghoian is a privacy researcher and activist, working at the intersection of technology, law and policy. He is a Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union and is based in Washington, D.C.

Soghoian completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2012, which focused on the role that third party service providers play in facilitating law enforcement surveillance of their customers. In order to gather data, he has made extensive use of the Freedom of Information Act, sued the Department of Justice pro se, and used several other investigative research methods. His research has appeared in publications including the Berkeley Technology Law Journal and been cited by several federal courts, including the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Between the years, 2009-2010, he was the first ever in-house technologist at the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, where he worked on investigations of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Netflix. Prior to joining the FTC, he co-created the Do Not Track privacy anti-tracking mechanism now adopted by all of the major web browsers.

He is a TEDGlobal 2012 Fellow, was an Open Society Foundations Fellow between the years, 2011-2012, and was a Student Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University between 2008 and 2009.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/role-of-us-tech-companies-in-govt-surveillance

October 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-25T04:53:06Z

Welcome to the Centre for Internet and Society newsletter! In this issue we bring you the updates of our research, events, media coverage and videos of some past events organized by us during October 2011.

Digital Natives

Key Research

On Fooling Around: Digital Natives and Politics in Asia
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research
Youths are not only actively participating in the politics of its times but also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation, writes Nishant. The paper was presented at the Digital Cultures in Asia conference at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Links in the Chain

Analog Relics in the Digital Age, volume 8, issue 4
Guest Editor: Nilofar Ansher
“The scale of inventions has not really leaped, so much as mutated. We had Twitter and Facebook ... (remember notice boards, community centers and pamphlets); they just weren’t so instant, hyperlinked and global in scale. We still use the medium of a mouthpiece and speaker to talk to each other long distance, the difference is in the changed aesthetics of the 21st century – it’s all squarish curves and scratch-proof glass that are more appealing today. Blackboards, writing material, listening devices and memory aids have undergone unprecedented transformations of function and usage, but it’s still about having a blank canvas to write upon with a chalk, pen, paper or iClick”, writes Nilofar in this issue of the Digital Natives newsletter.

Articles/Columns

In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives: Nishant Shah charts the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and Hivos (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built. This blog post by Nishant Shah was published in DML central on 24 October 2011.

Staff Quoted in the Media

The Write Stuff , Deccan Chronicle, 14 November 2011. Nishant Shah has been quoted in this article.

Accessibility

Publication

e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities (Russian Version)
Edited by Nirmita Narasimhan
The e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities is now available in Russian. The handbook is a joint publication of ITU, G3ict and the Centre for Internet and Society, in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union wrote the preface, Dr. Sami Al-Basheer, Director, ITU-D wrote the introduction and Axel Leblois, Executive Director, G3ict wrote the foreword.

Blog Entry

The case for Accessible Banking by Dinesh Kaushal.

Access to Knowledge

Key Research

Of Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the Condition of Collaborative Authorship
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society
The idea of a single author creating cinematic objects in a well-controlled scheme of support system and production/distribution infrastructure has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of digital video sharing sites like YouTube, writes Nishant in this essay published in the Journal of Moving Images.

Openness

Featured Research

Know Your Users, Match their Needs!
As Free Access to Law initiatives in the Global South enter into a new stage of maturity, they must be certain not to lose sight of their users’ needs. This blog post gives a summary of the “Good Practices Handbook”, a research output of the collaborative project Free Access to Law — Is it Here to Stay? undertaken by LexUM (Canada) and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society. Rebecca Schild and Prashant Iyengar from CIS were part of the research team.

Event Organised

Open Access to Academic Knowledge, organised by the Indian Institute of Science and CIS at National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on 2 November 2011. Tom Dane participated in this event.

Event Participated

3rd Canadian Science Policy Conference, organised by Canadian Science Policy Conference from16 to 18 November 2011 at the Ottawa Convention Centre. Sunil Abraham spoke in the session on Global Implications of Open and Inclusive Innovation.

Announcement

The Wikimedia India Program Trust. A new entity, the “Wikimedia India Program Trust”, has been registered in Delhi. Sunil is a trustee.

Internet Governance

Comments / Submissions

CIS Comments on Finance Committee Statements to Open Letters on Unique Identity: The Parliamentary Finance Committee responded to the six open letters sent by CIS through an email on 12 October 2011. CIS has commented on the points raised by the Committee.
Comments on the National Policy of Information Technology: The NPIT 2011 has the laudable goal of making India a ‘knowledge economy with a global role’ by developing and deploying ICT solutions in all sectors to foster development within India and at a global level. CIS appreciates this initiative of the Department of Information Technology and offers brief comments to strengthen the draft.
CIS Comments on the Draft National Policy on Electronics: CIS submitted its comments to the request for comments put out by the Department of Information Technology on its draft 'National Policy on Electronics'.

Statement

India's Statement Proposing UN Committee for Internet-Related Policy: India made its statement at the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, its proposal for the UN Committee for Internet-Related Policy was presented.

Podcast

Professor Balaram talks Open Access : Tom Dane spoke with Professor P Balaram, Director of the Indian Institute of Science about the Open Access movement. A podcast of the interview is available for download.

Event Report

The 2nd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series — A Post-event Report : The 2nd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series was organised by the Indian Journal of Law and Technology and CIS on the 21st and 22nd of May 2011 at the National Law School of India University, Nagarbhavi, Bangalore. The main theme for this year was Emerging Issues in Privacy Law: Law, Policy and Practice.

Peer Review

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research
Nishant explores the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat–machine’, ‘digital–physical’, and ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. The essay was published in the European Journal of English Studies, Volume 12, Issue 2.

Articles / Columns

What is Dilligaf? On the web, time moves at the speed of thought: Groups emerge, proliferate and are abandoned as new trends and fads take precedence. Nowhere else is this dramatic flux as apparent as in the language that evolves online. While SMS lingo – like TTYL (Talk To You Later) and LOL (Laughing Out Loud)– has endured and become a part of everyday language, new forms of speech are taking over. This article by Nishant Shah was published in GQ India.
The Book of Jobs The man who made the computer personal, who changed the face of the digital media industry, who was inspired by Zen philosophy to create an eight-billion-dollar empire, Steve Jobs, died last month. Just a few weeks before his death, in the midst of his painful illness, he told Walter Isaacson, the man chosen to write his authorised biography, “I really want to believe that something survives”. And Isaacson wrote him a fairy tale which will make sure that Jobs will be remembered beyond the gizmos and gimmicks, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in the Indian Express on 12 November 2011.

Staff Quoted in the Media

Is Facebook tracking your virtual footprints? by Sheetal Sukhija in MidDay, 22 November 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
M-governance gains momentum by Vasudha Venugopal in the Hindu, 20 November 2011.
Learn it Yourself: The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah. The article was published by the Indian Express on 30 October 2011. Nishant Shah is quoted in this article.
SOPA: The bill that could kill the Internet by Suw Charman-Anderson in Firstpost.Technology, 16 November 2011.
Broadband user base still has a long way to go, by Leslie D’Monte & Deepti Chaudhary in Livemint, 15 November 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article.
Not mandatory’ but maids, guards get fingerprinted by Hemanth Kashyap in Bangalore Mirror, 9 November 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article.
Netizen Report: Transparency Edition by Rebecca MacKinnon in Global Voices Online, 7 November 2011.
Blocking online content: Google gets more requests than govt by Pallavi Polanki in Firstpost.com, 2 November 2011. Pranesh Prakash has been quoted in this article.

Blog Entries

Sources of CIS Funding by Pranesh Prakash on 9 November 2011.

TRAI urged to take action against P2P throttling and DNS hijacking by Anand on 9 November 2011.

Events Organised

Exposing Data: Art Slash Activism organised by Tactical Tech and CIS at CIS office in Bangalore on 28 November 2011. Ward Smith and Stephanie Hankey (Co-founders of TTC), Ayisha Abraham (Filmmaker, Srishti School of Art Design) and Zainab Bawa (Research Fellow, CIS) gave a lecture.
Droidcon India, first Android Conference in Bangalore, organised by CIS in collaboration with Droidcon.com, Bangalore Android User Group, MobileMonday Bangalore and Android Advices on 18 and 19 November 2011 at the MLR Convention Centre, Bangalore.

Events Participated

Western Ghats Portal: Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics organised by the Western Ghats Portal team at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment, 25 November 2011. Sunil Abraham spoke in the session on Scientific Commons and Policy.
Names Not Numbers Mumbai, 26 November 2011. Nishant Shah spoke in a panel on “The New Digital Individual: Is New Technology Liberating or Enslaving?”. The event was organised by Editorial Intelligence and partners which included the British Council and Financial Times, BBC World News, Mumbai first, Vodafone, Trident and Godrej India Cultural Lab.

Video

Facebook Resistance Workshop at CIS. This was a workshop for people to learn on how to think beyond the rules and limitations of Facebook, to tweak and play around the features and design to generate useful, creative, and funny concepts and explore how this creative intervention can be turned into a real software developed by the Facebook Resistance.

Telecom

Article / Column

Telecom Path-Breaker?
Does the draft National Telecom Policy-2011 reflect true brilliance or smoke-and-mirrors? It will be a game-changer if a shared network is implemented effectively, writes Shyam Ponappa in this article published in the Business Standard on 3 November 2011.

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit our website here

CIS is grateful to 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-2011-bulletin

November 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-24T02:37:09Z

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Key Research

On Fooling Around: Digital Natives and Politics in Asia
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research
Youths are not only actively participating in the politics of its times but also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation, writes Nishant. The paper was presented at the Digital Cultures in Asia conference at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Links in the Chain

Analog Relics in the Digital Age, volume 8, issue 4
Guest Editor: Nilofar Ansher
“The scale of inventions has not really leaped, so much as mutated. We had Twitter and Facebook ... (remember notice boards, community centers and pamphlets); they just weren’t so instant, hyperlinked and global in scale. We still use the medium of a mouthpiece and speaker to talk to each other long distance, the difference is in the changed aesthetics of the 21st century – it’s all squarish curves and scratch-proof glass that are more appealing today. Blackboards, writing material, listening devices and memory aids have undergone unprecedented transformations of function and usage, but it’s still about having a blank canvas to write upon with a chalk, pen, paper or iClick”, writes Nilofar in this issue of the Digital Natives newsletter.

Articles/Columns

In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives: Nishant Shah charts the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and Hivos (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built. This blog post by Nishant Shah was published in DML central on 24 October 2011.

Staff Quoted in the Media

The Write Stuff, Deccan Chronicle, 14 November 2011. Nishant Shah has been quoted in this article.

Pathways for Learning in Higher Education

The Pathways Project for Learning in Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in 9 undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between Technologies, Higher Education and the new forms of social justice in India.

Article Published by the Media

Learn it Yourself: The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah. The article was published by the Indian Express on 30 October 2011.

Video of Event Participated

Mobility Shifts 2011 — An International Future of Learning Summit: The summit was organised by the New School and sponsored by MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla. It was held from October 10 to October 16, 2011 at the New School, New York City. Nishant Shah participated in the summit and spoke on Digital Outcasts: Social Justice, Technology and Learning in India. The video of the event is online.

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

Publication

e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities (Russian Version)
Edited by Nirmita Narasimhan
The e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities is now available in Russian. The handbook is a joint publication of ITU, G3ict and the Centre for Internet and Society, in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union wrote the preface. Dr. Sami Al-Basheer, Director, ITU-D wrote the introduction and Axel Leblois, Executive Director, G3ict wrote the foreword.

Blog Post

The case for Accessible Banking by Dinesh Kaushal.

Access to Knowledge

Key Research

Of Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the Condition of Collaborative Authorship
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society
The idea of a single author creating cinematic objects in a well-controlled scheme of support system and production/distribution infrastructure has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of digital video sharing sites like YouTube, writes Nishant Shah in this essay published in the Journal of Moving Images.

Blog Posts

CIS Hosts Scanned Version of George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes

Comments / Statement

CIS Intervention on Future Work of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement: The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) is being held in Geneva on November 30 and December 1, 2011. Pranesh Prakash intervened during the discussion of future work of the ACE with this comment.
Comment by CIS at ACE on Presentation on French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting: The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement is being held in Geneva on November 30 and December 1, 2011. Pranesh Prakash responded to a presentation by Prof. Pierre Sirinelli of the École de droit de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 on 'The French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting of December 16, 2009' with this comment.
Statement of CIS on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty at the 23rd SCCR: The twenty-third session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is being held in Geneva from November 22, 2011 to December 2, 2011. Pranesh Prakash delivered this statement on a new proposal made by South Africa and Mexico (SCCR/23/6) on a treaty for broadcasters.

Openness

The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Content, Open Standards, Open Access to Law, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:

Featured Research

Know Your Users, Match their Needs!
As Free Access to Law initiatives in the Global South enter into a new stage of maturity, they must be certain not to lose sight of their users’ needs. This blog post gives a summary of the “Good Practices Handbook”, a research output of the collaborative project Free Access to Law — Is it Here to Stay? undertaken by LexUM (Canada) and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society. Rebecca Schild and Prashant Iyengar from CIS were part of the research team.

Event Organised

Open Access to Academic Knowledge, organised by the Indian Institute of Science and CIS at National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on 2 November 2011. Tom Dane participated in this event.

Event Participated

3rd Canadian Science Policy Conference, organised by Canadian Science Policy Conference from16 to 18 November 2011 at the Ottawa Convention Centre. Sunil Abraham spoke in the session on Global Implications of Open and Inclusive Innovation.

Announcement

The Wikimedia India Program Trust. A new entity, the “Wikimedia India Program Trust”, has been registered in Delhi. Sunil Abraham is one of the trustees.

Internet Governance

Comments / Submissions

CIS Comments on Finance Committee Statements to Open Letters on Unique Identity: The Parliamentary Finance Committee responded to the six open letters sent by CIS through an email on 12 October 2011. CIS has commented on the points raised by the Committee.
Comments on the National Policy of Information Technology: The NPIT 2011 has the laudable goal of making India a ‘knowledge economy with a global role’ by developing and deploying ICT solutions in all sectors to foster development within India and at a global level. CIS appreciates this initiative of the Department of Information Technology and offers brief comments to strengthen the draft.
CIS Comments on the Draft National Policy on Electronics: CIS submitted its comments to the request for comments put out by the Department of Information Technology on its draft 'National Policy on Electronics'.

Statement

India's Statement Proposing UN Committee for Internet-Related Policy: India made its statement at the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, its proposal for the UN Committee for Internet-Related Policy was presented.

Podcast

Professor Balaram talks Open Access : Tom Dane spoke with Professor P Balaram, Director of the Indian Institute of Science about the Open Access movement. A podcast of the interview is online.

Event Report

The 2nd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series — A Post-event Report : The 2nd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series was organised by the Indian Journal of Law and Technology and CIS on the 21st and 22nd of May 2011 at the National Law School of India University, Nagarbhavi, Bangalore. The main theme for this year was Emerging Issues in Privacy Law: Law, Policy and Practice.

Essay in Peer Reviewed Journal

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research
Nishant explores the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat–machine’, ‘digital–physical’, and ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. The essay was published in the European Journal of English Studies, Volume 12, Issue 2.

Articles/Columns

What is Dilligaf? On the web, time moves at the speed of thought: Groups emerge, proliferate and are abandoned as new trends and fads take precedence. Nowhere else is this dramatic flux as apparent as in the language that evolves online. While SMS lingo – like TTYL (Talk To You Later) and LOL (Laughing Out Loud)– has endured and become a part of everyday language, new forms of speech are taking over. This article by Nishant Shah was published in GQ India.
The Book of Jobs The man who made the computer personal, who changed the face of the digital media industry, who was inspired by Zen philosophy to create an eight-billion-dollar empire, Steve Jobs, died last month. Just a few weeks before his death, in the midst of his painful illness, he told Walter Isaacson, the man chosen to write his authorised biography, “I really want to believe that something survives”. And Isaacson wrote him a fairy tale which will make sure that Jobs will be remembered beyond the gizmos and gimmicks, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in the Indian Express on 12 November 2011.

Staff Quoted in the Media

Is Facebook tracking your virtual footprints? by Sheetal Sukhija in MidDay, 22 November 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
M-governance gains momentum by Vasudha Venugopal in the Hindu, 20 November 2011. Nishant Shah was quoted in this article.
SOPA: The bill that could kill the Internet by Suw Charman-Anderson in Firstpost.Technology, 16 November 2011.
Broadband user base still has a long way to go, by Leslie D’Monte & Deepti Chaudhary in Livemint, 15 November 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article.
‘Not mandatory’ but maids, guards get fingerprinted by Hemanth Kashyap in Bangalore Mirror, 9 November 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article.
Netizen Report: Transparency Edition by Rebecca MacKinnon in Global Voices Online, 7 November 2011.
Blocking online content: Google gets more requests than govt by Pallavi Polanki in Firstpost.com, 2 November 2011. Pranesh Prakash has been quoted in this article.

Blog Posts

Sources of CIS Funding by Pranesh Prakash on 9 November 2011.

TRAI urged to take action against P2P throttling and DNS hijacking by Anand on 9 November 2011.

Events Organised

Exposing Data: Art Slash Activism organised by Tactical Tech and CIS at CIS office in Bangalore on 28 November 2011. Ward Smith and Stephanie Hankey (Co-founders of TTC), Ayisha Abraham (Filmmaker, Srishti School of Art Design) and Zainab Bawa (Research Fellow, CIS) gave a lecture.

Droidcon India, first Android Conference in Bangalore, organised by CIS in collaboration with Droidcon.com, Bangalore Android User Group, MobileMonday Bangalore and Android Advices on 18 and 19 November 2011 at the MLR Convention Centre, Bangalore.

Events Participated

Western Ghats Portal: Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics organised by the Western Ghats Portal team at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment, 25 November 2011. Sunil Abraham spoke in the session on Scientific Commons and Policy.
Names Not Numbers Mumbai, 26 November 2011. Nishant Shah spoke in a panel on “The New Digital Individual: Is New Technology Liberating or Enslaving?”. The event was organised by Editorial Intelligence and partners which included the British Council and Financial Times, BBC World News, Mumbai first, Vodafone, Trident and Godrej India Cultural Lab.

Upcoming Events

Dialogue Cafe @ Centre for Internet and Society, 2 December 2011, Centre for Internet & Society, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
The High Level Privacy Conclave, 3 February 2011, Paharpur Business Centre, Nehru Place Greens New Delhi, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. This is a closed-door meeting. For participation, get in touch with Elonnai (elonnai@cis-india.org).
All India Privacy Symposium, 4 February 2011, India International Centre, New Delhi. This is a public meeting. For participation, get in touch with Elonnai (elonnai@cis-india.org).

Video

Facebook Resistance Workshop at CIS. This was a workshop for people to learn on how to think beyond the rules and limitations of Facebook, to tweak and play around the features and design to generate useful, creative, and funny concepts and explore how this creative intervention can be turned into a real software developed by the Facebook Resistance.

Telecom

Column

Telecom Path-Breaker? (by Shyam Ponappa): Does the draft National Telecom Policy-2011 reflect true brilliance or smoke-and-mirrors? It will be a game-changer if a shared network is implemented effectively, writes Shyam Ponappa in this article published in the Business Standard on 3 November 2011.

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CIS is grateful to 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/november-2011-bulletin

December 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-23T08:35:03Z

Welcome to the newsletter issue of December 2011. This issue carries a special section on Freedom of Expression as there was much discussion regarding the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal’s proposal for pro-active censorship of social media.

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS, India and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscapes of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and internet technologies, in emerging information societies. The collaboration has produced a four book collective around ‘digital revolutions’ in a post Arab spring world, a position paper, a scouting report and three international workshops in Taipei, Johannesburg and Santiago.

Blog Entry

The Digital Other: Nishant Shah raises his concerns that increasingly, Digital Natives are acting as pure consumers of technology and gadgets, and seem willing to do so. The blog post was published in DML Central, 14 December 2011.

Events

Digital Native Video Contest, jointly organised by CIS and Hivos. Submission guidelines and FAQs are online. Submit your proposal online by 26 January 2012.
Digital AlterNatives Tweet-a-Review, 17 – 26 December 2011: 'Digital Natives with a Cause?' Project invites readers to review essays from the 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause', a four-book collective published by Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos.

Book Reviews

Unpacking Digital Natives from their Shiny Packaging: “The ‘Digital Natives’ concept is neither necessarily nor inherently positive, as YiPing Tsou highlights in her chapter Digital Natives in the Name of a Cause: From Flash Mob to "Human Flesh Search.” — Argyri Panezi
On Natives, Norms and Knowledge: “It is a text I strongly recommend, especially to those interested in the reasons behind contemporary policies that try to regulate digital activism such as the US SOPA Act.” — Philip Ketzel
Digital Native: Twin Manifestations or Co-Located Hybrids: “Ben-David’s piece is a well-articulated and informed attempt to resolve two of the several conceptual fuzziness of the term Digital Native. She attempts this in a philosophical manner: trying to move away from the ontological who are Digital Natives? to an epistemological when and where are Digital Natives?” — Samuel Tettner

Pathways for Learning in Higher Education

The Pathways Project for Learning in Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in nine undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between technologies, higher education and the new forms of social justice in India.

Workshop Report

The Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy: Nishant Shah captures some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore

Blog Post

Technology, Social Justice and Higher Education by Nishant Shah, 7 December 2011.

Event Organised

Pathways 3rd Faculty Workshop & Regional Facilitators Meeting at CSCS, 8–10 December 2011, CSCS, Bangalore, Nishant Shah participated in the workshop.

Accessibility

India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and electronic accessibility policies. So far we have organised Right to Read campaigns in the four metro cities of Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai, made a submission to amend the Indian Copyright to the HRD Ministry, researched on accessible mobile handsets in India, analysed the Working Draft of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, and published a policy handbook on e-accessibility and a book on universal service for persons with disabilities.

Publications

Universal Service for Persons with Disabilities: Published by G3ict and CIS in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. The book is co-authored by Axel Leblois, Executive Director, G3ict, Deepti Bharthur and Nirmita Narasimhan.
The Business Case for Web Accessibility: NASSCOM Foundation has published a handbook on web accessibility titled “Understanding Web Accessibility — A Guide to Create Accessible Work Environments”. Nirmita Narasimhan authored a chapter “The Business Case for Web Accessibility”.

Submission

Accessibility in the New Telecom Policy 2011: CIS was part of the 27 organisations that responded to the call for comments on NTP 2011. The submission was made to the Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India on 9 December 2011.

Interview

An Interview of Nirmita Narasimhan on ITU Portal: ITU Girls in ICT is now online! ITU interviewed Nirmita and published her profile on their website.

Award

Nirmita receives NIVH Award: Nirmita Narasimhan received the NIVH Excellence Award from Justice AS Anand (retd), former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, on International Day of Persons with Disabilities at the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped in Dehradun on Saturday, 3 December 2011. The Tribune covered the award ceremony and published this in their newspaper on 3 December 2011.

Upcoming Event

ITU Meeting and Tutorial on Audiovisual Media Accessibility, organized by the International Telecommunication Union, India International Centre, 13 – 15 March 2012. CIS is hosting the workshop in collaboration with the ITU-APT Foundation. More information and registration are available at the ITU website.

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. We prepared the India report for the CI IP Watchlist, made submission to the HRD Ministry on WIPO Broadcast treaty, questioned the demonization of pirates, and advocated against laws (such as the PUPFIP Bill) that privatize public funded knowledge.

Comments

CIS Intervention on Future Work of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement
The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) was held in Geneva on 30 November and 1 December 2011. Pranesh Prakash participated in the event and made the intervention.
Comment by CIS at ACE on Presentation on French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting: Pranesh Prakash responded to a presentation by Prof. Pierre Sirinelli of the École de droit de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 on 'The French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting of 16 December 2009 during the seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) held in Geneva.

Blog Post

CIS Hosts Scanned Version of George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes: Verbindingen/Jonctions (V/J), the bi-annual multidisciplinary festival organised by Constant took place on 1 December 2011. CIS hosted the scanned pages of the essay in public domain.

Openness

Innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration. The advent of Internet has radically defined what it means to be open and collaborative. The Internet itself is built upon open standards and free/libre/open source software. Our endeavour has resulted in a report on open government data, a report on online video environment in India and a film on oral citations on the Wikipedia.

Award

Inaugural EPT Award for Open Access: The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development is pleased to announce the winners of a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developing countries who have made a significant personal contribution to advancing the cause of open access (OA) and the free exchange of research findings. The winner of the inaugural award is Dr Francis Jayakanth of the National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.

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. CIS partnered with Privacy International and Society in Action Group which has produced outputs in banking, telecommunications, consumer rights, media law, sexual minorities, etc., and submitted seven open letters to Parliamentary Finance Committee on UID covering several aspects, feedbacks on NIA Bill, and IT Rules.

Peer Review

Now Streaming on Your Nearest Screen by Nishant Shah, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 3, Issue 1.
Internet and Society in Asia: Challenges and Next Steps by Nishant Shah, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 11, Number 1.

Book Review

The Historian Wins Over the Biographer “In Walter Isaacson's eponymous biography of Steve Jobs, the multibillion dollar man who is credited with single handedly changing the face of computing and the digital media industry, we face the dilemma of a biographer: how do you make sense of a history that is so new, it is still unfolding.”
Nishant Shah's detailed review of Steve Jobs' biography was published in the Biblio Vol. XV Nos. 11 & 12, November- December 2011

Newspaper / Magazine Articles

Spy in the Web The government’s proposed pre-censorship rules undermine the intelligence of an online user and endanger democracy, Nishant Shah, Indian Express, 18 December 2011.
What is Dilligaf? On the web, time moves at the speed of thought: Groups emerge, proliferate and are abandoned as new trends and fads take precedence. Nowhere else is this dramatic flux as apparent as in the language that evolves online, Nishant Shah, GQ India.
Of Surrogate Futures and Scattered Temporalities: Nishant Shah responds to Michael Edwards through this blog post published in the Broker on 27 December 2011.

Interview

An Interview with Dr. Ann Cavoukian: Elonnai Hickok interviews Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, Canada.
When the digital spills into the physical: Nishant Shah tells us why flash mobs are an interesting sign of our times, and not just a passing fad. MidDay published this interview in their newspaper on 18 December 2011.

Video

Phishing Attacks on the Rise: Sunil Abraham was on the TV Channel News 9 on 2 December 2011 speaking about two visual cues to distinguish between the fake and the real websites.

Media Coverage

India’s dreams of web censorship, Financial Time's beyondbrics, 6 December 2011, Sunil Abraham was quoted in this post.
Did He, Didn’t He by Rahul Bhatia, Open Magazine (issue: 7-14 December 2011)
Much at stake for tech sector in UID project by Pranav Nambiar, Economic Times, 12 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
On the net, red herring by Javed Anwer, The Times of India, 4 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
Twitter, Facebook take the lead in blogosphere as blog searches fall by half by Ameya Chumbhale, Economic Times, 17 November 2011. Pranesh Prakash was quoted in this article.

Event Report

Exposing Data: Art Slash Activism organised by Tactical Tech and CIS in Bangalore on 28 November 2011. Zainab Bawa, Ayisha Abraham, Ward Smith and Marek Tuszinsky gave a talk. Videos of the event are now online.

Upcoming Events

Privacy Matters — Analyzing the "Right to Privacy Bill": Privacy India in partnership with International Development Research Centre, Canada, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, the Godrej Culture Lab, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore is organising "Privacy Matters", a public conference at IIT, Bombay on 21 January 2012.

The High Level Privacy Conclave: Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Society in Action Group, Gurgaon and Privacy International, UK is organizing the High Level Privacy Conclave at the Paharpur Business Centre, Nehru Place Greens in New Delhi on Friday, 3 February 2012.

All India Privacy Symposium: Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Society in Action Group, Gurgaon, Privacy International, UK and Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative is organizing the All India Privacy Symposium at the India International Centre, New Delhi on Saturday, 4 February 2012.

Event Organised

Dialogue Cafe @ Centre for Internet and Society, 2 Dec 2011, Kavita Philip gave a talk.

Special Section on Freedom of Expression

We usually cover Freedom of Expression under Internet Governance. However, this month there has been much discussion regarding the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal’s proposal for pro-active censorship of social media. This special section covers reportage and original content from CIS:

Newspaper / Magazine Articles

Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen by Pranesh Prakash: The Indian government wants to censor the Internet without being seen to be censoring the Internet. The article was translated into Marathi and featured in Lokmat, 18 December 2011.
US Clampdown Worse than the Great Firewall by Sunil Abraham: If you thought China’s Internet censorship was evil, think again. American moves to clean up the Web could hurt global surfers. Sunil Abraham wrote this article in Tehelka, Volume 8, Issue 50, 17 December 2011.
That’s the Unkindest Cut, Mr. Sibal by Sunil Abraham: There’s Kolaveri-di on the Internet over Kapil Sibal’s diktat to social media sites to prescreen users’ posts. That diktat goes far beyond the restrictions placed on our freedom of expression by the IT Act. But, says Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society, India is not going to be silenced online. Deccan Chronicle, 11 December 2011.

Blog Posts

Online Pre-Censorship is Harmful and Impractical by Pranesh Prakash: The Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal wants Internet intermediaries to pre-censor content uploaded by their users. Pranesh Prakash takes issue with this and explains why this is a problem, even if the government's heart is in the right place.
Press Coverage of Online Censorship Row: We are maintaining a rolling blog with press references to the row created by the proposal by the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology to pre-screen user-generated Internet content.

Radio Broadcast

Social media sites refuse Indian censorship request: Sunil Abraham spoke to Radio Australia. Follow the broadcast here

Live Chat

Is the govt bid to regulate content on the Internet a good thing?: Pranesh Prakash answered questions freedom of expression vis-a-vis objectionable content live on CNN-IBN's chat feature, 7 December 2011.

Media Coverage

Caught in the Web: “As it is the status of freedom of speech in India is in a bad shape. Sibal's new rules will only make it worse.”— Sunil Abraham in Hindu Business Line, 13 December 2011.

Online gag: Existing rules give little freedom: “Our criticism is of the policy and not of the websites and Internet entities that are forced to err on the side of caution when faced by such notices.” — Sunil Abraham in the Times of India, 9 December 2011.
Facebook, Google tell India they won’t screen for derogatory content: “Researchers sent mock take-down notices to seven sites, complaining about their content... six sites immediately deleted content. They did not even verify the validity of our flawed complaint. They over-complied.” — Sunil Abraham in Washington Post, 6 December 2011.
‘Any Normal Human Being Would Be Offended’: “Indian law seems to state that it has global jurisdiction but that is not really true. An Indian court might give an order that is unenforceable in the United States or anywhere else.” — Sunil Abraham in the New York Times, 6 December 2011.
IT Inc oppose Sibal’s ‘great’ firewall proposal: “You wouldn’t want to end up with a situation where you are denied access to, say, the website of the University of Sussex because the address contains the word ‘sex’.” — Nishant Shah in Indian Express, 7 December 2011.
Online @ India: “I haven't yet heard of anybody in India going on a rampage because somebody in Pakistan started an 'India hate' page.” — Nishant Shah in the Hindustan Times, 10 December 2011.
How ‘private-censorship’ is making online content disappear, quietly: “Google’s self-reported compliance rate of 51 per cent shows that they are probably over-stepping the law in order to appease the Indian government’s requests.” — Pranesh Prakash in FirstPost, 15 December 2011.
Kapil Sibal to sterilise Net but undercover sting shows 6 of 7 websites already trigger-happy to censor under ‘chilling’ IT Act, Legally India, 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this blog post.
‘Chilling’ Impact of India’s April Internet Rules by Heather Simmons, New York Times, 7 December 2011.
Govt wants to scrub the Internet clean, Livemint, 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
India's Techies Angered Over Internet Censorship Plan, NPR, 20 December 2011. Pranesh Prakash was quoted in this blog post.
Internet, social media access should not be blocked: Ban, Oman Tribune, 10 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
India entering the Minority Report age?, ioL scietech. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this.
Los internautas indios se oponen a la censura a través de la Red, Diario de Navarra, 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in the Spanish newspaper.
Technological beasts like Facebook, Orkut, YouTube & Google impossible to control by Sunanda Poduwal & Kamya Jaiswal, Economic Times, 11 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in the article.
Google V/s Kapil Sibal by Sundeep Dougal in Outlook, 8 December 2011. Pranesh Prakash's work at CIS has been extensively quoted in this blog post.
India bid to censor Internet draws flak Phil Hazlewood spoke to Sunil Abraham and published this article for AFP. France 24, Khaleej Times, Physorg.com, TimesLive, Bangkok Post, Yahoo News, MSN News, Emirates 24/7, Business Live and Jakarta Globe also carried the news on their websites, 9 December 2011.

Videos

Censorship — A Death Knell for Freedom of Expression Online: On 8 December 2011, NDTV aired an interesting discussion on internet censorship. Shashi Tharoor, Soli Sorabjee, Shekhar Kapoor, Ken Ghosh and Sunil Abraham participated in this discussion with NDTV's Sonia Singh.
FTN: Should social networking sites be censored?: Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal met the representatives of Facebook, Google and others seeking to device a screening mechanism. Sunil Abraham was on CNN-IBN from 10.00 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. speaking about freedom of expression in India.
Debate: Online content row-1: Sunil Abraham was on Times Now from 9.05 p.m. to 9.45 p.m. on 6 December 2011 speaking about freedom of expression in India.

Event Organised

Free Speech Online in India under Attack? A Panel Discussion, 21 December 2011. Achal Prabhala, Anja Kovacs, Lawrence Liang and Sunil Abraham gave lectures.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. In this connection, Shyam Ponappa continues to write his monthly column for the Business Standard.

Newspaper Article

Healing self-inflicted wounds by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, 1 December 2011: A spate of dysfunctional actions and retrograde developments has led to an unimaginable mess for India. Can the damage to growth prospects be undone? Does it need to be? If so, how?

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Follow CIS on identi.ca
Join the CIS group on Facebook\
Visit us at www.cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to 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/december-2011-bulletin

The kids are all on Facebook

praskrishna — 2012-07-20T06:24:17Z

In one photo, Prerna stands in front of the mirror, back slightly arched, a fringe covering her left eye, one hand on her hip, pursing her lips. The other hand holds the camera in a steadfast grip. Below this picture are almost a hundred likes and comments. There is nothing unusual as such about this photo on Facebook. Prerna, however, is just 11.

This article by Shikha Kumar was published in Daily News & Analysis on July 8, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

"Stop looking so pretty" and "OMG! You’re so thin" are some of the comments that appear under the picture of this young girl.

In another picture, Diksha’s wavy hair cascades around her face as she fixes the camera with an unwavering stare. The caption reads — "I love my hair. I know I sound like a conceited bitch." Diksha is 12.

Children like Prerna and Diksha, who are under the age of 13, are officially not allowed to open accounts on Facebook. But they are among the 7.5 million under-13 users of the popular social networking website, according to a study released by Consumer Reports last year. The study further revealed that among such users, 5 million were under the age of 10. Closer home, a McAfee-Synovate survey conducted across various cities in India revealed that 64% kids in the age group of 9-12 are members of social networking sites.

You may find the trend daunting since ‘kids’ are supposed to step out and socialise, rather than chat online. However, it’s a reality that we have no choice but to accept as a modern reality.

Internally, Facebook seems to have accepted the trend. As revealed by a news reports last month, the company is readying a technology that will allow children younger than 13 to open accounts and operate them in a secure manner. Possible approaches include connecting the children’s Facebook accounts with their parents’, and giving parents the control over who befriends their children on the website.

The New ways of being in touch with ‘friends’
The move has once again put the spotlight on the ways in which social networking is changing the way children interact with each other.

Namrata Bhoomkar, 13, logs on to the website at least two to three times a day. "I check my news feeds and see what my friends are up to. If you’re not on Facebook, you can’t be updated with what’s happening with everybody," she says.

Apart from finding out what their friends are up to, kids also spend a lot of time sharing their pictures, and are proficient at photo editing software like Photoshop, Picasa and Photobooth to make their pictures more striking.

Another way of standing out is to give pictures creative captions. "I google random quotes on love and life and then put those up as captions on the pictures. I get a lot of likes for it, which makes me feel nice," says 13-year old Sakshi Shrivastav.

Having No clue about privacy settings
However, while the kids use many of Facebook’s features, few are aware of the risks or the privacy settings available on the website that can protect them. In the McAfee-Synovate survey, 32% of the kids were not aware of any online threats, such as cyber hacking, stalking, bullying and identity thefts.

As a result, lessons are often learnt the hard way. "A 39-year-old man started sending me messages saying that I’m very pretty. My father found out and told me to disable my account. I was very upset since all my friends are on Facebook. So finally, my sister helped me activate my privacy settings," says an underage girl on the condition of anonymity.

Anandita Mishra, a security expert at McAfee Cybermum India, says that she does not advocate kids’ presence on Facebook. "There are several dangers; there might be paedophiles lurking, strangers pretending to be younger or your child may be a victim of online abusing or bullying," she says.

With the new timeline format, even though one’s account is protected, the cover pictures are always visible to everybody. In such cases, Mishra recommends either keeping no cover photo or keeping pictures of favourite cartoon characters.

In the face of so many risks, some experts believe that Facebook’s move to officially allow younger kids under some form of parental supervision is a step in the right direction.

"Children’s interaction online should always be under parental supervision. Censorship and control is not the responsibility of the government, but of parents," points out Sunil Abraham, director, Centre for Internet and Society.

Abraham believes that if this technology comes into force, children will consume content more responsibly. This will also give them the chance to go out in the real world and get some real communication experience, the old-fashioned way.

"They will even behave responsibly. If the account is supervised, they are less likely to engage in bullying, abusing, sexting or any other unacceptable forms of social behaviour," he adds.

While she is not totally in favour of this development, McAfee’s Mishra sees no other way because parents are unable to control their children. "Seven million kids are online with or without parental supervision. You cannot have cyber policing of children. It is important to inculcate the right values about responsible internet usage," she says.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/kids-on-facebook

A Net of Hatred

praskrishna — 2012-07-20T06:09:19Z

Citizens worlwide have been resisiting the threat of internet censorship that governments seek to impose — and justifiably so. But while we have seen democratic revolutions such as the Arab Spring emerge from the power of the net, it is increasingly becoming clear to even the most ardent defender

This article by Samar Khurshid was published in the Hindustan Times on July 14, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in it.

The Problem

On the internet, anyone can say anything and largely get away with it, making it a near-perfect means for fanatics. India, in particular, with its religious diversity and history of communal tension, constantly struggles with this issue. Earlier this week, the phrase ‘Internet Hindus’ was trending on popular social media website, Twitter, brought to the fore by a discussion about online religious fundamentalism on Al Jazeera, a news network based in Qatar. The panelists sought to put in context the largely vocal community of internet users who support right-wing Hindu ideology. These ‘Internet Hindus’ have become synonymous with an "abusive, vocal, uncouth group of people who subscribe to Hindu nationalism," said one panellist. The tribe of ‘Twitter jihadis’ is now responding with equal fervour with mostly anonymous fundamentalists who are vocal with their message.

"The problem," says Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), "is that internet conversations become extreme. Liberals don’t get embroiled in heated arguments while fundamentalists, dedicated to extreme ideologies, tend to win out." Web censorship, he adds, is in vain as the net is too vast to control.

Online fanaticism is not limited to Hindus. For long, extremist Islamic groups have taken their jihad on to the world wide web. Of late, jihadist groups have mushroomed on social media to expand their base of support. The trend was observed by BBC Islamic Groups Analyst, Murad Batal al-Shishani, on Twitter. Even the recent arrest of Lashkar-e-Toiba’s handler of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, Syed Zabiuddin Ansari alias Abu Jundal, was possible after he was tracked on Facebook trying to recruit young Muslims for 'the cause'. The Afghanistani Taliban, in fact, has its own news website with a running Twitter feed. The site offers the ‘voice of jihad’ with events propagandised from the Taliban perspective – American and Afghan soldiers are referred to as puppets, minions, cowards and even terrorists.

Islamic groups, however, are not a major cause of concern for India, according to Prasanto K Roy, a tech analyst and social media commentator. "Jihadist groups are a relatively small minority in India. But right wing Hindu groups have majority support."

The greatest issue, says CIS’s Prakash, is that these fundamentalists are increasingly well-organised and make great efforts to build a stronger extremist position. They are encouraged, he says, by the likes of Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy, who believes that minorities in India should only be given political rights after they acknowledge their Hindu ancestry; Francois Gautier, a French-Indian writer and journalist who supports the cause of Hindutva; and Zakir Naik, a Mumbai-born Islamic televangelist whose controversial opinions often attracts criticism. Prakash also says that on the net, "Many people are not only manufacturing opinion but also manufacturing facts as the basis of that opinion. These falsities are fuelling Right-wing anger."

The Solution

Governments are hard pressed to effectively censor and discourage otherwise reprehensible dialogue. The UPA attempted to tackle what they see as ‘objectionable content’. In December 2011, based on a petition, the government prosecuted internet giants like Yahoo, Google, Twitter and Facebook for hosting offensive material.

Legally, various sections of the Indian penal code, notably 153A – promoting enmity between communities – can be applied in cases of hate speech. But online speech falls short of being prosecutable, says sociologist Dipankar Gupta. "Something can only be (considered) hate speech if it directly incites people or results in violence, like statements made by Varun Gandhi in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. Online fundamentalist speech does not cross the boundaries of the law. And we cannot prosecute someone for their opinion."

When a Twitter post asked the question whether certain people could be violating section 153A, the response was far from reasonable, or even civil. One person wrote, "We p*ss on you and your secular section." Another urged others to report the user to Twitter as spam and have him blocked. And of course all this comes with the barrage of by now infamous Twitter terms like 'sickular', 'pseudo secular' or 'Congress Dirty Tricks Department'. They have thousands of followers, even their own websites and are extremely organised.

"The larger question is whether we should tackle this legally or develop other methods," says Siddharth Narayan, a lawyer with the Alternative Law Forum. "Hate-speech laws have been misused in the past. We don’t need a clampdown on internet freedom. We just need a more nuanced application of existing legislation," he says.

When looking at net-speak, it is tough to distinguish between generic statements of hate and a genuine call to violence. The internet has no intermediaries; no editors to censure your posts. Then perhaps it bodes ill for India’s secular democracy, and for secularism in the world at large, that uncurbed dialogue, which seeks to crystallise hate between communities, is spreading like an epidemic. CIS’s Prakash says the government cannot cope with this. “But we as society should be strong enough to respond, even if we disagree."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/a-net-of-hatred

Fifth Meeting of the two Sub-Groups on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah

praskrishna — 2012-08-07T10:11:25Z

The fifth meeting of the two sub-groups on privacy issues will be held on July 22, 2012 under the chairmanship of Justice AP Shah, former chief justice of Delhi High Court.

The next meeting of the two Sub-Groups (5th Meeting) on privacy issues under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, former Chief Justice of Delhi High Court is scheduled to be held on July 22, 2012 at 11.00 a.m. This was announced vide notice No. M-13040/47/2011-CIT&I, dated the 10th June, 2012.

A copy of the notice was sent to the following individuals:

Justice AP Shah, Chairman
Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj
Usha Ramanathan
Sunil Abraham
Prashant Reddy
Prof. Arghya Sengupta
Shri Som Mittal
Shri Gulshan Rai
Mala Dutt

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/fifth-meeting-of-two-sub-groups-on-privacy

Session M4 – International Public Policy and Internet Governance Issues Pertaining to the Internet

praskrishna — 2012-07-19T05:59:40Z

The Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum 2012 is being organised at Aoyama Campus, Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo on July 20, 2012. Sunil Abraham will be speaking in the session on international public policy and internet governance issues pertaining to the internet. The event is organised by APrIGF.Asia

The Internet is a vital strategic communications infrastructure for the Asia Pacific region, and so the future evolution of the Internet is a hugely important policy issue for individuals, business and government alike across the region. The region is the most diverse and dynamic in the world and the formulation of a unified and coherent regional view on such an important policy issue is very challenging. With internet governance becoming increasingly important, efforts are underway by some countries in Asia Pacific and elsewhere to change the nature of internet governance; moving from a relatively open multi-stakeholder model to a more closed, government led system of governance. What is the best evolution Internet governance path for Internet users of Asia Pacific to follow? This workshop will discuss the competing paths currently under discussion and seek to offer delegates a comprehensive understanding of the issues.

Panel

Moderator – Mr. Jeremy Malcolm, Consumers International

Speakers

Hasanul Aaq Inu, Member, Bangladesh National Parliament; Chairman, Parliamentary Standing Committee for Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications
Atsushi Umino, Director for International Policy Coordination, Global ICT Strategy Bureau (MIC)
Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet & Society, India
David Farrar, Director of Curia Market Research

Panelists

Naoya Bessho, General Counsel, Chief Compliance Officer, Yahoo Japan Corporation
William Drake, International Fellow & Lecturer, Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ, University of Zurich, Switzerland

For the full agenda, click here
Click to read the original

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/session-m4-international-public-policy-and-internet-governance-issues-pertaining-to-the-internet

Open letter to Hillary Clinton on Internet Freedom

sunil — 2012-09-04T08:28:02Z

Last month I wrote an open letter to Hillary Clinton. It was based on a presentation I that I made during a panel discussion at a Google sponsored conference titled Internet at Liberty 2012 in Washington DC on May 24, 2012.

Sunil Abraham's article was published in Thinking Aloud on July 17, 2012

The question that my panel tried to grapple with was "In a world where nearly nine out of ten Internet users are not American, what is the responsibility of United States institutions in promoting internet freedom?" My co-panelists were Cynthia Wong who is with the Centre for Democracy and Technology, Mohamed El Dahshan a writer and journalist, Dunja Mijatovic the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media.

Internet freedom is a curious subject. It is a technology specific liberty - for a moment consider television freedom. The US has more Muslims than India has Christians. But Indian television in the average hotel comes in hundreds and there are at least 3 channels of Christian preaching. But US television in hotels is usually less than 50 channels with no channels of Islamic preaching. In fact even the reception of secular channels from the Islamic World like Al Jazeera is still difficult in America. Can we accuse the US of not having television freedom since their television features Christian evangelists but not Muslim evangelists? Should it be part of India's foreign policy to evangelize television freedom given that there is a large domestic industry with clear international potential?

In an ideal world - citizens will possess technology-neutral freedom to communication and expression. But nothing can be farther from the truth. Communication technologies are regulated using a plethora of policies and practices and very often these have a chilling effect on freedoms.

The following is my response to the technology-specific demands for deregulation from the US Government.

Text of the Open Letter[2]

Recognise Access to Knowledge (A2K) as pre-condition for freedom of expression: There is no difference between aggressive enforcement of imbalanced and obsolete intellectual property laws and censorship. The need of the moment is not more enforcement to protect obsolete business models against the everyday practices of ordinary netizens but rather the reform of intellectual property law (levies, broader exceptions and limitations, pools, statutory and compulsory licenses, prizes etc.) to keep pace with innovations in technology and the production of knowledge and culture.

Recognise privacy as pre-condition for security: The alleged tension between privacy and security is a false dichotomy. Blanket surveillance by design compromises security. Surveillance is like salt in cooking — essential in very small quantities but dangerous even if slightly in excess. Blanket surveillance technologies are only going make things easier for — and will only serve as targets for — current and future online villains.

Don't lose the moral high-ground: Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Other countries are waiting to cherry pick from your worst practices. Also don't use trade agreements to selectively export components of US policy without the accompanying safeguards for civil liberties and rights. Citizens in oppressive and authoritarian states are depending on the US government, courts and civil society to protect their rights online. Don't undermine their capacity to shame their governments by holding up the US as the example of 'how to get things right'. They urgently need the US government to lead by example.

Recognise that freedom of expression has become a trade issue: This is unfortunate but this is true — thanks to the precedent set by the developed world when it came to asymmetric trade negotiations. Just as the US is interested in protecting the interests of its corporations in global markets — other governments are keen protect the interests of their own corporations. The optimal solution in this case is where all countries and corporations are equally unsatisfied. This will remain a continuing discussion.

Address developing country anxieties around critical internet infrastructure: Security by obscurity will no longer do — security by transparency through open standards, technologies and governance is the only way to fears and build a trust-worthy and secure Internet for all of us. For example, there is urgent need to develop standards for supply chain audits of information infrastructure. The US has dealt with the fear of back doors by banning the use of hardware and software from countries it does not trust. The developing world is not sure if there are back-doors in hardware and software manufactured by US corporations.

Time has comes to address this and other related anxieties.

Appreciate diversity in nomenclature: 'Freedom' and 'liberty' may be appropriate terms to use in the United States of America. But openness may be more in countries that are not yet full and robust liberal democracies. The Internet Governance Forum for example uses 'openness' instead of 'freedom'. Openness is also preferred because it includes 'freedom of expression', 'freedom of information' (also known as right to information, access to information or public and 'free knowledge' (free software, open standards, open content, open access, open data, open educational resources, etc.)

Don't be too instrumental in your interventions: Don't undermine the local credibility of like-minded civil society, think-tanks and research organisations by being too directive in your support. Managerialism will undermine reform of policies and practices in information societies and so does inappropriate/premature monitoring and evaluation (for example, looking for explicit attribution in terms of casual connections between your actions and outcomes). There is a need to support greater reflexivity in the global information society by developing institutional capacity in developing countries through unrestricted funding. True critical thinking is the foundation of both scientific progress and open societies. Go out of your way to find and support those who disagree with you. Protect the plural foundation of our networked society!

Video

Sunil Abraham was a speaker along with Cynthia Wong, Mohamed El Dahshan and Dunja Mijatovic in Plenary IV Debate 3 at the Internet at Liberty 2012 event organised by Google on May 24, 2012.

View the video on YouTube

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/open-letter-to-hillary-clinton