Centre for Internet and Society

Criticism mounts over India censorship

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T06:38:51Z

India’s government is facing fierce criticism from privacy groups, political opponents and irate internet users accusing it of an excessive and poorly targeted censorship drive as it seeks to contain social alarm triggered by communal unrest.

This article written by James Crabtree in Mumbai and Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco was published in Financial Times on August 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Following panicked scenes among groups from the nation’s troubled north-east and fearing an escalation of urban violence between Muslim and Hindu groups, the administration this week instructed internet companies, including Facebook and Google, to block more than 300 web pages and more than a dozen Twitter accounts it claimed were inflaming communal tensions.

But by Friday the order was being assailed as an example of administrative incompetence, as internet analysts revealed that many of the pages contained seemingly harmless material from foreign media organisations, political columnists and critics of India’s government.

Pranesh Prakash, a legal expert at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, said: “I am not questioning their original motives, but I do think this is excessive and incompetent censorship.”

Political opponents also accused the government of over-reach, including Narendra Modi, the controversial chief minister of the state Gujarat and a member of the Hindu nationalist BJP party, who on Friday used a Twitter post to call the moves a “crackdown on freedom of speech”.

The government denies it is being heavy handed. “We are only taking strict action against those accounts or people which are causing damage or spreading rumours,” said Kuldeep Dhatwalia, an Indian home ministry spokesman. “We are not taking action against other accounts, be it on Facebook, Twitter or even SMSes.”

Twitter found itself at the centre of the growing controversy, as government spokespeople accused the US-based social networking site of failing to respond to requests to block users, some of which involved accounts appearing to impersonate Manmohan Singh, the prime minister.

Twitter responded by suspending a number of impersonator accounts and is now in discussions with the prime minister’s office in an attempt to defuse the row, according to people familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Twitter declined to comment.

Angry users also used the site to attack the restrictions using the hashtags #GOIblocks and #Emergency2012, the latter a highly charged reference to prime minister Indira Gandhi’s two-year period of rule by decree in the late 1970s.

India has a long history of censorship measures designed to prevent communal violence, ranging from restrictions introduced under the British Raj in the early 20th century to more recent edicts banning Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and restricting derogatory portrayals of religious figures in Bollywood movies.

“Blocking content to help mitigate a volatile situation involving civilian security could be justified,” says Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “But when the government expresses equal concern about fake Twitter handles or criticism of political leaders, it begins to look like censorship.”

The online restrictions followed related measures restricting to five the number of text messages that could be sent from most Indian mobile phones, although this was lifted to 20 on Thursday.

They also came during a week of deepening political crisis in the world’s largest democracy, as opposition leaders repeatedly halted parliamentary proceedings and called for Mr Singh’s resignation in the aftermath of a critical report from India’s government auditor.

“These threats to social harmony are real, but like almost everything the Indian state is doing at present, the restrictions incompetently deal with a few symptoms rather than addressing causes,” says Pratap Bhanu Mehta of the Centre for Policy Research, a think tank in New Delhi. “They are simply exacerbating a crisis of trust, not solving it.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-ft-com-aug-24-2012-james-crabtree-tim-bradshaw-criticism-mounts-over-india-censorship

Internet clamp outrage

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T05:13:31Z

The Indian government's attempts to block social media accounts and websites that it blames for spreading panic have been inept and possibly illegal, a top Internet expert said yesterday.

Published in the Gulf Daily News on August 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Earlier this month, thousands of people from the country's remote northeast began fleeing cities in southern and western India, as rumours swirled that they would be attacked in retaliation for ethnic violence against Muslims in their home state.

Last weekend, the government said the rumours were fed by gory images - said to be of murdered Muslims - that were actually manipulated photos of people killed in cyclones and earthquakes. Officials said the images were spread to sow fear of revenge attacks.

After that, the government began interfering with hundreds of websites, including some Twitter accounts, blogs and links to certain news stories. The government also ordered telephone companies to sharply restrict mass text messages.

It is unclear who has been spreading the inflammatory material. Experts say that despite the government's electronic interference, there are many ways to access the blocked sites.

"The government has gone overboard and many of its efforts are legally questionable," said Pranesh Prakash, who studies Internet governance and freedom of speech at The Center for Internet and Society, a research organisation in the southern city of Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-gulf-daily-news-com-aug-25-2012-internet-clamp-outrage

India Blocks News Website Pages for 'Spreading Fear' over Assam Violence

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T04:53:08Z

Access to more than 300 internet web pages including some published by Telegraph, Times of India and Al-Jazeera blocked.

This article by Gianluca Mezzofiore was published in International Business Times on August 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The Indian government has blocked more than 300 internet web pages including ones published by the Daily Telegraph, Australia's ABC and Al-Jazeera claiming they contained "incendiary" material likely to spread panic.

Internet experts said the move might be illegal as the Indian government interfered with hundreds of website, including some Twitter accounts, blogs and links to certain stories.

Internet posts, phone text messages and fake video clips have allegedly spread rumours that Muslims were poised to attack the Assamese population in Chennai, Mumbai and Pune. More than 10,000 Assamese workers fled to their native state in northeastern India.

The content, bound to fuel tension between Muslim migrants and Assamese workers, included images that falsely portrayed the relief effort for the 2010 Tibetan earthquake disaster as Burmese Buddhists walking among their Muslim victims.

The mass exodus from southern cities followed clashes in Assam between the Bodo tribe and Muslims. At least 80 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were displaced.

The Telegraph reported that India blocked its pages including a photo-gallery of Reuters and AFP news pictures that documented "attacks by Burma's Buddhist Rakhine community on villages which had been occupied by Rohingya Muslims, who had migrated from Bangladesh several decades earlier".

Among other news outlets blocked were The Times of India, the Dainik Bhaskar and FirstPost.

"The government has gone overboard and many of its efforts are legally questionable," Pranesh Prakash, who studies internet governance and freedom of speech at the Centre for Internet and Society, said.

"The government's highest priority should have been to counter the rumours and it did a really bad job of that."

Victoria Nuland, spokeswoman for the US State Department, said it was urging the Indian government "to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world" while addressing its security concerns.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-ibi-times-co-uk-gianluca-mezzofiore-aug-24-2012-india-blocks-news-website-pages-for-spreading-fear-over-assam-violence

India: Social Media Censorship to Contain ‘Cyber-Terrorism'?

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T03:36:37Z

This is the second post in the 2-part series about the perceived role of social media in the wake of the Assam clashes that spilled across the country and threatened to upset the nation's peace.

Written by Aparna Ray. This post was published in GlobalVoices on August 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash's analysis is quoted in this. The first post can be found here.

As the Indian government sought to block bulk SMS, MMS, webpages and specific social media urls, justifying its step as an attempt to control viral rumor-mongering and “cyber-terrorism”, there was a lot of discussion on the mainstream media (MSM) about how social media was fast becoming a “double-edged sword” and how the recent events brought out the “mischief potential of social media in full play“. These MSM opinions, some of which offered tacit support the idea of reigning in social media, did not go unnoticed by netizens. For example, Media Crooks asked:

So what’s with the rant against the Twitterati and social media by these media celebs?

Blogger Amrit Hallan at Writing Cave wondered if the MSM had an underlying motive for creating a hype around the ‘dangers' of social media. He wrote:

People in the mainstream media have always been at loggerheads with the free spirit of social networking websites that empowers everybody to express opinions and spread ideas…(they) have been gleefully recommending the curtailment (of social media). Social networking and blogging continuously make their job hard. The moment they try to spread some misinformation, it is countered by Twitter or blogs with factually correct information, often posted by people close to the ground.

Tweets too expressed similar concerns and sentiments:

Priya James (@james_priya): I think by now, MSM coverage volumes of 'social media terrorism' has now surpassed even their basic coverage of Assam situation!

Gaurav Sabnis (@gauravsabnis): Politician-MSM nexus in India so blatantly clear with blame for NE rumors laid squarely at social media's doors.

Rajeev Nagpal (@rajeevnagpal): In #India the #MSM can't tolerate any one challenging their hold. No wonder they support censoring social media #HandsOffTwitter

Things have been moving very quickly. The ISPs have been sent official communication to block webpages and twitter handles, including those ofsome journalists plus fake profiles created with the purpose of lampooning the Indian Prime Minister. Curiously, the Pakistani blogger Faraz Ahmed Siddiqui, who was the first to break the news about the morphed photos being used to incite communal tensions, also came under the ambit of censorship and his post was inaccessible on some ISPs.

AEIdeas, a blog from the American Enterprise Institute commented on the issue:

The Indian government ought to have given Mr. Siddiqui a medal for his investigative work. Instead it has blocked his post.

Social media users in India have been following the government actions closely and there is muchdebate and discussion about whether the crack down on social media is censorship of free speech in the guise of rumor control.

Some have termed the government's action as Orwellian/dystopian. Others have seen merit in the government's ‘intent' to curb inflammatory content but have been disappointed with the ineffective way the government went about the task - acting as “Net nannies” and “blocking communications, curbing speech, and banning websites”.

At CIS India, Pranesh Prakash did an analysis of the social media content blocked in India since August 18, 2012. Here are the results:

Strong reactions are pouring in on Twitter via trending hashtags such as #GOIBlocks, #IndiaBlocks,#Emergency2012 etc. [There is some debate over the use of the word ‘Emergency' and the attempt to draw parallels between the present block and the state of emergency of 1975, which saw suspension of civil liberties and persecution of journalists in the name of battling threat to national security].

Indian Rebellion (@reBel1857): today they r blocking ur twitter account, tomorrow ur bank account and then will lock u in ur home … #GOIBlocks #Emergency2012

Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash): If you oppose #censorship, more power to you! I do too. But calling this #Emergency2012 is ridiculous! #IndiaBlocks #netfreedom

Madhavan Narayanan @madversity): Social media is a modern challenge and a modern opportunity. Government attempts to police it smacks of outdated feudal style #GOIblocks

Raheel Khursheed(@Raheelk): Everything ██ is █████ ████ ████ fine ███ █ ████ love. ████ █████ the ███ UPA ███ ████ Government ██ #GOIBlocks #Twitter

Sunanda Vashisht (@sunandavashisht): First they ignored us, then they argued with us, then they blocked us #emergency2012

Babar (@6a6ar): The only thing left for us to do is block all media and Govt. handles in protest. Let's start a #VirtualRevolution #IndiaBlocks

Abhijit Majumdar (@abhijitmajumder): Govt of #India is just testing #socialmedia waters by blocking spoof PMO accounts. Prepare for greater censorship on #Twitter and #Facebook

Amit Agarwal (@labnol): The Indian govt can force ISPs to block individual Twitter profiles but everything will still be available through web apps like Tweetdeck

Humour and sarcasm too weren't in short supply. For example:

Mahesh Murthy (@maheshmurthy): Now that Govt has solved North East crisis by limiting SMS, it will fight malnutrition by banning food pics on Instagram

Kalyan Varadarajan (@itzkallyhere): My nose blocked. But I didn't poke my nose in Govt matters! My nose isnt a handle. Damn! #GOI

Ramesh Srivats (@rameshsrivats): I've a few SMSs to spare from today's quota. If you mail me recipient's number, message & a cheque, I can send an SMS for you.#BusinessIdea

However, not everyone is amused. Amrit Hallan asks:

Are we going to follow the footsteps of Pakistan and China and turn into a Blockistan? No matter how much it makes some of the English-speaking mainstream journalists happy, blocking isn’t possible, at least sustained blocking. The Internet has empowered the silent majority and there is going to be a big backlash if the government, or another agency tries to take this power back. In what form this backlash is going to manifest? It remains to be seen.

In a guest post on Trak.In, blogger Prasant Naidu suggests how the government could use social media positively. He says:

instead of banning social media, the government can use it in its favor controlling the crisis of NE. The virality feature that our politicians are scared of can be used for killing rumors. Can’t the government get in touch with Facebook and Google India to find out ways to use social media in a better way? Can’t the Government start a social media campaign to “Save NE and Save India”?

Twitter is one of the tools that the government can use. A brilliant example is how Nirupama Rao, India’s Foreign Secretary used Twitter during the evacuation of Indians at the time of the Libyan crisis.

Social Media is not rocket science; it is about communicating with humans and for that you need to have the will to evolve and change. Banning social networks is not a solution to combat rumors but it is a half backed measure to cover the lid on the growing tensions.

The government, on it's part, issued social media guidelines to be followed by government agencies. It remains to be seen how the situation develops on the ground and what impact the current stand-off between government and social media has on cyber-control policies in the days to come.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/global-voices-online-org-aparna-ray-aug-24-2012india-social-media-censorship-to-contain-cyber-terrorism

Blocked websites: Where India flawed

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T03:00:16Z

Apart from not giving 48 hours response time, the Indian government has blocked some websites which don't exist or don't have web addresses, says an analyst.

Published in CIOL on August 23, 2012. Pranesh Prakash's analysis is quoted.

India is threatening to block Twitter as the latter has allegedly failed to respond to the government's order to remove some inflammatory posts.

That has come to light as it is being widely covered in media, but there are hundreds of websites which have already been shut, apparently without due notice to the owners.

Apart from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts, the blocked websites include which are sympathetic to Hindu and Muslim radical groups.

In an analysis of 309 websites blocked in the wake of exodus of North eastern people from Bangalore, Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), says the government has blocked these sites under the Information Technology Act, but it failed to provide the mandatory 48 hours to respond (under Rule 8 of the Information Technology Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public, Rules 2009).

He writes in his post: "The persons and intermediaries hosting the content should have been notified. Even if the emergency provision (Rule 9) was used, the block issued on August 18, 2012, should have been introduced before the "Committee for Examination of Request" by August 20, 2012 (within 48 hours), and that committee should have notified the persons and intermediaries hosting the content.

Internet censorship is acceptable as long as it is in the purview of the law and doesn't encroach one's freedom. In this case, some people and posts debunking rumours have been blocked, says Pranesh.

He points to some discrepancies in the way the websites are blocked:

Some of the items are not even web addresses (e.g., a few HTML img tags were included). Some of the items they have tried to block do not even exist (e.g., one of the Wikipedia URLs).
An entire domain was blocked on Sunday, and a single post on that domain was blocked on Monday.
For some YouTube videos, the 'base' URL of YouTube videos is blocked, but for other the URL with various parameters (like the "&related=" parameter) is blocked. That means that even nominally 'blocked' videos will be freely accessible.

He concludes: "All in all, it is clear that the list was not compiled with sufficient care."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-ciol-com-aug-23-2012-blocked-websites

Regulating the Internet by fiat

praskrishna — 2012-08-26T10:13:03Z

The Union government’s move to ban or block 310 online entities is worrisome.

This article by V Sridhar was published in the Hindu on August 26, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The unprecedented spike in the velocity of hateful, offensive and blatantly communal online content earlier this month, which reinforced rumour mongering on the ground that resulted in the exodus of people from the northeast from several Indian cities has been a classic example of how new technologies can be harnessed for old vices. But just as disturbing has been the manner in which the government yielded to the old itch of censoring, banning or blocking content. Between August 18 and August 21, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), in four separate directives issued to all Internet service licensees, asked them to “block access” to a total of 310 URLs (Unique Resource Locators).

Directing ISPs

The number of URLs blocked does not quite convey the extent of the banned content because the list includes instances of entire websites, a single Web page in some cases, videos posted on YouTube, Twitter handles, Facebook entries, or even instances of links that would take the browser to an img tag (an individual image that is linked to an HTML page). Although the directives clearly stated that the service providers should block only the specific URLs leading to the main sites such as YouTube, Facebook or Twitter.

Airtel, the leading telecom and Internet service provider, blocked youtu.be, the short URL that Twitter and Facebook users normally use for sharing images and videos. A perusal of the four orders clearly shows that Airtel overreacted. Although the service provider subsequently corrected the error, worries about arbitrary disruptions remain.

Pranesh Prakash, Programme Manager, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), who did the first analysis of the resources that were pulled out of the Web, said the list was only partial, because they related only to the URLs that ISPs were asked to block, not what action would have been initiated against those offering Web services.

A ragtag list

Net activists, even those who do not have an absolutist notion of the right to free speech, have expressed deep reservations about the manner in which the government has blocked 310 URLs. Although Mr. Prakash, who is also a lawyer, believes that “temporary curbs” of freedom of expression, in situations such as the unprecedented situation earlier this month may be necessary, he argued that the government acted carelessly and in a kneejerk manner. “It is a ragtag list, prepared in a haphazard manner,” he told The Hindu.

Logically, the rules applicable to hate content ought to be the same whether the offence is in print or whether it appears as online content. Mr. Prakash pointed to the fact that official agencies such as the police have not gone after those responsible for the content posted in the blocked URLs, which shows that the government’s approach is not backed by a resolve to bring to book those responsible for spreading hate.

The ban-first, examine-later approach is wrong for three sets of reasons, argued Mr. Prakash. First, because there are what he characterises as “egregious mistakes”. Second, he doubts whether regulations prescribing due process of enforcing and reviewing the ban were indeed followed. Third, the government ought to have acted smarter, by using the same media to debunk the rumours that were swirling in several Indian cities but also in the northeast. Mr. Prakash pointed to the case of a Canadian intern working at the CIS who received an SMS from a Canadian government agency that asked her not to heed the rumours. Although the Bangalore police did issue an SMS asking people not to heed such rumours, it came well after the rumour mongering had passed its peak.

“I generally believe that the government must exercise utmost caution in censoring,” said Mr. Prakash. He pointed out that in the list were sites and people who had done nothing to promote hate. He refered to the case of Amit Paranjpe, whose twitter handles were blocked. “If you go through his timeline, you will not find anything that is communal at all,” Mr. Prakash says. “I do not think the government acted responsibly by going after material that is not directly inflammatory, or contributes to the state of panic,” he argued. “I do not doubt the motives of the government, because I see that the overwhelming majority of the material it has blocked is stuff that has something to do with communalism or rioting, whether it is as reportage or as material that contributes to tension,” he observed. He also did not think the government used the crisis as an excuse to put down politically dissenting voices, which was what happened last October (critical references to Sonia Gandhi were removed then).

Cyber terror?

Significantly, the list of blocked domains did not match the government’s claim that a lot of the hate content were in the form of images with misleading captions, most of which came from Pakistan. Mr. Prakash pointed out that many of these images had “been floating around” in Pakistan for at least a month before the rumours hit their peak in mid-August. He noted that within Pakistan there had been debates about the authenticity of these images. “In fact, the reportage and the countering of the reportage in the Pakistani media has been much more sophisticated than in India,” he observed. Significantly, the debate was not even targeted at the Indian audience, but to Pakistani or a global audience. “This debunks the notion some sections of the media have propagated, that this is about cyber war or cyber terrorism,” he says. “I have not seen evidence that India has been targeted from Pakistan,” he observed.

Lack of transparency

It has also been done without abiding by the procedures that are clearly laid down. Mr. Prakash pointed out, the provisions of the Information Technology Act require that “persons or intermediaries” blocked ought to have been given an opportunity to explain their position within 48 hours. He doubted that this had been followed. Moreover, he argued that the people or companies hosting the offensive content, not the ISPs, ought to have been asked to remove them. After all, most of the large and popular intermediaries have clearly laid down conditions of usage, he said.

The lack of transparency in the manner in which the government blocked these websites — even if it is accepted that the content was hateful, abhorrent and aimed at stirring social tension — is worrisome because it sets a precedent for unchecked use of power, without proper sanction. Nor was it a smart way of addressing an innovatively virulent way of spreading chaos. While the government’s use of the sledgehammer may have got it out of the immediate crisis it found itself in, it may have fewer friends when faced with a similar outbreak later.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-the-hindu-aug-26-v-sridhar-regulating-the-internet-by-fiat

To regulate Net intermediaries or not is the question

sunil — 2012-08-26T06:12:48Z

Given the disruption to public order caused by the mass exodus of North-Eastern Indians from several cities, the government has had for the first time in many years, a legitimate case to crackdown on Internet intermediaries and their users.

Sunil's column was published in the Deccan Herald on August 26, 2012.

There was, of course, much room for improvement in the manner in which the government conducted the censorship. But the policy question that becomes most pertinent now is: do we need to regulate Internet intermediaries further? The answer is yes and no.

There are areas where these intermediaries need to be regulated in order to protect citizen and consumer interest. But to deal with rumour-mongering and hate speech, there is sufficient provisions in Indian law to deal with the current disruption in public order and any similar disruptions in the future.

It is a common misunderstanding to assume that all civil society organisations that advocate civil liberties on networked technologies are regulatory doves that wish to dismantle regulation of the private sector and allow them complete free hand for innovation and, perhaps, causing harm to public interest.

The opposite is also not necessarily true. We are not hawks, those that believe in maximal regulation of the private sector. The state should regulate the private sector in areas where the citizens are unable to protect their own interest and self-regulation is inadequate. But there are many other areas where regulation needs to be dismantled in the interests of citizen and public interest.

Dr Rohan Samarajiva, founder of a Colombo-based regional policy think tank LIRNEasia, explains this best using the ‘law of soft toys’. When his daughter was young he told her that in Sri Lanka there was a law which mandated that every time she got a new soft toy, she would have to necessarily give away another one.

The regulatory lesson here is: the mandate for regulation cannot keep endlessly expanding. As the government moves into new areas of regulation, it should also exit other older areas where regulatory rupee is providing limited returns. These decisions should be based on evidence of harm caused to citizens and consumers. The following are a list of areas where regulation is required for Internet intermediaries:

Privacy: India needs the office of the privacy commissioner established and an articulation of national privacy principles through the enactment of the long awaited Privacy Act. This privacy commissioner should be able to investigate complaints against intermediaries, proactively investigate companies, order remedial action and fine companies that violate the principles and other policies in force. Remedial action could require change in policies, features, data retention policies and services etc.

Competition: Many of these intermediaries have been taken to court on anti-trust complaints, fined and subjected to remedial action by regulators in America and Europe.

Earlier this year, BharatMatrimony.com has filed a complaint against Google at the Competition Commission of India (CCI) alleging anti-competitive practices in its Adwords program. In addition, based on a report submitted by Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS), a civil society organisation, CCI has initiated an investigation into Google's search engine for anti-competitive practices. If they are found guilty of breaking competition law they could be fined up to 10 per cent of their turnover.

Speech: Article 19(2) of the Constitution permits Parliament to enact laws that place eight categories of reasonable restrictions on speech. Unfortunately, the Information Technology Act and its associated rules attempts to expand these restrictions and in addition does not comply with the principles of natural justice. Ideally, all those impacted by the censorship should be informed and should be able to seek redress and reinstatement for the censured speech.

The policy sting operation conducted by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) last year demonstrated that intermediaries are risk-averse and tend to over-comply with takedown notices. There is a clear chilling effect on speech online and it is important that the Act and rules be amended at the earliest.

Intellectual Property: Policies that fall under this inappropriate umbrella term for many differently configured laws make the yet unproven fundamental assumption that granting limited monopolies to rights holders, usually corporations, will result in greater innovation. However, citizen and consumer interest is protected through provisions for exceptions and limitations in laws such as copyright, patent, trademarks etc. Some examples of these safeguards that guarantee access to knowledge in Indian law include compulsory licences, patent opposition, fair-dealing etc.

There are many other areas where special treatment may be required for intermediaries. For example tax law needs to handle evasion techniques like the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich. Given my lengthy wish-list of regulation of Internet intermediaries, why then has CIS become an NGO member of the Global Network Initiative?

This is because I believe that technological development happen too quickly for us to purely depend on government regulation. Self-regulation has an important role to play in keeping up with these rapid changes. As self-regulatory norms mature they could be formalised into policy by the government.

Therefore, I consider it a privilege that CIS has been accepted as a member of this self-regulatory initiative and we influence GNI norms using our Indian perspective. However, when self-regulation fails to protect public interest, then the government must step in to regulate Internet intermediaries.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-deccan-herald-aug-26-2012-to-regulate-net-intermediaries-or-not-is-the-question

When #GOIBlocks, twitterati fly off their ‘handles’

praskrishna — 2012-08-26T05:56:19Z

Ever since the news broke mid-week that some genuine Twitter accounts and six spoof accounts were blocked, the social networking platform has been in a tizzy.

Published in the Hindustan Times on August 26, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Hashtags like #GOIblocks and variations on the same theme began “trending” and the twitterati, functioning like a virtual democracy, have been bombarding the world in real time with posts about the issue. 16 accounts of the 15 million twitter users in India, among them those of a few journalists, spoof accounts like @PM0India, a right-wing parody of @PMOIndia, the official twitter account of the Prime Minister’s office, and a few anonymous accounts like Barbarian Indian (@barbarindian) and Dosabandit (@dosabandit) were blocked.

While Narendra Modi turned his twitter display picture black in solidarity with the idea of freedom of speech (and was promptly termed a hypocrite with many like @JagPaws, who has 641 followers, tweeting, “Whoa!! Is he supporting Jihadi sites?”), Pankaj Pachauri, (49,827 followers) Communications Adviser to the Prime Minister’s office, has put up twitter rules and the National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon’s ominously pro-surveillance keynote address at the release of the IDSA report on “India’s Cyber Security Challenge”.

Many like Nitin Pai @acorn, with 16,988 followers, founder of Takshashila Institute, a public policy think tank, tweeted that “under extraordinary circumstances, the govt must do whatever it can under the constitution to prevent loss of life” and added that targeted and temporary blocks of sites, facebook pages and twitter handles that spewed hate were acceptable. Others like film maker Harini Calamur (@calamur) (11,277 followers) who says she is against censorship tweeted that “Blocking internet handles & sites is silly” and “the Govt’s job is to uphold the constitution & protect our fundamental rights. Not make value judgements.” Much of the debate has led to a genuine exchange, sometimes making comrades of people from opposing camps. Kanchan Gupta, a journalist known for his pro-Hindutva views, whose twitter handle @KanchanGupta (26,424 followers) was among those blocked, accepted on TV that scores of “people from all communities” many of whom “disagreed violently” with him had extended their support on twitter.

Others like writer Shivam Vij (@Dilidurast), who has 3,296 followers, whom Hindutvawadis has often branded ‘pseudo sickular’, surprised baiters by speaking against the ban.

Many were strident in their criticism of the arbitrary nature of the blocks and tweeted that it was indicative of authoritarianism. “Internet blocks in India have been increasing in frequency&intensity. I wouldn't put this down to knee-jerk/foolishness.There is *intent*,” tweeted Nikhil Pahwa (@nixxin), founder and editor of @medianama. Others like business journalist Samidha Sharma @samidhas worried that the government’s frequent attacks on freedom of expression shows that it is “following china in all the wrong things”.

While Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash) of the Centre for Internet and Society tweeted, “They've blocked sites from all parts of the spectrum: Muslim right-wing, Hindu right-wing, neutral news sites, etc. No politics”, many others saw the move as a “self-serving” one. “Dear GoI: why not be honest enough to say that this web censorship has NOTHING to do with security+ all to do with your own arrogance” tweeted Sunny Singh (@sunnysingh_nw3).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-hindustan-times-aug-26-2012-when-goi-blocks-twitterati-fly-off-their-handles

India’s Internet Curbs Under Legal Cloud

praskrishna — 2012-08-26T05:48:12Z

India’s crackdown on the Internet has caused much debate. But was it legal?

This article by Rumman Ahmed and R Jai Krishna was published in Wall Street Journal on August 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

India’s government says its moves this week to block websites, Twitter accounts and news portals was necessary to reduce simmering tensions over ethnic violence in the northeast of the country.

Authorities have far-reaching powers to do just that, laid down in rules framed in April 2011 under the country’s controversial new IT law.

But those rules state authorities must give companies 48 hours notice before blocking Web pages. In cases of emergency, New Delhi can block first and inform a special government committee within 48 hours. That committee must notify the blocked sites.

Many of the sites that India blocked or sought to block, including Twitter accounts of anti-government commentators and mainstream news organizations, say they were given no forewarning of the actions and weren’t contacted afterwards, either.

Indian news website Firstpost.com and Kanchan Gupta, a newspaper columnist who is critical of the government, were among those who faced blocks. Mr. Gupta and First Post Editor-in-Chief R. Jagannathan both said they were not contacted by the government either before or after the blocks.

The Home Ministry this week provided lists of around 300 web pages, including Twitter accounts and news stories, to the Ministry of Communications and IT, which then ordered Internet Service Providers to block them.

Kuldeep Dhatwalia, a Home Ministry spokesman, confirmed the lists. The government, he said, was not bound to give notice in an emergency situation.

The government’s reading of the IT law is unlikely to win it any friends among those who say the government is curtailing Internet freedoms.

“It seems the government is yet to have a well planned strategy in place to counter threats to public security and law and order events arising out of viral distribution of malicious content via social media networks,” said Anirban Banerjee, an associate vice president at CyberMedia Research, a New Delhi-based information technology research firm.

India’s government has defended its conduct by saying the blocked Web pages and Twitter handles were inciting communal hatred amid recent violence between Muslims and northeasterners in the state of Assam that has cost almost 80 lives.

The government says some off the sites hosted fake pictures purporting to show violence against Muslims in Assam. In fact, many of these pictures showed Muslim refugees from Myanmar, authorities say.

“We are only taking strict action against those accounts or people which are causing damage or spreading rumors. We are not taking action against other accounts, be it on Facebook, Twitter or even SMSes. There is no censorship at all,” the Home Ministry said in a statement Friday.

“We decided on taking action because there were pictures of Myanmar etc. online, which were disturbing the atmosphere here in India.”

Critics, though, say the government also targeted Twitter accounts that were critical of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, giving a political tinge to the censorship.

Some commentators said the government asked Internet Service Providers to block sites without invoking any laws.

“The four orders that were sent to the ISPs don’t say under which section or under what power these orders are being sent,” said Pranesh Prakash, a lawyer and program manager at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

“They were sent without invoking any statute or without invoking any law. The orders just say that those on the list would have to be blocked immediately. It doesn’t say these have be decided by whom, under what provision or what law,” Mr. Prakash added.

One telecom operator said on condition of anonymity that the government has not sent any new lists since Aug. 21. Google Inc and Facebook Inc. say they are working with the government to take down offensive content. Twitter Inc. has not commented.

The latest clampdown comes as public-interest groups are pressing the government to scrap the latest Web censorship laws. Critics say the rules not only limit free speech but also expose Internet companies to unfair liability for material posted by Web users.

“In the 21st century, you cannot censor your way to public tranquility,” said Mishi Choudhary, lawyer and director of international practice at New York-based Software Freedom Law Center.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wsj-com-aug-25-2012-rumman-ahmed-r-jai-krishna-indias-internet-curbs-under-legal-cloud

India Dismisses Charges of Internet Censorship

praskrishna — 2012-08-26T05:29:15Z

Read, listen and learn English with this story. Double-click on any word to find the definition in the Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary.

This is the VOA Special English Technology Report. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The government in India is defending itself against charges of Internet censorship. The move comes after the government last week asked companies like Facebook and Twitter to block more than three hundred websites.

Officials accused the websites of posting edited images and videos of earthquake victims. They said the websites falsely claimed that the images were Muslim victims caught in recent ethnic conflict in India’s northeastern Assam state and Burma. A number of the images were reportedly uploaded from Pakistan.

Officials said the panic that resulted caused thousands of Hindu immigrants to flee the area. They feared that Muslims would answer the false reports with attacks of their own. Cyber law expert, lawyer Pawan Duggal says this is the first time the Internet and mobile-phone technology have been used to create fear in a community.

PAWAN DUGGAL: “India has to wake up to the need for putting cyber security as the number-one priority for the nation. Unfortunately, India does not even have a national cyber-security policy. The nation does not have any plan of action, should this kind of emergency happen again. India needs to have its own cyber army of cyber warriors.”

On Friday, India’s Communication and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal dismissed charges that the government is trying to censor social media. But he said the misuse of social media has to be prevented.

Pranesh Prakash is program manager at the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society. He says some of the web pages that have been blocked included official news websites.

PRANESH PRAKASH: “I am not questioning the motivations of the government which in this current case seemed to be above board. We found that most of the material that they have complained about is actually stuff that is communal. But I do feel that the government went overboard in doing so, that it has also curbed legitimate reportage.”

He says some of the websites were uploaded by people trying to let others know that the images were false.

The government in India has called on social media companies to come up with a plan to keep offensive material off the web. Last year, it passed a law that requires companies to remove so-called “objectionable content” when requested to do so.

A Google Transparency report says that last year India topped the list of countries that make such requests. Supporters of online freedom have expressed concern that India may be restricting web freedom.

About one hundred million people in India use the Internet - the third-largest number of net users in the world. About seven hundred million people have mobile phones.

And that's the VOA Special English Technology Report. I'm Steve Ember.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/learning-english-voanews-com-india-dismisses-charges-of-internet-censorship

Tweets and twits

praskrishna — 2012-08-25T07:45:43Z

The orders issued by the Ministry of Communication and IT to block more than 300 items on the Internet, including Twitter handles, Facebook pages, YouTube videos, blogposts, pages of certain websites, and in some cases entire websites, tell a revealing story of a government that has simply not applied its mind to the issue of how to deal with hate speech, both cyber and traditional.

Published in the Hindu on August 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash's blog post is quoted.

There can be no argument against taking down material that can incite violence, and some of the targeted content rightly needed to be blocked. But this should have been done transparently, with judicial oversight. In the present case, it is not clear what laws have been invoked to block the items specified in the four orders issued from August 18 to 21. Certainly, the orders themselves do not make reference to any law. As pointed out by the Centre for Internet and Society (http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/analysing-blocked-sites-riots-communalism), if the government had acted under the Information Technology Act, the host servers of the affected sites should have been notified and given 48 hours to respond under the IT Rules of 2009; and if it used the emergency provision in the Rules, which are themselves opaque, the orders should have come up before an ‘examination of request’ committee within 48 hours. Another serious problem is that the orders do not mention the duration of the blocks.

Especially disturbing is the decision to block the Twitter handles of right-wing agitators and one pro-Hindutva journalist. Bad taste, warped logic and chauvinist comment do not, by themselves, add up to hate speech or criminal incitement. If an individual is really spreading hate through speech, print or the Internet, let the government proceed against him or her under the Indian Penal Code — where the courts will have the final word — rather than indulging in censorship that is pre-emptive and arbitrary. And mindless too: among the sites blocked is an anti-hate page on a Pakistani website which was one of the first to expose how fake photographs had been used to whip up Islamist passion on the Rakhine clashes in Myanmar. A London School of Economics-Guardian study of the 2011 London riots documents how Twitter was used extensively in a positive way, to organise community clean-up operations after the riots. On the other hand, their analysis of 2.5 million tweets showed, the response to messages inciting riots was ‘overwhelmingly negative’. The lesson from this is that it is possible to counter hate on social media through the same platform. This is really what the government should be doing, instead of the Sisyphean task of trying to block noxious content that will always find other ways of bubbling to the surface.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-thehindu-com-opinion-editorial-aug-25-2012-tweets-and-twits

Blocking Twitter: How Internet Service Providers & telcos were caught between tweets and tall egos

praskrishna — 2012-08-25T07:36:04Z

Long derided as 'dumb pipes' to the Web, Internet service providers (ISPs) are discovering these days that insult is being increasingly followed up by injury.

Joji Thomas Philip and Harsimran Julka's article was published in the Times of India on August 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

In the fight between netizens who spare no effort at lampooning the powers that be and alarmingly frequent government flashes of rage at comments that can range from the mildly disrespectful to downright defamatory, telcos and ISPs find themselves much like the grass in the age-old Swahili saying "When two elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers".

The latest reminder of the hard place they find themselves in came earlier this week when news first broke that the government had asked for some accounts on social media site Twitter to also be part of websites and Internet pages it wanted blocked by ISPs. The news triggered a wave of outrage across cyberspace, with many users venting their rage at the first entity they associate the web with - their ISP, which in many cases is also their telecom operator.

"We acted immediately to the government's orders, but ended up being targetted and criticised wrongly only because we acted first," explained one official, who sought anonymity for himself and the company to avoid offending bureaucrats.

It's a common feeling. Telcos and ISPs are increasingly finding themselves in a 'Damned if you do, Damned if you don't' predicament these days, having to walk a tightrope between government orders and a restive netizenry.

And government orders can range from the super-urgent to arbitrary to sometimes ill-conceived. Very often, its 'one ban fits all' makes little allowance for differences between social networking sites and regular websites.

Executives in telecom companies recounted the instance when the government on August 18 ordered a ban on bulk SMSes and restricted text messages to five per day as part of efforts to combat the large-scale migration of people of north-eastern origins from other states to their home provinces fearing reprisal attacks.

"Within an hour of the directive, we started getting calls seeking compliance," said a top executive with a leading telco. But as the Centre was demanding compliance reports, operators were busy trying to decipher its notification, which read: "(a) Block bulk SMS (more than 5) for the next 15 days in the entire country across all states/UTs (b) Block bulk MMS (more than 5) and all MMS with attachment more than 25 KB for the next 15 days in the entire country across all states/UTs."

Shoot first, talk later

Telecom operators were nonplussed by the notification. Did it apply only to senders of bulk text messages who use this facility for commercial purposes? Or, did it mean customers could not send SMSes to more than five people simultaneously?

"When we sought clarification, the explanation was completely different and took a new dimension. It was five text messages per day per customer," said the regulatory head of a GSM operator, requesting anonymity as he did not want to offend the government.

Mobile phone companies then approached the department of telecom explaining that they did not have any technology with which they could impose a five SMSes a day limit for postpaid users. "The home and telecom ministries had not even realised that a facility did not exist before issuing the directive," said the marketing head of a leading telco.

In this case, the government accepted the operator's arguments and relented, but still told the companies not to highlight the limitation. "This time around, our arguments were accepted. Going by past instances, some operators had feared that the government would slap a hefty penalty for non-compliance without considering what we had to say," the marketing head said.

Industry officials say the tendency of 'shoot first, talk later' among bureaucrats and ministers long used to having their orders followed, especially when it came to the world of social networking which very few of them had any idea about, meant that it was safer to obey first and correct later.

"We don't even do any application of mind to the government's notices on requests. We wholesale block them. We can't even question the government's requests. A notice is a law in effect. Violation means a potential penalty which can go up to the cancellation of my licence and thus end to my business," said the head of a Delhi-based ISP that serves business users.

Executives with several ISPs and telcos say most often, court orders, government notifications and directives are not in public domain, and these result in angry consumers assuming that their service provider is up to some mischief.

ISPs say public clarifications by the government would go a long way in addressing the issue. "There has to be transparency. The government should have proactively disclosed the names of the websites it wanted blocked. The persons and intermediaries hosting the content should have been notified and provided with 48 hours to respond as required by the IT Act," said Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society, a research organisation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-aug-25-2012-blocking-twitter

Social media, SMS are not why NE students left Bangalore

nishant — 2012-08-28T10:48:06Z

I woke up one morning to find that I was living in a city of crisis. Bangalore, where the largest public preoccupations to date have been about bad roads, stray dogs, and occasionally, the lack of night-life, the city was suddenly a space that people wanted to flee and occupy simultaneously.

Nishant Shah's article on North East exodus was published in FirstPost on August 20, 2012.

Through technology mediated gossip mill that produced rumours faster than the speed of a digital click, imagination of terror, of danger and of material harm found currency and we found thousands of people suddenly leaving the city to go back to their imagined homelands.

The media spectacle of this exodus around questions of religion, ethnicity and regionalism only emphasised the fact that there is a new wave of connectedness that we live in – the social web, or what have you – that can no longer be controlled, contained or corrected by official authorities and their voices.

Despite a barrage of messages from the law enforcement and security authorities, on email, on large screens on the roads, and on the comfort of our cell-phones, there was a growing anxiety and a spiralling information mill that was producing an imaginary situation of precariousness and bodily harm.

Much has been said about the eruption of this irrationality that pokes holes in the mantle of cosmopolitanism that Bangalore (and other such ‘global cities’) is enveloped in, in its quest to represent the India that is supposed to shine. It has been heartening to see how communities that were supposed to be in conflict have worked so hard in the last few days, at building human contacts and providing assurances of safety and inclusion, which are far more effective than the official word.

There has been a rich discourse on what this means for India’s modernity, especially when such an event marks the so-called neo-liberal cities, showing the darker undercurrents of discrimination and suspicion that seem to lie just beneath the surface of networked neighbourhoods.

While there is much to be unpacked about the political motivations and the ecologies of fear that our immigrant lives are enshrined in, I want to focus on two aspects of this phenomenon which need more attention.

The first is the fierce localisation of our global technologies. There is an imagination, especially in cities like Bangalore, of digital technologies as necessarily plugging us in larger networks of global information consumption. The idea that technology plugs us into the transnational circuits is so huge that it only tunes us towards an idea of connectedness that is always outward looking, expanding the scope of nation, community and body.

However, the ways in which information was circulating during this phenomenon reminds us that digital networks are also embedded in local practices of living and survival. Most of the times, these networks are so naturalised and such an integral part of our crucial mechanics of urban life that they appear as habits, without any presence or visibility, In times of crises – perceived or otherwise – these networks make themselves visible, to show that they are also inward looking.

The visibility of the networks, when they suddenly crop up for public viewing, for those of us who are outside of that network, it signals that something has gone wrong. There is a glitch in the matrix and we need to start unpacking the local, the specific and the particular that signals the separation of these networks from our habits of living.

The second point I want to make is about the need to look at the ellipsis that occurs in this spectacular emergence of the network and the apparatus that is set into place to control and regiment it. The hyper-visibility of the information and technology network destabilises the ways in which we think of our everyday, thus emerging not only as a sign of the crisis but a crisis unto itself.

These ellipses of the crisis – replacing the crisis with the network – as well as the collusion between the crisis and the network are the easy solution that state authorities pick up on.

This is a problem about the nation-wide building of mega-cities filled with immigrant bodies that are not allowed their differences because they all have to be cosmopolitan and mobile bodies. The solution, however, is offered at the level of technology.

Instead of addressing the larger issues of conservative parochialism, an increasing back-lash by conservative governments and a growing hostility that emerges from these cities which nobody possesses and nobody belongs to, the efforts are being made to blame technology as the site where the problem is located and the object that needs to be controlled.

So what we have is redundant regulation that controls the number of text messages we are able to send, or policing of internet for those spreading rumours. The entire focus has been on information management, as if the reason for mass exodus of people from the North East Indian states and the sense of fragility that the city has suddenly been immersed in, is all due to the pervasive and ubiquitous information gadgets and their ability to proliferate in peer-2-peer environments outside of the control of the government.

Digital Technologies have become the de facto scapegoats of many problems in our past. It invites more regulation, containment and censorship of the freedom that digital technologies allow you – from the infamous Delhi Public School MMS Scandal in the early 2000s to the recent attempts at filtering the social web – we have seen the repeated futility of such measures of technology control, and yet it appears as a constant trope in the State’s solution to the problems of the contemporary.

This obsession with governance of technology to resolve a much more nuanced problem is akin to fabulous stories of mad monarchs banishing spinning wheels from their kingdoms or sentencing hammers to imprisonment for the potential and possibility of crime.

And these solutions are always going to fail, because they fail to recognise either the intimate penetration of digital technologies in our everyday life, or the ways in which our local structures are constructed through the presence of ubiquitous technologies and gadgets and screens and networks.

These ellipses of the crisis – replacing the crisis with the network – as well as the collusion between the crisis and the network are the easy solution that state authorities pick up on.

Digital Technologies have become the de facto scapegoats of many problems in our past. It invites more regulation, containment and censorship of the freedom that digital technologies allow you – from the infamous Delhi Public School MMS Scandal in the early 2000s to the recent attempts at filtering the social web – we have seen the repeated futility of such measures of technology control, and yet it appears as a constant trope n the State’s solution to the problems of the contemporary.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-first-post-com-aug-25-2012-nishant-shah-social-media-sms-are-not-why-ne-students-left-bangalore

What lurks beneath the Network

nishant — 2012-08-25T07:10:38Z

There is a series of buzzwords that have become a naturalised part of discussions around digital social media—participation, collaboration, peer-2-peer, mobilisation, etc. Especially in the post Arab Spring world (and our own home-grown Anna Hazare spectacles), there is this increasing belief in the innate possibilities of social media as providing ways by which the world as we know it shall change for the better. Young people are getting on to the streets and demanding their rights to the future.

Nishant Shah's column on the North East exodus and digital networks was published in Down to Earth magazine on August 24, 2012

Citizens are mobilising themselves to overthrow authoritarian governments. Socio-economically disadvantaged people, who have always been an alternative to the mainstream, are finding ways of expressing themselves through collaborative practices. Older boundaries of nation, region and body are quickly collapsing as we all become avatars of our biological selves, occupying futures that were once available only to science fiction heroes.

To this list of very diverse phenomena, I want to add the recent tragic and alarming exodus of people from the north eastern states, from the city of Bengaluru, where I live. There might not be many connections between this state of fear which instigated thousands of people, fearing their safety and security, to leave Bengaluru and return home and the global spectacles of political change that I listed earlier. And yet, there is something about the digital networks, the social web and the ways in which they shape our information societies, that needs to be thought through. In the Arab Spring like events, which are events of global spectacle, there is a certain imagination of digital technologies and its circuits that gets overturned.

These events challenge the idea that digital networks are always outward looking—connecting us to somebody and someplace ‘out there’ in a world that is quickly getting flat—and show how these networks actually create new local and specific communities around information production, consumption and sharing. These networks that connect people in their information practices, often make themselves simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible. So that the interfaces that we operate through—laptops, cellphones and other portable computing devices—become such a part of our everyday life, that we stop noticing them. They are a natural element of our everyday mechanics of urban survival, and in their omnipresence, become invisible.

This invisibility or naturalisation of the digital technologies, often make us forget the intricate and inextricable way in which they are woven into our basic survival strategies. Especially with the younger generation that has ‘grown up digital’, the interface, the gadget and the network is the default space that they turn to for their everyday needs. We develop intimate relationships with these technologised circuits, making them such a part of our quotidian existence that we often forget that these technologies are external to us. Which is why we come across articulations like, “I love my computer because my friends live in it,” or “I feel amputated when you take away my cell-phone”. These are ways in which we naturalise and internalise the digital technologies that we live in and live with. However, in times of crises, we suddenly realise the separation, as the technologies make themselves present, unable to sustain the new conditions of crises. It would be fruitful to see then that the eruption in our seamless connection with the digital technologies is a sign of an external crisis –something that we have seen in the Arab Spring or the Anna Hazare campaign, where these networks became visible to signal towards an external crisis. The emergence of networks into public view is a symptom that there is something that has gone wrong and so we see the separation of the digital ecosystem from its external reality and context.

The unexpected visibility of the network indicates that the regular information ecologies have been disrupted, the contexts which support community interaction at the local level have been changed, and those changes need to be accounted for and addressed in order for the network to become the transparent infrastructure of new urban communities again. In many ways, it resonates with the science fiction logic of the Matrix Trilogy where, if you can see the matrix, it means that something has gone wrong in the fabric of reality and it needs to be fixed.

The exodus of the north eastern people also needs to be examined in this context. In an immigrant city like Bengaluru, the sense of belonging and community is often deeply mediated by the digital ecologies of information sharing. Beneath the veneer of a global city that is to connect with the external world, there is also a huge network of local, specific and invisible practices that do not become a part of the global spectacle of digital technologies, and operate in a condition of relative invisibility. However, when the logic of a migrant city gets disrupted because the conditions of its work force get threatened, these networks go into an overdrive. They become gossip and rumour mills. They become visible and suddenly create conditions of fear, danger and crisis that were unexpected. And so, without a warning, over-night, a huge number of people, who were a part of these networks, decided to abandon their lives and head home, because the larger social, cultural and political threats transmitted through these local networks before they could become global spectacles that we could consume.

A large part of the people fleeing the city had already crowded the trains and left their lives behind, before any attempt at regulation or control could be made. All kinds of post-facto theories about the real or perceived nature of the threat, the actual cases of violence, and the conditions of life in the IT City have emerged since then. However, in all these theories is a recognition that the crisis which led to this phenomenon lingers on and cannot be addressed. There is no particular person to hold responsible. The few scattered incidents of attacks, violence or intimidation have been recognised as strategic and opportunistic interventions by local regressive groups. All in all, we have a condition where something drastic and dramatic has happened and there is no real or material person or group of people who can be blamed for it. And so, instead of addressing the crisis and the conditions which led to the exodus, we have committed an ellipsis, where we have made technology the scape-goat of our problems.

And we have done this repeatedly in the history of technology and crises in India. In the early days, when the notorious Delhi Public School MMS clip that captured two under-age students in sexual activity, became hugely visible, instead of addressing the problem at hand, we eventually set up a committee to regulate the conditions of cultural production and distribution online. During the horrifying bomb-attacks in the trains in Mumbai, we tried to block Blogspot and curtail information online as if technology was the reason that these acts were made possible. Last year, Dr. Sibal’s attempts at establishing a pre-censorship regime on information on the social web, because he encountered material that was disrespectful to the Congress party leader Mrs. Gandhi, sought to regulate the web rather than look at the political discontent and dissent that was being established through those articulations. Because there was no way by which the local situation could be controlled or contained, technology became the only site of regulation, inspiring draconian measures that limit the volume of text messaging and try and censor the web for lingering traces of the information mill that catalysed and facilitated this exodus.

This is a remarkable ellipsis where the actual problem – the conditions of life and safety in our global cities – is hidden under a perceived problem, which is the sudden visibility of a digital information ecosystem which was not apparent to us hitherto. And while there is no denying that at the level of tactics, for immediate fire-fighting this kind of regulation is important, nay, necessary, we also need to realise that at the level of strategy, these kinds of knee-jerk regulatory mechanisms are not a resolution of the problem. These laws and attempts at censorship are neither going to correct what has happened, nor are they going to be potent enough to curb such networked information sharing in the future. They are symbolic tactics that are trying to correct the crisis – the feeling of fear and danger – and in that, they do their job well in establishing some sense of control over the quickly collapsing world. However, we need to look beyond the visibility of this network, and realise that the crisis is not its emergence or its functioning but at something else that lurks behind the facade of the network.

Nishant Shah is director (research), Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/down-to-earth-org-nishant-shah-aug-24-2012-what-lurks-beneath-the-network

How ISPs block websites and why it doesn’t help

praskrishna — 2012-08-25T06:56:41Z

Banning websites is ineffective against malicious users as workarounds are easy and well known.

Gopal Sathe's article was published by LiveMint on August 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

India blocked 245 web pages for provocative content on Monday in an effort to prevent the spread of hate messages and lessen communal tensions in the country, and suggested via an official release on the website of the Press Information Bureau that more could follow.

As was widely reported in the days that followed, most websites blocked were not related to the ethnic clashes in Assam.

Pranesh Prakash, programme manager with the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, analysed the sites which were listed by the government. In his analysis, 33% of all blocked addresses were on Facebook, 27.8% on YouTube, 9.7% on Twitter and the rest were spread over a number of different websites including Wikipedia, Firspost.com and TimesofIndia.Indiatimes.com.

Prakash says, “I don’t believe that the decision to block sites was politically motivated, but I do believe that in trying to prevent harm, the government has gone overboard.”

He also writes in his analysis, “Even though many of the items on that list do deserve (in my opinion) to be removed [...] the people and companies hosting the material should have been asked to remove it, instead of ordering the ISPs to block them.”

Prakash also pointed out, “There are numerous egregious mistakes. Even people and posts debunking rumours have been blocked, and it is clear that the list was not compiled with sufficient care.”

Of course, India’s overall record on Internet censorship isn’t great, with the current laws encouraging Internet service providers (ISPs) to take down content without investigating individual cases properly. And that is not even taking into consideration official government orders, such as this decision to block websites.

The process of blocking content for an ISP is very simple. After all, any content that is coming from a website to your computer has to travel through the ISP, giving it ample opportunity to observe and censor banned content.

Think of it like this—you’re on an island, with no way to reach the mainland (Internet) where all the websites are. The ISP builds a bridge connecting you to the mainland, and charges you to let cars (data) from the sites come to you, by opening the road. Each web page has a unique ID, like a licence plate. If the government tells the ISP to block a specific page, it’s added to the blacklist, and isn’t allowed on the bridge. The government could also block a full domain, such as Facebook.com, which would be like blocking all cars with DL plates, instead of specific numbers.

New Delhi based cyber security consultant Dominic K. says, “The content is still there and can be accessed from outside India, so these measures are really very ineffective. People can use proxies or a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent these measures with ease, by appearing to be a different site; so banning sites does nothing to deter malicious users.”

Proxies are websites that load blocked sites for you—if the proxy is not using the ISP doing the block, they can still load the content from the blocked site and present it to the users, since the blocklists simply block websites, and not their content.

VPNs work in a similar fashion, creating a virtual presence for the user outside of their own country. This can be done to circumvent blocks and access region-specific content, but is also a perfectly legitimate tool, and can increase your security greatly.

It’s a pretty crude system but it’s used around the world. In Australia, for example, the government has a page that directly lists their web censorship activities. It wants to block material that includes child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act. However, as noted on the same page, these measures can be easily circumvented. Since the content remains on the Internet, and is only blocked, it can be accessed by “any technically competent user”.

China, meanwhile, is frequently criticized for what is called, tongue-in-cheek, “the great firewall of China”. Reporters without Borders, a French organization that works for freedom of the press, has a list of countries that are “enemies of the Internet”. China, Iran, North Korea and Burma are some of the worst offenders, but Australia, India, Egypt, France and South Korea are also on the watchlist as “countries under surveillance”.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE publish detailed information on their filtering practices but other countries such as China return connection errors, and fake “file not found” errors.

There is a long history of Internet censorhip in India, and a perception that the laws have been used for political ends. Net censorship has been around for a while—in 1999, VSNL blocked access to Pakistani newspapers. Later, in 2006 the government wanted to block certain separatist groups of the Yahoo! Groups platform. While the government issued specific pages for the ban, initially, the whole Yahoo! Groups domain was blocked by ISPs. In 2007, Orkut was told to remove “defamatory” pages created by users.

Cartoon pornography website Savitabhabi.com was also blocked in 2009, while several blogging services such as Typepad were blocked last year for a few weeks, and then the block was lifted, with no explanations.

Like Australia, in the UK too, child pornography is filtered by the government, though users there have to opt-in for this filtering. Other countries such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden also see such content being filtered. The Indian IT Act also notes various kinds of illegal content which is not permissible, such as child pornography and hate speech.

Other countries, such as the US, also have aggressive Internet censorship of copyrighted content. Prakash says, “Internet censorship is not restricted to India alone. Every country in the world has been doing this in different ways. The United States, for example, has even seized domains in copyright cases, which were legally hosted in other countries. With regards to political censorship, which some feel is a concern now, I don’t think that the Indian government is doing that. I believe that they are sincerely trying to address a serious issue, but people are going overboard.”

He adds, “The biggest concern is that there is no transparency about what is being blocked, or why, and this leaves things open for active misuse in the future.”

In Google’s 2011 Transparency Report, released in June this year, India did not feature very favourably. According to Google, the number of content removal requests the company received increased by 49% from 2010. There were five court orders from India ordering the Internet giant to remove content and there were 96 other requests by Indian government agencies for 246 individual items.

In comparison, the US made only 77 requests in the same period. They also revealed that 70% of the content removal requests from India were related to defamation. National security and religious offence attracted far fewer removal requests. Google received only one request from Indian agencies from July to December 2011 for removal of pornographic content.

Our government might not be politically motivated in this instance—however, the possibility for abuse is high, and what’s more, the measures that are being taken are limited at best. Instead of ordering ISPs to block content directly, the government should be working with the content owners and platforms offering the content to have it taken down properly. Instead, we get crude measures which do nothing to deter malicious users, and only serve to inconvenience the general users.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-com-aug-24-2012-gopal-sathe-how-isps-block-websites-and-why-it-doesnt-help