Centre for Internet and Society

Facebook's Delicate Dance With Delhi On Censorship

praskrishna — 2012-09-03T04:39:45Z

At the end of last week, a hashtag briskly rose across India: #Emergency2012. It was a reference to the 21-month stint, beginning in the summer of 1975, when then PM Indira Gandhi determined democracy an inconvenience.

Contributed by Mark Bergen, the post was published in Forbes on August 29, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

This time around, the government launched a jumbled attempt, following ethnic violence in the northeast, to stem rumors behind a panicked exodus. They blocked over 300 sites and axed at least 16 Twitter accounts, including those of political opponents and journalists. Many of us found our cell phone texts suddenly, with no announcement, cut off after five missives.

It was hardly the Emergency of 1975. The government’s actions were far less draconian than three decades ago. But, back then, there were no foreign internet companies to complicate matters—and, it seems, absolve the government.

In response to the recent charges, Delhi claimed that there was “no censorship at all.” As the communications minister, Kapil Sibal, put it, “Facebook and Google are cooperating with us.”

Under the circumstances, shutting down the incendiary hate speech online was warranted, explained Sunil Abraham, the director of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore. The process was just incredibly inept. “There were so many things they did wrong,” he told me when I asked about the government’s response. And the reaction can be tacked onto a very recent history of Delhi issuing sweeping, usually empty, threats of censoring U.S. internet companies.

“Perhaps the Indian government has wasted, frittered a way goodwill,” Abraham continued. “It has cried ‘wolf’ so many times that this time the internet intermediaries are not taking them as seriously as they should.”

His group analyzed the sites shut down last week, pointing out the “numerous mistakes and inconsistencies that make blocking pointless and ineffectual.” It’s clear that the censorship was also opportunistic—used to stamp out political parody Twitter accounts—and counterproductive. Among the sites blocked was a Pakistani blog debunking the rumors behind the whole exodus episode.

Abraham criticized the government for coming to the intermediaries with broad demands first, rather than directly to Twitter, Facebook and Google. That approach, coupled with earlier censorship demands, may strain the trust between the ruling coalition and the web giants.

Still, Facebook has every reason to keep Delhi happy. This year, the number of users in India hit 32 million—a 85 percent jump from the last. The total is expected to nearly double next year, leap-frogging Indonesia for the title of second largest market. An overwhelming chunk of that growth will come from mobile users. As this solid report from Forbes India shows, the company is still struggling here, as it is in the U.S., to turn those new users into ad revenue:

Indian businesses spent Rs 2,850 crore on digital advertising as of March 2012, a number that’s expected to grow to Rs 4,391 crore next year, according to a report by the Internet Mobile Association of India/Indian Market Research Bureau (IAMAI/IMRB).

…But Facebook has not been able to capture much of this share. Mahesh Murthy reckons that businesses spent about Rs 150 crore on Facebook marketing, but only a third went to Facebook’s own kitties in the form of ad revenues. The rest went to social media marketing firms which handle Facebook accounts.

That’s not to say that the company will discontinue its aggressive efforts. It likely will not be deterred by policies that attack free speech—Zuckerberg’s empire has long been accused of complacency with censorship. It’s India’sinfamously unpredictable tax policies toward foreign entities that would conceivably slow the company’s expansion.

There’s little reason to suspect, then, that Facebook, Google and the western web behemoths will not continue to cooperate with Delhi moving forward. And much of that cooperation should come not as blatant censorship but covert surveillance. According to the Google Transparency Report, India has made over 2,000 data requests and 100 removal requests, third only to the States and Brazil. As the mobile revolution soars, that number will surely rise.

On Monday evening, Christopher Soghoian, a D.C.-based privacy analyst, spoke at the CIS before a crowd of young Indian law students and activists. Despite the shoddy security default of internet firms, he said, they can impose limits on government surveillance. “When these companies receive requests from where they don’t have an office,” he claimed, “they refuse.” Two years ago, Facebook India opened its first office in Hyderabad.

Soghoian advised his audience to push for privacy and transparency standards in India. He shared the story of the long-fought battle for encryption protection with Facebook in the U.S. Yet, he admitted that security provisions can falter when a government is bent on policing the internet—and a company is bent on cooperation. “If you can force companies to hand over the keys,” he said, “then encryption is useless.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-forbes-com-mark-bergen-aug-29-2012-facebooks-delicate-dance-with-delhi-on-censorship

India Blocks Facebook, Twitter, Mass Texts in Response to Unrest

praskrishna — 2012-09-03T02:46:42Z

The Indian government has gone on the offensive against Internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, demanding hundreds of pages be removed or blocked after political unrest erupted in various parts of the country.

This post by Simon Roughneen was posted in Media Shift on August 28, 2012. Nishant Shah is quoted.

On August 15, India's independence day, Indian northeasterners began fleeing Bangalore, the country's southern IT hub and 5th largest city, after text messages said to threaten Assamese people and other northeasterners were sent around.

Authorities restricted text messages so they could be sent to only five recipients to stop bulk sending, which was followed by a government backlash against social media and news sites; more than 300 pages have been blocked in recent days.

Exodus

The scene during the exodus was reminiscent of an old newsreel from World War II Europe, or, more aptly, from the separation of India and Pakistan in the late 1940s when around 25 million people took flight amid chaos and bloodshed as the contours of the new states were drawn up after British withdrawal.

On the platform at a Bangalore train station were hundreds of people from Assam state and other areas of India's northeast, a remote part of the country almost 2,000 miles away. The region is mostly surrounded by Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Burma and is linked to the rest of India only by a narrow strip of land nicknamed the chicken-neck.

In July, fighting in the northeast's Assam state between local ethnic groups and Muslims -- which some Indians say are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh -- killed 80 people and forced 400,000 more from their homes, most of them Muslims. On August 11, a march in Mumbai , India's financial capital, ended up in a riot, with two killed and dozens injured, when Muslims there protested attacks on Muslims in the northeast and on Muslim Rohingya in Burma.

The SMS scare in Bangalore came next, but who sent what and why has never been clearly established, though three men were subsequently arrested in Bangalore on suspicion of mass-forwarding threatening text messages.

Nonetheless, the scare, real or hyped, was enough to prompt panic among the 300,000 or so northeasterners who study and work in Bangalore. Interviewees at the city's rail station, waiting for a train to Guwahati in Assam state, a two-and-a-half-day journey, said they hadn't received or even seen any messages, but the rumor mill went into overdrive and their parents in the northeast urged them to come home, temporarily at least.

A lack of confidence in police, perceived racism against northeasterners -- some of whom appear east or southeast Asian and are sometimes called "chinki" by other Indians -- as well as political discord ahead of elections next year all contributed to the exodus.

Government Reacts

The Indian government urged the northeasterners to stay put, as the exodus spread to Pune, Chennai and other large cities in the south and west where northeasterners work. Text messages were limited to five recipients to stop bulk messages spreading fear, a bar later raised to 20 recipients. India has around 750 million cell phone subscribers, the world's second biggest market after China, and the government's nationwide restriction seemed an over-reaction given that the exodus was confined to a few cities.

In a country of 1.2 billion people -- the world's fourth biggest economy measured in purchasing power parity terms -- the government is worried about a recent economic slowdown. Growth is at its lowest since 2003, and foreign investors are complaining out loud about hazy rules and red tape. India feels it needs to nip any political unrest in the bud with foreign investment dropping by 78 percent year-on-year, according to June figures.

Apparently with public order in mind, the Indian government began blocking websites and pages said to contain inflammatory content, even as the exodus slowed.

Nishant Shah of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society said that the government is trying to figure out how best to react to the transition from an era when news and information was carried via broadcast and print.

"In the older forms of governance, which were imagined through a broadcast model, the government was at the center of the information wheel, managing and mediating what information reached different parts of the country. In the [peer-to-peer] world, where the government no longer has that control, it is now trying different ways by which it can reinforce its authority and centrality to the information ecosystem. Which means that there is going to be a series of failures and models that don't work," Shah told PBS MediaShift in an email.

Overdoing It?

However, for a country that has long styled itself as the world's biggest democracy, and is home to some of the world's biggest selling English language newspapers, the last few days have seen the government take a forceful line against Internet giants such as Google and Facebook that some feel threatens freedom of speech.

The text messages were said to be from some of India's 170 million or so Muslim population, the world's third largest after Indonesia and Pakistan -- and the Indian government at first sought to blame Pakistan for fomenting the exodus by whipping up anger among India's Muslims.

Following the text restrictions, Indian authorities blocked what they describe as "incendiary" and "hate-mongering" content on websites in Pakistan and Bangladesh that they say spurred the northeast fighting -- including images of the 2010 Tibet earthquake passed off as images of Burmese Buddhists after attacking Burmese Muslims -- and asked Google and Facebook to remove the content.

However, news reports on the exodus, as well as other coverage of Muslim-Buddhist clashes in Burma, were blocked. Among those affected were Doha-based news agency Al-Jazeera and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). And stories on sectarian fighting in Arakan in western Burma -- where Buddhist Arakanese have clashed with Muslim Rohingya, with the flare-up catching the attention of Islamist groups elsewhere, including India -- were blocked in India.

ABC said on Friday content that "in relation to the particular blocked ABC, we are surprised by the action and we stand by the reporting."

An April 2011 law says that the government must give 48 hours before blocking pages, as well as an explanation for the block in each individual case, though this can be sidestepped in an emergency. "Every company, whether it's an entertainment company, or a construction company, or a social media company, has to operate within the laws of the given country," said Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the Ministry of Communications, speaking about the recent restrictions.

There's more to the back-story than just the 2011 IT law, however. Prior to the recent exodus from Bangalore and the government reaction, Google and Facebook were facing charges for allegedly hosting offensive material.

A Google spokesman, speaking by telephone from Singapore about the Indian government's recent blocks, said that the company abides by the law of the land, in India and elsewhere. "We also comply with valid legal requests from authorities wherever possible, consistent with our longstanding policy," he said.

All told, 80 million to 100 million Indians are online, and India has the world's third biggest number of Facebook users, at 53 million. But, that just makes up just 4.5 percent of the country's population.

Some commentators see the government as oversensitive. For example, using the pushback to put a block on an account parodying the country's prime minister.

Twitter has 16 million accounts in the country. By Friday, a stand-off between New Delhi and Twitter saw around 20 Twitter handles blocked by Indian ISPs, on the orders of the government, with threats that the government could block Twitter completely.

The hashtag #GOIblocks gets about 10-12 tweets per minute -- going by a quick scroll-through -- from users protesting the government's measures. However, caught up in the dragnet so far are accounts with little apparently to do with the Bangalore exodus. The Indian opposition said the blacklist is partisan, while other commentators see the government as oversensitive, using the pushback to put a block on an account (@PM0India) parodying the country's prime minister, for example.

Adding to the irony, though it is not clear whether this was by accident or design -- the Twitter account of Milind Deora, the country's minister of state for communications and IT, and a vocal proponent of the recent blocks, was taken down by Twitter for 12 hours before being restored -- along with an apology by Twitter on Saturday.

This story has been altered to correct the date of India's independence day.

Simon Roughneen is an Irish journalist usually based in southeast Asia. He writes for the The Irrawaddy, Christian Science Monitor and others. He is on twitter @simonroughneen and you can Circle him on Google+.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-pbs-org-aug-28-2012-simon-roughneen-india-blocks-facebook-twitter-mass-texts-in-response-to-unrest

Tata Photon unblocks Wordpress.com

praskrishna — 2012-09-03T01:53:47Z

As of yesterday, the Tata Photon service of the Internet service provider (ISP) Tata Teleservices seems to have lifted the block it had put on the Wordpress.com domain for over a week.

The post was published in tech2 on August 30, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in it.

Tech2 had reported on Saturday that the free platform of Wordpress was put under a blanket ban across India by the ISP following government orders to block around 309 URLs carrying disruptive or inflammatory content. Directives issued by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to ISPs between August 18 and 21 state that only the URLs mentioned be blocked, not entire domains. Users could neither view Wordpress blogs nor edit or post new content on them, the first instance of which was noticed by us on August 20.

Our repeated efforts to contact Tata Teleservices' officials drew a blank. Numerous users who contacted customer service did not receive any replies or resolution. Through the course of the blockade, the ISP did not even display any message to Wordpress visitors that the domain was blocked, nor did it notify the owners of Wordpress blogs about it. Puzzled users tried resetting their Internet connections, clearing DNS caches, and calling the customer service helpline only to realise that they were experiencing an ISP-level block.

The reactions of Wordpress users ranged from annoyance to distress. Human rights activist and lawyer Kamayani Bali Mahabal commented on Tech2, "Yes, my wordpress blog is blocked and I have 4 blogs...have also written to TATA. I can access through [an] anonymous browser but I cannot log in, edit and do admin functions, I can do about 50 percent work on my blog. Dashboard not accessible[,] barely manage to post, will be suing TATA soon". In a blog post, she has described her experience of the block.

Blogger Shantanu Adhicary who goes by the nom de blog Tantanoo says, "My blogs are self-hosted [on Wordpress] so I was not affected. But it was annoying that I was unable to access, read or comment on other Wordpress blogs, especially in the absence of any message whatsoever that this site has been blocked".

The move by Tata Teleservices is being seen as ham handed; around 25 million Wordpress blogs were made inaccessible to deal with a few rotten eggs. Blogger and social media consultant Prateek Shah opines, "Blanket bans on domains because content on some of their pages is objectionable are akin to jailing a certain section of society just because some people from the community broke the law. Wordpress plays an extremely important role on the Internet and if such a site were to go down even for a few hours, it would mean mayhem for bloggers as well as readers who count on the platform to get the latest updates and information. ISPs need to mature and grow up to the fact that one can't put millions of people in jeopardy when apparently trying to protect the interests of some".

In June, the Madras High Court had granted relief to netizens in India by urging that there be no more John Doe orders. “The order of interim injunction dated 25/04/2012 is hereby clarified that the interim injunction is granted only in respect of a particular URL where the infringing movie is kept and not in respect of the entire website. Further, the applicant is directed to inform about the particulars of URL where the interim movie is kept within 48 hours.”

Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), agrees the move was wrong but shares insights about the position of the ISPs. He says, "It was obviously wrong. It contravenes the government's orders to not block the base URL but individual pages. Action should be taken against them for causing inconvenience to users. This is not the first time an ISP has gone overboard in implementing censorship, be it copyright issues, piracy or inflammatory content. In 2006, the government had chastised ISPs for over-censoring content and blocking unintended websites and pages. Having said that, ISPs have numerous grouses against the government. They do not possess the technical capabilities to implement the government's orders, at times, whether about surveillance or censorship".

ISPs that are also telecom services providers, find themselves unable to decipher government notifications about shutting off content on the Internet or introducing curbs on mobile communication. Prakash's analysis of the 300-odd URLs blocked by the Indian government reveals glaring mistakes in the government directives "that made blocking pointless and effectual". When asked to opine about what ISPs and telcos should do when the orders from the government were not crystal clear, Prakash said, "They should ask for clarifications from the government. The operators sought clarifications from the Ministry of Telecommunications about the recent orders to ban bulk text messages and MMSes. The ministry was unable to resolve them, and in turn, sought further clarifications from the Home Ministry. The government should coordinate better".

Tata Teleservices was not the only ISP guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sify too reportedly imposed a blanket block on the Wordpress domain. Airtel went overboard by temporarily blocking Youtu.be URLs last week citing orders by the court or the DoT.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/tech-2-in-com-aug-30-2012-tata-photon-unblocks-wordpress

Watch out for fettered speech

praskrishna — 2012-09-02T09:30:50Z

The constant attempts at censorship in the name of national security should give all right-thinking Indians pause.

This article by Rohit Pradhan was published in the Business Standard on September 1, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

It was always predictable. That the Indian government’s war against social media “hate mongers” would turn farcical and begin targeting all and sundry: from random parodies of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s Twitter account to prominent journalists like Kanchan Gupta and Shiv Aroor. And then Communication Minister Milind Deora discovered that his own Twitter account had been blocked.

The government blames social media for hosting objectionable content and rumour-mongering that allegedly contributed to the exodus of people of northeastern origin from cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad. Despite its best attempts, the government argues, it was unable to control the mass hysteria and was left with little alternative but to block 300 websites as well as ask Twitter and Facebook to delete “objectionable” content.

It is hardly the first time that social media has been blamed for facilitating riots. The role of BlackBerry’s instant messenger during the London riots of 2011 was constantly highlighted and there was even talk of banning the popular service before saner heads prevailed. Clearly, while rumours and doctored images have always been part of riots, the instantaneous nature of social media and the relative anonymity it affords offer additional challenges.

Nevertheless, the government’s constant attempts at censorship in the name of social harmony and national security should give all right-thinking Indians pause. Four simple reasons.

First, it is astounding how quickly the attention has shifted away from the governance failures that were largely responsible for the Assam riots and the mass departure of people of northeastern origin from India’s major metropolitan centres. The local government’s laggardly response to the initial bursts of violence allowed the riots to rage for days while the government dithered over calling the army. Social media had little, if any, role to play. And while panic is admittedly difficult to control, it is the poor record of the Indian state in responding to politically motivated violence that contributed to the panic-stricken reaction of people of northeastern origin. What should worry the Indian state are not the ravings of some anonymous Twitter account but the utter lack of faith in its ability to secure the safety of some of its most vulnerable citizens.

Second, while all governments wish to control the flow of information, the track record of the Indian state in the matter of free speech has been spectacularly poor. At the slightest allegation of “hurting religious sentiments”, books are banned, movies censored, and violence is threatened. Lacking an explicit First Amendment protection, Indian citizens are virtually powerless when the government wishes to quell free speech. The draconian Information Technology Act, 2008, orders internet providers to immediately remove content that may be “grossly harmful”, “blasphemous”, “obscene”, or even disparaging with little oversight and virtually no due process of law. As the Centre for Internet and Society’s Pranesh Prakash has demonstrated, internet providers are ready to remove “objectionable” content even in the case of frivolous complaints originating from ordinary citizens. What is particularly disconcerting is that the disregard for free speech extends even to some of India’s most prominent media personalities who can often be heard exhorting the government to regulate the internet or scrub off “hate mongers”. Given this history and the government’s demonstrated contempt for free speech, its attempts at censorship should be strongly scrutinised and vigorously resisted except in the most extenuating of circumstances.

Third, the Luddites in the Indian government may not yet comprehend it, but the internet is virtually impossible to police. The government may be able to threaten giant companies like Facebook and Twitter into cooperating, but that simply means the “objectionable” content would move to darker corners of the Net. Indeed, it is surprising that the government has not considered using technology to counter malicious rumours or to reach a mass audience with a message of reassurance. Technology can be a powerful tool for doing good and it is high time the government properly harnessed its potential. As a first step, the government has to recognise that the days when it had a monopoly on information are long gone and it has to compete for people’s attention.

Finally, even the most ardent supporter of free speech should have no qualms about admitting that it can offer a platform to the bigoted or can indirectly lead to social unrest. That may be especially true for a country like India where passions run high and an ambivalent attitude towards political violence prevails. That, however, is simply the price of liberty. Yes, a society that lacks free speech may be more stable, but it would lack the spirit of rambunctious discussion, criticism and argument — the hallmarks of a liberal democracy.

India can adopt a China-lite model, which emphasises social stability over freedom. Or India can go down the path of other liberal democracies and understand that freedom – of speech, thought and behaviour – is an ideal worth cherishing and protecting. As a constitutional republic with genuine claims of being a liberal democracy, it is clear which path India should embrace.

The writer is a fellow at the Takshashila Institution. These views are personal.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-business-standard-rohit-pradhan-sep-1-2012-watch-out-for-fettered-speech

India's Internet Jam

pranesh — 2014-03-20T12:41:58Z

As authorities continue to clamp down on digital freedom, politicians and corporations are getting a taste for censorship too. Pranesh Prakash reports.

The article was published in Index on Censorship in August 2012. This is an unedited version of the article.

In a matter of three days, in August 2012, India’s central government ordered internet service providers to block around 309 pieces of online content – mostly individual web pages, YouTube videos and Facebook groups. The blocking orders came days after people originally from north-eastern India living in Bangalore began fleeing the city in fear of attack. Rumours that some Muslims in the city were planning violence in retaliation for recent clashes between the indigenous Bodo tribe and Muslim settlers in Assam spread quickly via text messages and through the media. The Nepali migrant community in Bangalore also received text messages from their families, warning them that they might be mistaken for north-eastern Indians and also be targeted. Indian Railway, catering to the huge demand, organised special trains to Assam for the crowds of people.

Freedom of speech is enshrined in the Constitution of India, which came into force in 1952, and specifically in Article 19(1)(a), which guarantees that ‘all citizens shall have the right to freedom of speech and expression’. While in the United States, it wasn’t until the 1920s that the Supreme Court struck down a law or governmental action on freedom of speech grounds, in India, just one year after the constitution was adopted, government actions against both left- and right-wing political speech were struck down for violating Article 19(1)(a). Enraged, the Congress government then amended Article 19, expanding the list of restrictions to the right to free expression. These included speech pertaining to ‘friendly relations with foreign states’, ‘public order’ and ‘incitement to an offence’. In 1963, in response to the 1962 war with China, the ‘sovereignty and integrity of India’ was also added, taking the number of categories of permissible restrictions up to eight. While the constitution categorically stipulates that no further restrictions should be imposed, courts have on occasion added to the list (privacy, for instance) through judicial interpretation without explicitly stating that they are doing so. Comparisons are often drawn between the constitution’s ‘reasonable restrictions’ and the categorical prohibition enshrined in the US Constitution’s First Amendment: ‘Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press’ – a meaningless comparison as there are indeed many categories of speech that are seen as being protected under the US constitution and even speech that is protected may be restrained in a number of ways.

Today, there are a number of laws that regulate freedom of speech in India, from the Indian Penal Code (IPC), the Victorian legislation meant to codify crimes, to the Information Technology Act, which was amended in 2008 and in some cases makes behaviour that is perfectly legal offline into a criminal activity when online.

Sedition and social harmony

The Indian Penal Code criminalises sedition; speech intended to cause enmity between communities; speech intended to ‘outrage religious feelings of any class’; selling, singing or displaying anything obscene; and defamation. It also prohibits ‘causing someone, by words or gestures, to believe they’re the target of divine displeasure’. Each of these provisions has been misused, as there are indeed many catagories of speech that are not seen as being protected under thw US constitution, and even speech that is protected may be restrained in a number of ways.

In recent years, sedition charges have been brought against human rights activists (Binayak Sen and Arundhati Roy), journalists (Seema Azad), cartoonists (Aseem Trivedi) and protesters (thousands of villagers in Koodankulam and neighbouring villages who demonstrated against a nuclear reactor in their area). It is usually the higher judiciary that dismisses such cases, while the lower judiciary seems to be supplicant to the bizarre claims of government, the police and complainants. Similarly, the higher judiciary has had to intervene in cases where books and films have been banned for ‘causing enmity between communities’ or for intentionally hurting the sentiments of a religious group.

Of the last six books banned by the Maharashtra government, all but one (RV Bhasin’s Islam: A Concept of Political World Invasion by Muslims) have been overturned by the Mumbai High Court. In one case, the court criticised the government for using a violent protest (organised by the Sambhaji Brigade, one of many right-wing political groups that frequently stage demonstrations) as reason enough for banning an academic book on the Maratha king Shivaji. In its decision, the judge pointed out that it is the government’s job to provide protection against such violence. Given India’s history of communal violence there is indeed a need for the law to address incitement to violence – but these laws should be employed at the actual time of incitement, not after the violence has already taken place. But, as recent events have shown, the government is willing to censor ‘harmful’ books and films and less likely to take action against individuals who incite violence during demonstrations.

Online speech and the law

There are regular calls for the government to introduce legislation that deals specifically with online behaviour, despite the fact that the vast majority of the laws regarding sedition and social harmony apply online as well as offline. One example is the recent move to introduce amendments to the Indecent Representation of Women Act (1986) so that it applies to ‘audiovisual media and material in electronic form’.

But the government’s attempts to control online speech began long before the introduction of any internet-specific legislation. Indeed, when state-monopoly internet service provider VSNL censored content, it did so under the terms of a contract it had entered with its customers, not under any law. In 1998, a mailing list called Middle East Socialist Network was blocked on national security grounds. In 1999, Pakistani newspaper Dawn’s website was blocked during the Kargil conflict. In both of the latter cases, the government relied on the Indian Telegraph Act (1885) to justify its actions, though that act contains no explicit provisions for such censorship.

In 2000, the Information Technology (IT) Act was passed and the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) was created, which (unlawfully) assumed the role of official online censor. Importantly, while the IT Act did
make the publication of obscene content online illegal (though it already was under the IPC), it did not grant permission for authorities to block websites. Despite this, an executive order passed on 27 February 2003 granted CERT-In the power to block. Had this been challenged in a court, it may well have been deemed unconstitutional since, in the absence of a statutory law, an executive order cannot reverse the freedom granted under Article 19. And although the telecommunications sector in India was being liberalised around this time, as part of their licence agreements, all internet service providers (ISPs) have to agree to block links upon being requested to do so by the government. In 2008, when the IT Act was amended, it clearly stated that the government can block websites not only when it deems it necessary to do so but also when it is deemed expedient in relation to matters of public interest, national security and with regard to maintaining friendly relations with foreign states. The power to block does not, however, extend to obscenity or defamation offences. At the same time, further categories of speech crimes were introduced, along with other new offences, including the electronic delivery of ‘offensive messages through communication services’ or anything ‘for the purpose of causing annoyance or inconvenience’. This has often been abused, including by the chief minister of West Bengal, who issued proceedings against a professor for forwarding an email containing a cartoon that mocked him. Under this draconian and unconstitutional provision, the police do not need an arrest warrant and the punishment can be as much as three years’ imprisonment, longer than even the punishment for causing death by negligence. The amendment also granted the government extensive powers to monitor and intercept online speech and data traffic, greatly extending the powers provided under colonial laws such as the Indian Telegraph Act (1885). As legislation has been introduced, the penalties for online offences have increased significantly. For example, the penalty for the first-time publication of an obscene ebook is up to five years in prison and a 1,000,000 rupee (US$18,800) fine, compared with two years’ imprisonment and a 2,000 rupee (US$38) fine as stipulated in the IPC for publishing that same material in print version. New laws introduced in 2009 pertain specifically to blocking (section 69a), interception, decryption and monitoring (69 and 69b) and are in accordance with the constitution. However, the amendments were brought in without any attempt at transparency or accountability.

Power in the hands of intermediaries

In April 2011, despite critical submissions received during its public consultation, the government announced new ‘intermediary guidelines’ and ‘cyber cafe rules’, both of which have adverse effects on freedom of expression. The rules, which were issued by the Department of Information and Technology (DIT), grant not only the government but citizens significant powers to censor the internet. They require all intermediaries – companies that handle content, including web hosts, telecom companies, domain name providers and other such intermediaries – to remove ‘disparaging’ content that could ‘harm minors in any way’. They prohibit everything from jokes (if the person sharing the joke does not own copyright to it) to anything that is disparaging. In a recent case, in December 2011, thousands of people used the hashtag #=IdiotKapilSibal on Twitter to criticise the minister of communications and information technology, Kapil Sibal, who had requested that officials from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Facebook in India pre-screen online content. These guidelines and rules are badly drafted and unconstitutional, as they go beyond the limits allowed under Article 19 in the constitution. And do so in a manner that lacks any semblance of due process and
fairness. They are inconsistent with offline laws, too: for example, because the guidelines also refer to gambling, the government of Sikkim can publish advertisements for its PlayWin lottery in newspapers but not online. It’s far easier to persuade officials to remove online material than it is to persuade them to remove books from a bookstore or artwork from a gallery. Police are only empowered to seize books if the government or a court has been persuaded that it violates a law and issues such an order. This fact is always recorded, in government or legal records, police files or in the press. By contrast, web content can be removed on the basis of one email complaint; intermediaries are required to ‘disable’ the relevant content within 36 hours of the complaint. A court order is not required, nor is there a requirement to notify the owner of the content that a complaint has been received or that material has been removed. The effect is that of almost invisible censorship.

This assertion – that it only takes one complaint – may seem far-fetched. But a researcher from the Centre for Internet and Society sent complaints to several intermediaries on a number of occasions, resulting in content being removed in a majority of cases. If intermediaries choose not to take action, they risk losing their immunity against punishment for content. In essence, the law is the equivalent of punishing a post office for the letters that people send via the postal service.

The amendments were brought in without any attempt at transparency or accountability

In 1984, Indira Gandhi was forced to sue Salman Rushdie for defamation in a London court in order to ensure one sentence was expurgated from his novel Midnight’s Children. Today Gandhi wouldn’t need to win a lawsuit against publishers. She would merely have to send a complaint to websites selling the book and it would have to be removed from sale. It is easier to block Akbari.in – the online newspaper run by Vinay Rai, who filed a criminal complaint against multiple internet companies in December 2011 for all manner of materials – than it is to prevent its print publication. There is no penalty for frivolous complaints, such as those sent by researchers from the Centre for Internet and Society, nor is there any requirement for records to be kept of who has removed what. Such great powers of censorship without any penalties for abuse of these powers are a sure-fire way of moving towards greater intolerance, with the internet – that republic of opinions and expressions – being a casualty.

Censorship outside the law

Since 2011, governments and private companies alike have increasingly engaged in internet censorship. In April 2011, in response to a right to information request, the DIT released a list of 11 websites that had been officially blocked under the IT Act since 2009, when the amended act came into force. But, according to a recent Google Transparency Report, government requests for the removal of material far exceeds that number. The report reveals that the government (including state governments) requested that Google remove 358 items from January 2011 to June 2011. Of this number, only eight were considered to be hate speech and only one item was related to concerns over national security. The remaining material, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests), was taken down because of ‘government criticism’. Criticism of the government is protected under the country’s constitution but, nonetheless, Google complied with take-down requests 51 per cent of the time. It’s clear, then, that governmental censorship is far more widespread than officially acknowledged.

In July 2011, Reliance Entertainment obtained a ‘John Doe’ order to protect its intellectual property rights with regard to its film Singham, which was scheduled for release that month. The order prohibited both online and offline infringement of copyright for the film and was sent to a number of ISPs, which then blocked access to file-sharing websites, even though there was no proof of the film having been available on any of them. According to Reliance Entertainment, they merely asked ISPs ‘not to make the film available’ on their networks, even though the order did not authorise it. But a right to information request pertaining to a similar case dealing with the distribution of the film Dhammu showed that the entertainment company’s lawyers had in fact asked for dozens of websites – not just deep-link URLs to infringing content – to be blocked, despite publicly claiming otherwise. If web users encountered any information at all about why access to the sites was blocked, it was that the Department of Telecom had ordered the blocking, which was plainly untrue. In February 2012, following a complaint from the Indian Music Industry (a consortium of 142 music companies), the Calcutta High Court ordered 387 ISPs to block 107 websites for music piracy. At least a few of those, including Paktimes.com and Filmicafe.com, were general interest entertainment sites. The most famous of these sites, Songs.pk, re-emerged shortly after the block as Songspk.pk, highlighting the pointlessness of the block. And outside the realm of copyright, in December 2011, the domain name CartoonsAgainstCorruption.com was suspended based on an unlawful complaint from the Mumbai police requesting its suspension, despite there being no powers for them to do so under any law.

Between August and November 2011, the DIT also went to great efforts to compel big internet companies including Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, to ‘self-regulate’. This revealed the department’s desire to gain ever greater powers to control ‘objectionable’ content online, effectively bypassing the IT Act. It’s obvious, too, that by encouraging internet companies to ‘self-regulate’ the government will avoid embarrassing statistics such as those revealed by Google’s Transparency Report.

New dangers

A way forward, at least for internet-specific laws, could be to rekindle the Cyber Regulations Advisory Committee – a multi-stakeholder committee required by the IT Act – and to practise at home what we preach abroad on matters of internet governance: the value of a multi-stakeholder system, which includes industry, academia and civil society and not just governments. The idea of a multi-stakeholder framework has gained prominence since it was placed at the core of the ‘Declaration of Principles’ at the first World Summit on Information Society in Geneva in 2003. It has also been at the heart of India’s pronouncements at the Internet Governance Forum and the India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum. The Internet Governance Division, which formulates the country’s international stance on internet governance, has long recognised that these decisions must be taken in an open and collaborative manner. It is time the DIT’s Cyber-Law and ESecurity Group, which formulates the country’s national stance on the internet, realises the same.

Freedom of speech means nothing in a democratic society if it does not allow everyone to speak. Despite the internet being a very elite space, the number of people who have used it to express themselves since its introduction in India in 1994 is vast, especially when compared to the number of people in India who have expressed themselves in print since 1947 when the country won its independence. Online speech is indeed a big shift from edited and usually civil discussions in the world of print media. Perhaps this gives us some indication of why there is some support among the mass media for government regulations on speech. Too many discussions of online speech laws in India descend into arguments about the lack of civility online. However, the press – and all of us – would do well to remember that civility and decency in speech, while desirable in many contexts, cannot be the subject of legislation. But in India, the greatest threat to freedom of expression is not a government clampdown on dissent but threats from political and corporate powers with a range of tools at their disposal, including fostering a climate of selfcensorship. The government has passed bad laws that have given way to private censorship. And many of these laws are simply a result of gross ineptitude.

We cannot take sufficient comfort in the fact that, in India, censorship is limited and nowhere on the scale that it is in China or Iran. It is crucial that, from a legal, cultural and technological standpoint we do not open the door for further censorship. And currently, we are failing.

Pranesh Prakash is Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. Part of this article appeared in a blog by the author on the centre’s website, cis-india.org, in January 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/index-on-censorship-august-2012-pranesh-prakash-indias-internet-jam

Indian government defends Internet blocking

praskrishna — 2012-08-28T10:07:50Z

India on Friday defended itself against accusations of heavy-handed online censorship, saying it had been successful in blocking content blamed for fuelling ethnic tensions.

Published by AFP on August 23, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The government over the past week has ordered Internet service providers to block 309 webpages, images and links on sites including Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, news channel ABC of Australia and Qatar-based Al-Jazeera.

The orders were an effort to halt the spread of "hateful" material and rumours that Muslims planned to attack students and workers who have migrated from the northeast region to live in Bangalore and other southern cities.

"We have met with success. These pages were a threat to India's national security and we demanded their immediate deletion," Kuldeep Singh Dhatwalia, a spokesman for India's home ministry, told AFP.

"Spreading rumours to encourage violence or cause tension will not be tolerated. The idea is not to restrict communication."

The government has blamed Internet activity for fanning fears that resulted in tens of thousands of migrants fleeing back to the northeast last week from Bangalore and elsewhere.

But Twitter users, legal experts and analysts criticised the government's approach, which appeared to have resulted in only partial blocking of material, much of which was still accessible.

"The officials who are trusted with this don't know the law or modern technology well enough," Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Centre for Internet and Society research group, told AFP.

"I hope that this fiasco shows the folly of excessive censorship and encourages the government to make better use of social networks and technology to reach out to people."

Among the blocked content were photographs by AFP and other news agencies from Myanmar in the British Daily Telegraph, a parody Twitter account pretending to be from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and dozens of YouTube videos.

ABC issued a statement saying it was "surprised by the action" after content on its website about unrest in Myanmar between Muslims and Buddhists was included on the blocking list.

India's Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde insisted in a statement the government was "only taking strict action against those accounts or people which are causing damage or spreading rumours."

Shinde added that the government sought to block the Myanmar online photos because they were "disturbing the atmosphere here in India."

The government said photographs of clashes in Myanmar were circulating on the Internet with fake captions claiming the scenes were from the northeastern Indian state of Assam, where 80 people have died in recent ethnic violence.

Vivek Sood, senior Supreme Court lawyer and an author on Internet legalisation, called the government's step "a gross abuse of power."

"It's completely illegal under the Indian IT Act," he told The Economic Times.

Indian journalist Kanchan Gupta, who is often critical of the government, had his Twitter account targeted by a government blocking order in a move he called a "political vendetta".

Al Jazeera webpages on the blocking list, including a report on the exodus from Bangalore, appeared unaffected by the government orders, the channel's Delhi bureau chief Anmol Saxena told AFP.

Ministers earlier complained they had not received cooperation from websites and social network groups.

The government on Thursday said Twitter had agreed to remove six fake accounts parodying Prime Minister Singh.

The prime minister's office issued a statement on Friday quoting Twitter that they have "removed the reported profiles from circulation due to violation of our Terms of Service regarding impersonation".

United States State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said as India "seeks to preserve security, we are urging them also to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world".

The above was carried in the following places as well:

The National (August 25, 2012)
MSN News (August 24, 2012)
StarAfrica.com (August 24, 2012)
Jakarta Globe (August 24, 2012)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/afp-com-aug-23-2012-indian-govt-defends-internet-blocking

India faces Twitter backlash over Internet clampdown

praskrishna — 2012-08-28T09:56:11Z

The government faced an angry backlash from Twitter users on Thursday after ordering Internet service providers to block about 20 accounts that officials said had spread scare-mongering material that threatened national security.

Post published in INDOlink, Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The backlash came as New Delhi turned up the heat on Twitter, threatening "appropriate and suitable action" if it failed to remove the accounts as soon as possible. Several newspapers said this could mean a total ban on access to Twitter in India but government officials would not confirm to Reuters that such a drastic step was being considered.

There was no immediate response from Twitter, which does not have an office in India. There are about 16 million Twitter users in the country.

The government has found itself on the defensive this week over what critics see as a clumsy clampdown on social media websites - including Google, YouTube and Facebook - that has raised questions about freedom of information in the world's largest democracy.

"Dear GOI (Government of India), Keep your Hands Off My Internet. Else face protest" tweeted one user, @Old_Monk60.

India blocked access to more than 300 Web pages after threatening mobile phone text messages and doctored website images fuelled rumours that Muslims, a large minority in the predominantly Hindu country, were planning revenge attacks for violence in Assam, where 80 people have been killed and 300,000 have been displaced since July.

Fearing for their lives, tens of thousands of migrants fled Mumbai, Bangalore and other cities last week. The exodus highlighted underlying tensions in a country with a history of ethnic and religious violence.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, the government has targeted Indian journalists, Britain's Daily Telegraph, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera television in its clampdown on Internet postings it says could inflame communal tensions.

The directives to Internet service providers listed dozens of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter pages. A random sampling of the YouTube postings revealed genuine news footage spliced together with fear-mongering propaganda.

INDIAN JOURNALISTS TARGETED

The government says Google and Facebook have largely cooperated while Twitter has been much slower to respond.

"Every company, whether it's an entertainment company, or a construction company, or a social media company, has to operate within the laws of the given country," said Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the Ministry of Communications.

Twitter has been instructed to remove 28 pages containing "objectionable content", an interior ministry official said.

"If they do not remove the pages, the Indian government will take appropriate and suitable action," he added.

The government has ordered Internet service providers to block the Twitter accounts of veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta and television anchor Shiv Aroor. Some appeared to have begun complying with the order on Thursday as Twitter users reported difficulties in accessing their pages.

"It is a political decision, because of my criticism of the government," said Gupta, who was an official in the previous government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The government's actions triggered a storm of criticism from Twitter users, with the hashtags #Emergency2012 and #GOIBlocks among the top trending topics on Twitter in India on Thursday. Some compared the situation with the state of emergency imposed by the government in 1975, when some journalists were jailed.

The Centre for Internet and Society, which analysed the 300 banning orders, found that they contained "numerous mistakes and inconsistencies". Some of the banned websites belonged to people trying to debunk the rumours, for example, it said.

"This isn't about political censorship. This is about the government not knowing how to do online regulation properly," said CIS programme manager Pranesh Prakash.

The parliament last year passed a law that obliges Internet companies to remove a range of objectionable content when requested to do so, a move criticised at the time by rights groups and social media companies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-indolink-com-india-faces-twitter-backlash

Details emerge on government blockade of websites

praskrishna — 2012-08-28T09:51:01Z

Facebook pages, Twitter handles among 300 unique web addresses blocked by ISPs.

Pranesh Prakash's analysis is quoted in this article published in the Hindu on August 24, 2012.

Over the past week, the Ministry of Communications and IT has sent out orders to ISPs (Internet service providers) to block over 300 unique addresses on the Web, cracking down on websites, Facebook pages, YouTube videos and even Twitter handles, ostensibly to prevent incitement to communal tension and rioting.

But a closer look at the specific URLs (web addresses) blocked by the government has given rise to doubts whether the government may have acted high-handedly, in some instances cracking down on parody Twitter handles.

Through four orders, one issued a day from August 18 to 21, the government sent out lists of specific URLs to be blocked by the Internet service providers.

An analysis of the leaked government orders by blogger Pranesh Prakash of the Center for Internet and Society (www.cis-india.org) revealed the extent of the government missive: in specific cases, it had asked for blocking of some portions of a website — like Facebook pages or Twitter handles — and in other instances asked for entire websites.

The government orders carried no specific reasons for the blockades. But in the backdrop of the paranoia surrounding the exodus of northeast people from South Indian cities, it appears that it may have been to disallow the use of the Web for spreading information that incites communal violence and rioting.

Cyber law expert N. Vijayashankar said though the government seemed to have acted within the Rules of IT Act 2008, the onus fell on it to justify the reasons why the specific websites were blocked and dispel doubts that there may have been some political motives at least pertaining to specific sites, especially in the blocking of some parody Twitter accounts spoofing the official Twitter account of the Prime Minister’s office (@PMOIndia).

“No website can be blocked permanently. Any blocked website must be taken up for review by a committee in a span of two months,” Mr. Vijayashankar added. “But sadly the review committee does not have any public representatives. It comprises only the secretaries to government.”

If the websites had indeed been blocked considering the emergency of the situation and keeping in mind national security, then the responsibility for preparing the list falls with the Home Ministry.

“Whatever be the case, this cannot pave the way for clamping down on websites at one swipe,” Mr. Vijayashankar added.

The news about the clampdown set the social networks abuzz through Thursday. Popular humour Twitter account holder Ramesh Srivats tweeted: “Am slightly worried that some government guy will notice that all the offending sites have “http” in them, and then go ban that.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-the-hindu-com-aug-24-2012-details-emerge-on-govt-blockade-of-websites

India Bans Mass SMS to Counter Panic

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T07:29:59Z

Last year social networking was credited with helping to organize revolutions across the Middle East and with getting normally apathetic middle-class Indians onto the streets to protest corruption.

This article by Shreya Shah was published in the Wall Street Journal on August 17, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

But in recent days, India has seen a darker side of social networking, as doctored videos of Muslims being attacked and text messages warning of retaliation by Muslims went viral in the wake of riots in the northeastern state of Assam.

The messages have caused panic among thousands of Indians and spurred attacks and clashes in two cities. In an attempt to calm the situation, India banned the ability to send mass text messages on Friday afternoon, the home ministry press office confirmed. The ban will stay in effect for two weeks.

In remarks to Parliament on Friday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, “The unity and integrity of our country is being threatened by certain elements.”

The riots in Assam saw clashes between Bodo tribals and Muslim immigrants, beginning in late July, which led to dozens of deaths and displaced tens of thousands of people. On Friday, Abdul Khaleque, press secretary to the chief minister of Assam, told India Real Time that the death toll had risen to 78 as sporadic clashes continued. Of the 400,000 people that had fled their homes, approximately 115,000 had returned home.

As India has struggled this month to bring calm to Assam, flare-ups started taking place in the western city of Pune, while in Bangalore, thousands of northeastern workers began fleeing the city.

Mobile phone messages saying that northeasterners had been killed in Bangalore have been circulating since Sunday, said Dilip Kanti, a 24-year-old law student from Mizoram who has lived in the city in the southern state of Karnataka for six years.

“The messages warned that we should leave the city before the day of Eid,” he added. Monday, Aug. 20, is an official holiday for Eid, the festival that marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting.

The Karnataka state government and the police have said that this is a hoax message and that they are investigating the source of these messages.

The messages appear to be intended to panic northeasterners, send large numbers of them back to their home state, and foster fear of Muslims. Those developments could set the stage for sectarian riots, always a concern in a country that has seen such clashes break out frequently.

The home minister has said an inquiry is underway. But so far officials have not shared information about the source of these messages.

Presently, Indian companies that send mass text messages need to register to do so. But there’s no bar on individual users sending mass messages. A limit of 100 messagesper user per day was imposed last year in an attempt to reduce spam and later increased to 200, but this was overturned by the courts in July.

Text messages are the “most potent weapon of rumor,” said Shiv Visvanathan, a professor at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy in Haryana. “They can multiply a few thousand times in a minute.”

India has been aware of the danger of high-tech rumor-mongering. When the verdict on the contested religious site of the Babri Masjid in Uttar Pradesh state was due in 2010, the Indian government temporarily banned the ability to send mass text messages.

But this time, with a new home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, who has only been in the job for a little more than two weeks, India was slower to act. It wasn’t till Friday afternoon – after the messages had been circulating for nearly a week – that India banned mass text messaging.

But by Wednesday, students and workers from the northeast who were living in Bangalore, where these messages circulated, were rushing to the train station to head home. On Thursday alone, two special trains were scheduled to take 6,000 people back to Guwahati, the capital of Assam.

Some of them had already experienced personal run-ins with Muslims upset about the riots in Assam. A 21-year-old student from the state of Nagaland, who didn’t want his name used, said that he is “sick of receiving these messages with rumors.” Apart from the messages, he said that he had been threatened twice in Bangalore by Muslims in the last five days but did not want to return to Nagaland and miss classes. His mother, on the other hand, is fearful for his safety and is forcing him to come back. His roommates have already left. “I will stay till Ramadan and if the situation doesn’t get better I will have no option but to leave,” he said.

The messages have gained potency from the fact that there have been some attacks on northeasterners in parts of India; these attacks too seem to have been intentionally instigated online.

Videos were doctored to show Muslims being tortured purportedly by ethnic Assamese, Pune police inspector Prasad Hasabnis told India Real Time.

“These incited the youth,” he added.

	Four students from the northeastern state of Manipur were attacked in Pune by young Muslim men in three separate incidents in the last week as a result, he said. In Mumbai, meanwhile, two people were killed and 65 injured after a protest over the suffering of Muslims in Assam turned violent. A group called the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena (Bhagat Singh’s Revolution Army) has been spreading some of the rumors, said Laurence Liang, a researcher with the Alternate Law Forum, a Bangalore-based human rights group that also advocates free speech.

Four students from the northeastern state of Manipur were attacked in Pune by young Muslim men in three separate incidents in the last week as a result, he said. In Mumbai, meanwhile, two people were killed and 65 injured after a protest over the suffering of Muslims in Assam turned violent.

A group called the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena (Bhagat Singh’s Revolution Army) has been spreading some of the rumors, said Laurence Liang, a researcher with the Alternate Law Forum, a Bangalore-based human rights group that also advocates free speech.

Mr. Liang said the group put up a post on Facebook that remained up until Wednesday. It said that a fatwa has been issued by the Muslims against people from the northeast and provided telephone numbers that didn’t work, he added. The Alternate Law Forum complained about the post to Facebook and it has since been taken down, he said.

“Technology is a double-edged sword,” says Mr. Liang. A few people use it to “rip up a frenzy of emotion by spreading rumors,” he says. He added that it didn’t help that “people in the United States and the United Kingdom, sitting in the safety of their homes, reply provocatively on social media, unaware of the consequences they unleash.”

Of course, some people are trying to use Twitter and Facebook to counter the rumors.

American Enterprise Institute resident fellow Sadanand Dhume tweeted on Friday that a video purporting to show violence in Assam was actually footage from Indonesia.

“I lived in Indonesia so recognized the policeman’s uniform, batik sarong & writing on baseball cap. Must be many more fake videos out there,” he said. (Mr. Dhume is an opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal in India.)

And in a message on Facebook, Walter Fernandes, head of the North-Eastern Social Research Centre, said northeastern and Muslim associations were meeting in Bangalore to figure out how to quell the rumors, and that people shouldn’t give in to panic. Muslim leaders have promised to speak about the situation and the need to protect people from the northeast in their sermons, Mr. Fernandes wrote.

The Indian government last year attempted to censor social networking site like Facebook, arguing inflammatory content on the site could lead to violence in India. Facebook, Google and several other Internet firms are presently on trial in India for failing to remove offensive material from their sites in response to complaints. This month’s developments could help the government make a stronger case for censoring these sites.

But Pranesh Prakash, of the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society, says that greater regulation will not solve the problem. What he says is needed are proactive statements by the government and rigorous fact-checking by the media, especially regional news channels.

The only way of “countering rumors is by fact,” he said.

– Preetika Rana contributed to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/blogs-wsj-com-aug-17-2012-shreya-shah-india-bans-mass-sms-to-counter-public

Indian mobiles go quiet amid SMS curbs

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T07:15:01Z

India’s 900m-plus mobile telephones have fallen unusually quiet since Saturday, when the government curbed text and multimedia messages for 15 days in an attempt to dispel panic among north-easterners fearing attacks from angry Muslims.

This article written by Victor Mallet in New Delhi and James Crabtree in Mumbai was published in Financial Times on August 21, 2012. Additional reporting by Jyotsna Singh in New Delhi. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The order limiting the number of SMS and MMS messages to five a day from each pre-paid account – which comprise 97 per cent of the market – has disrupted personal communications and threatens to squeeze the revenues of the mobile operating companies.

The government has also urged social media websites including Facebook and Twitter to remove “inflammatory” content it said had helped spread rumours that caused an exodus of migrants from some cities last week. Access to 245 web pages containing doctored videos and images had been blocked, the government claimed, and the relevant sites told to take the pages down.

Indians send more than a billion text messages a day, although it is not clear how many people have been affected by the restrictions or how many of the messages are mass mailings.

Akshat Dwivedi, 20, an undergraduate student at Delhi University, said the restrictions were “a stupid idea”.

“How can the government take away something that has become a basic, fundamental need today?” he said. “The ban has affected mostly students who use pre-paid connections because pre-paid connections are cheaper and more affordable for students like us. The ban has hugely disrupted our life. There are many people who rely on text messages because you can’t always call everybody.”

Civil rights activists wary of censorship accept that the ban may have been necessary to ease ethnic and religious tensions.

“There is the fear that the state will exercise inordinate powers,” said Akila Shivdas, a civil and consumer rights activist. “But regulation and state control are two different things … This is an opportunity to look at regulation seriously.”

India’s mobile industry earned about $20bn in revenue last year, of which 15-18 per cent was from data services, according to the Cellular Operators Association of India, a trade body. This suggests operators are set to suffer a loss of about $133m for the 15-day period, according to COAI figures.

“When we are going through the trauma of increased costs, being challenged on revenues does not help,” said Rajan Matthew, COAI director-general. “The government’s heart is in the right place in trying to address this issue ... But when we are fighting for every nickel and dime, this loss is not a small amount.”

Other analysts cautioned that the likely revenue impact would be much smaller, noting that most customers bought pre-paid SMS packages. “I’m not saying there will be no loss, but it will not be dramatic”, said Rohit Chordia, a telecoms analyst at Kotak, a Mumbai-based brokerage.

Industry sources and analysts also questioned the government’s decision to impose an extended nationwide ban, rather than experimenting with more limited short-term restrictions targeted to particular trouble spots.

“Some kind of limitation on communication was a reasonable step, but restricting everyone to just five per day I don’t think is reasonable at all,” said Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based think tank.

Thousands of north-easterners – physically similar to the Bodo people who have been fighting Muslim migrants over land and political power in Assam – fled from cities such as Bangalore and Hyderabad last week after threats of violence sent by SMS.

Muslims in Mumbai had previously been inflamed by media messages purportedly showing brutality towards their fellow followers of Islam, though the Indian government said some pictures were doctored and had been uploaded from Pakistan.

Events in Bangalore, said Pavan Duggan, a lawyer specialising in IT issues, were “a classic case of mobile cyberterrorism”. He backed the government’s measures despite concerns about censorship. “Obviously there are some rumblings, but these are still small murmurs because everyone is very clear that the national interest will come over [mobile] revenues.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-ft-com-aug-21-2012-victor-mallet-james-crabtree-indian-mobiles-go-quiet-amid-sms-curb

India faces Twitter backlash over Internet clampdown

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T06:56:37Z

The Indian government faced an angry backlash from Twitter users on Thursday after ordering Internet service providers to block about 20 accounts that officials said had spread scare-mongering material that threatened national security.

Written by Devidutta Tripathy and Satarupa Bhattacharjya, this post was published in Reuters on August 24, 2012. (Additional reporting by Ross Colvin, Annie Banerji and David Lalmalsawma and Andrew Quinn in Washington; Writing by Ross Colvin; Editing by John Chalmers, Andrew Osborn, Gary Hill). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The backlash came as New Delhi turned up the heat on Twitter, threatening "appropriate and suitable action" if it failed to remove the accounts as soon as possible. Several Indian newspapers said this could mean a total ban on access to Twitter in India but government officials would not confirm to Reuters that such a drastic step was being considered.

Twitter, which does not have an office in India, declined to comment. There are about 16 million Twitter users in the South Asian country.

"Dear GOI (Government of India), Keep your Hands Off My Internet. Else face protest" tweeted one user, @Old_Monk60.

India blocked access to more than 300 Web pages after threatening mobile phone text messages and doctored website images fuelled rumors that Muslims, a large minority in the predominantly Hindu country, were planning revenge attacks for violence in the northeastern state of Assam, where 80 people have been killed and 300,000 have been displaced since July.

In Washington, the State Department urged New Delhi to balance its security push with respect for basic rights including freedom of speech.

"As the Indian government seeks to preserve security we are urging them also to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

Nuland said Washington stood ready to consult with U.S. companies as they discuss the issue with the Indian government, although it was not now directly involved.

"The unique characteristics of the online environment need to be respected even as they work through whether there are things these companies can do to help calm the environment," she said.

Indian Journalists Targeted

The government says Google and Facebook have largely cooperated while Twitter has been much slower to respond.

Twitter has been instructed to remove 28 pages containing "objectionable content," an interior ministry official said.

"If they do not remove the pages, the Indian government will take appropriate and suitable action," he added.

"It is a political decision, because of my criticism of the government," said Gupta, who was an official in the previous government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Centre for Internet and Society, which analyzed the 300 banning orders, found that they contained "numerous mistakes and inconsistencies." Some of the banned websites belonged to people trying to debunk the rumors, for example, it said.

"This isn't about political censorship. This is about the government not knowing how to do online regulation properly," said CIS program manager Pranesh Prakash.

India's parliament last year passed a law that obliges Internet companies to remove a range of objectionable content when requested to do so, a move criticized at the time by rights groups and social media companies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/in-reuters-com-devidutta-tripathy-satarupa-bhattacharjya-aug-24-2012-india-faces-twitter-backlash

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

Delhi defends Internet blocking

praskrishna — 2012-08-27T04:13:10Z

India on Friday defended itself against accusations of heavy-handed online censorship, saying it had been successful in blocking content blamed for fuelling ethnic tensions.

Published in Gulf Today on August 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The orders were an effort to halt the spread of “hateful” material and rumours that Muslims planned to attack students and workers who have migrated from the northeast region to live in Bangalore and other southern cities.

“We have met with success. These pages were a threat to India’s national security and we demanded their immediate deletion,” Kuldeep Singh Dhatwalia, a spokesman for India’s home ministry said.

“Spreading rumours to encourage violence or cause tension will not be tolerated. The idea is not to restrict communication.” But Twitter users, legal experts and analysts criticised the government’s approach, which appeared to have resulted in only partial blocking of material, much of which was still accessible.

“The officials who are trusted with this don’t know the law or modern technology well enough,” Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Centre for Internet and Society research group, told AFP.

“It is counter-productive. I accuse them of monumental incompetence, given that the main problem is that they are getting really bad advice.

“I hope that this fiasco shows the folly of excessive censorship and encourages the government to make better use of social networks and technology to reach out to people.”

In a strange irony, account of none other than Minister of State for Communication and Information Technology Milind Deora was suspended by Twitter.

But at the same time, a fake account similar to Deora’s remained active.

The followers of Deora on Twitter were in for a surprise when they found a search for his name showed “No people results for Milind Deora.”

Deora’s tweets gave the government’s version on the crackdown on the microblogging site and other social networking websites.

Deora in his tweet on Thursday night had defended the government’s efforts to block hate content on the Internet.

“Ironically, let me clarify on Twitter that there is absolutely no intent of the government to curb freedom of social media platforms,” Deora’s tweet read.

“Account suspended. The profile you are trying to view has been suspended...,” was the automated message that was seen on the Twitter.

The news of Deora’s account suspension spread like wild fire on the microblogging site with some making sarcastic comments.

“Communication Minister Milind Deora’s Twitter Account ‘Suspended.’ It’s like the home minister losing his house key,” read one of the tweets, while another user’s tweet read: “Ah! I know what happened. Milind Deora sent Twitter a list of people to (be) banned and signed his name under it.”

The government has asked Internet service providers to block select 16 Twitter accounts, including that of some journalists.

Twitter has also removed six accounts, which resembled that of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) amid government’s assertion that action would be taken against those allowing objectionable content.

In a communication to the PMO, Twitter has said it has “removed the reported profile(s) from circulation due to violation of our Terms of Service regarding impersonation.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/gulf-today-aug-25-2012-delhi-defends-internet-blocking