Centre for Internet and Society

India internet: clean-up or censorship?

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T11:17:11Z

Is India going the way of China? Not when it comes to development indicators. Or enhanced infrastructure. Or economic power. But in another category at which Beijing excels: web censorship.

That was the implication of a ruling on Thursday from Justice Suresh Kait, of the Delhi High Court, who told lawyers for Facebook India and Google India that unless they develop mechanisms to regulate “offensive and objectionable” material on their web sites, India is prepared to take drastic measures, according to the Hindustan Times. “Like China, we will block all such websites,” Kalit declared.

According to the IBN news channel, the government seems to be moving to make good on those threats:

Government sources said on Friday that the Delhi High Court was likely to issue sanctions to prosecute social networking sites Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo India in the ongoing spat between the companies and the Government of India over content regulation.

“Prosecution for some of the non-bailable offences requires prior sanction of the government, which has been sought and it is likely to be granted,” the sources said.

[…]

Summons are to be sent to the companies through the Ministry of External Affairs directing their heads to appear before court on March 13, which is when the next hearing will take place. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology will file its affidavit by this evening.

Clearly there’s trouble in “the world’s largest democracy”.

Kalit’s pronouncement is the latest turn in a story that broke last month, when the New York Times reported that telecoms minister Kapil Sibal had met with executives from Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft to discuss the pre-emptive removal of “offensive material” – including, it seems, web pages that had criticized the leader of his party, Sonia Gandhi.

As beyondbrics reported, Sibal then gave a combative press conference where he said: “I believe that no reasonable person aware of the sensibilities of large sections of communities in this country and aware of community standards as they are applicable in India would wish to see this content in the public domain,” referring to “offensive material” he had shown some reporters prior to the conference.

He added, repeatedly, that the government did not believe in censorship.

Apparently, Kalit didn’t get the memo.

Lawyers for the internet giants appeared before the judge to request the dismissal of a criminal complaint filed by a private citizen in a lower court under sections of the Indian law that cover “sale of obscene books etc”, “sale of obscene objects to young person etc” and “criminal conspiracy”. The judge declined.

“The magistrate of the trial court had observed that the material submitted by the complainant contained obscene pictures and derogatory articles pertaining to various Hindu gods, Prophet Muhammad and Jesus Christ”, IBN reported.

According to the Hindustan Times:

On behalf of Google India, senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi said it was humanly not possible to filter or monitor the postings of obscene, objectionable and defamatory material. “Billions of people across the globe, post their articles on the website. Yes, they may be defamatory, obscene but cannot be checked,” he said.

A Google spokesperson issued a statement last night, saying, “We did file a petition before the Delhi High Court. The Court has now issued a notice to the petitioner. We can’t comment at this stage.”

Today, the company issued a clarification:

Today the Court has merely directed the petitioner to serve the Court order to the overseas entities at their respective addresses and has adjourned the matter to March 13th.

Last month, a lower court had ordered the sites to remove all “anti-social” or “anti-relgious” content by February 6.

As Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, told beyondbrics last month, it’s difficult to establish exactly what is anti-religious: for example, the Hindu profession of belief in multiple gods is blasphemous to Muslims, Christians and Jews.

A lower court had directed the central government to take “immediate appropriate steps” and file a report by January 13.

It has not been released yet, but later on Friday you can Google it. Take the opportunity – if India goes the way of China, it might prove more difficult in future.

This blog post by Neil Munshi was published in beyondbrics on 13 January 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/clean-up-or-censorship

Facebook, Google face censorship in India

praskrishna — 2012-01-09T05:10:37Z

Religious leaders in India are on a collision course with social media websites including Google, Facebook and Yahoo. Two Indian courts recently asked these American companies as well as 19 other websites to take down “anti-religious” material. They are now required to report their compliance by February. Betwa Sharma's blog post was published in SmartPlanet on 5 January 2012. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in it extensively.

Information technology minister Kapil Sibal also met with a delegation of different faith groups who are worried that certain internet content could lead to communal discord. India’s 1.2 billion people are made up of majority Hindus but it also has the third largest population of Muslims as well as large number of Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains and other faiths.

India has an estimated 100 million internet users–the third largest in the world after U.S and China. The proposed restrictions are not at all comparable to China’s but is the internet free enough for the world’s largest democracy?

Some observers are suspicious that promoting religious or social harmony is a front for censoring the internet. Sunil Abraham, head of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), said that "traditional intellectual property rights holders like movie studios, music companies and software vendors are trying to protect their obsolete business models by pushing for the adoption of blanket surveillance and filtering technologies."

"They have found common cause with both totalitarian and so-called democratic regimes across the world interested in protecting the political status-quo after upheavals like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Anonymous and the Pirate Party," he said.

The Indian government has tried to reassure the public that it is not trying to censor. Google’s Transparency Report, however, recorded that out of the 358 items requested to be removed by the Indian government from Jan-June 2011, 255 had to do with government criticism and only a handful with hate speech.

Sibal has also been speaking to executives from Facebook, Yahoo and Google in India. But no agreement has been reached on taking down hate speech. New rules, issued in April, require internet intermediaries like Facebook and Yahoo to check for “unlawful” material and take it down.

CIS will soon be releasing a report called “Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet 2011." For the report, CIS conducted a sting operation by sending flawed takedown notices to seven intermediaries. The results showed that six intermediaries over-complied with the notices. "From the responses from the intermediaries don’t have sufficient legal competence or unwilling to dictate resources to determine legality of an online expression," Abraham said.

"Various pretexts like national security, protection of children, crackdown on online crime and terrorism, defense against cyber war etc are used to compromise civil liberties and clamp down on freedom of expression," he added.

(Photo-facebook24h.com/Google images)

Read the original published by SmartPlanet

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/facebook-google-face-censorship-in-india

US Clampdown Worse than the Great Firewall

sunil — 2012-01-26T20:42:14Z

If you thought China’s Internet censorship was evil, think again. American moves to clean up the Web could hurt global surfers, writes Sunil Abraham in this article published in Tehelka, Volume 8, Issue 50, 17 December 2011.

TWO PARTICULARLY terrible pieces of legislation — the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) — have been introduced in the US Senate and House of Representatives. If passed, the US administration will be empowered to shut down specific websites using the same four measures it employed in its failed attempt to shut down WikiLeaks — domain name system (DNS) filtering, blocking financial transfers via financial intermediaries, revoking hosting and sanitising search engine results. SOPA represents the perfect policy interest overlap between a State clamping down on freedom of expression and IPR-holders protecting their obsolete business models. After all it was Bono who publicly articulated the unspoken desire of many right-holders: “We know from China’s ignoble effort to suppress online dissent that it’s perfectly possible to track content.”

China fortunately only censors the Internet for its own citizens, the Great Firewall does not, for example, prevent access to knowledge by Indian netizens. SOPA will enable the US to censor the global Internet unilaterally. The Great Firewall can be circumvented using tools like Tor, but SOPA will in many ways make its targets disappear for the average user. DNS filtering, even when implemented in a single country, has global consequences. DNS, one of the foundational mechanisms of the Internet, is an address look-up service that allows users to translate domain names (e.g. cisindia.org — easier for humans to remember) into IP addresses (e.g. 202.190.125.69 — easier for machines). The most critical servers in the global DNS hierarchy are the root servers, or today’s server clusters. Mandated DNS filtering would result in some DNS servers returning different IP addresses than other DNS servers for certain domain names. With PROTECT-IP and SOPA, these global consequences would be at unprecedented levels given that seven of the 13 server clusters that constitute the DNS root fall within US jurisdiction. We already have some indication where this is headed. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency announced recently that it has seized 150 domain names for alleged IPR infringement.

We must remember that IPR policy in some countries has been configured in public interest to take advantage of the exceptions and limitations afforded by the TRIPS (trade-related aspects of IPR) agreement. In others, even though the letter of the law goes beyond TRIPS requirements, access by ordinary citizens is protected because of poor enforcement of these maximalist policies. E-commerce platforms that sell Micromax, Karbonn, Spice and Lava mobile phones that are manufactured in China may be taken offline because an American court is convinced of patent infringement. An online publisher of George Orwell’s books, which are public domain in Russia, India and South Africa but still under copyright in the US and Europe, may have its Paypal account blocked.

After the witch-hunt against WikiLeaks, policymakers have realised the extent of American hypocrisy

In the recent past, activists in authoritarian regimes and democracies with draconian Internet laws have leveraged US Internet freedom rhetoric. This was first deployed by Hillary Clinton in early 2010 after Google’s melodramatic withdrawal from China. Even then, many observers were convinced that this was just selective tokenism and the real agenda was domination of global markets by US-based MNCs. Today, after the witch-hunts against WikiLeaks and Anonymous, global policymakers have realised the extent of American hypocrisy.

Fortunately, opposition for SOPA has cut across traditional political and ideological divides — libertarians, liberal human rights organisations and political conservatives who believe in small government and also modern- day capitalists like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Let us pray that Kapil Sibal registers his protest with the Obama administration to protect the online aspirations of millions of Indian citizens and entrepreneurs.

Read the original published in Tehelka here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/us-clampdown

Spy in the Web

nishant — 2012-03-26T06:38:51Z

The government’s proposed pre-censorship rules undermine the intelligence of an online user and endanger democracy.

Kapil Sibal’s recent remarks demanding that private social media companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook remove "objectionable" content from their social networks has created a lot of furore. It should not come as a surprise to us that just like any other platform of publication and content creation, several rules and regulations already regulate online content while still respecting our constitutional right for freedom of speech and expression in India.

From terms of services of the different web 2.0 products that seek to moderate "offensive" or "harmful" material to strictly defined punishable offences as defined in the Information Technologies Act, framed by the Government of India, there are various ways by which material that might incite violence, hatred or pain is systemically removed from the digital space.

Largely, this happens silently. Unless you are particularly keen on certain spurious websites, you wouldn’t even realise that there is a list of blacklisted websites that remain inaccessible to us in India. Once in a while, we realise the regulatory nature of state censorship when certain actions come to light. In 2006, the Indian government blocked Blogspot, the popular blogging platform, because they had detected "anti-national" activities by certain groups using the blog.

More recently, India’s first home-grown erotic comic series Savita Bhabhi was banned and taken off its Indian servers, without realising that in the era of cloud-computing, the comic still remains available through different containers and spaces. In both these cases, while one might be able to provide a critique of the Indian government’s attempts at censoring and regulating information, there is reasonable sympathy to the idea that some control on information is possibly a good thing.

It is in the very nature of information to be filtered. I am sure everybody will agree that censoring, controlling and regulating information of certain kinds — involving child pornography, calls for violence and vandalism aimed at insulting and offending vulnerable sections of the society — is probably in the interest of a healthier information society. And hence, one nods one’s head, rather grudgingly at some of the censorship laws (print, TV, internet, et al) and accepts that we need them, at least in principle, if not in execution.

However, what Sibal is asking for is not in the same vein. Censorship laws have always been very cautious of what constitutes "offensive" content and have relied both on the larger opinions of the community as well as the informed expertise of legal bodies to censor information. More often than not, an act of censorship is implemented when certain sections of the society, in their interaction with certain information, find it offensive or insulting and ask for a block. Pre-emptive censorship, the kinds performed by the Central Board of Film Certification, is in service of existing legal infrastructure around production and distribution of information.

Protective guidelines for censoring information, as was recently seen in the Broadcast Editors’ Association’s mandate around not intruding into the privacy of the Bachchan baby and the mother, during the birth of the child, are demonstrably for the protection of a person’s private life.

Sibal’s new calls for censorship against material “that would offend any human being” is separate from all these instances in three ways. First, while Sibal is an important political figure in this country, he is not the lord of information production. Using the power of his office to call for taking down of content that he found offensive (fortunately it did not incite him to violence and moral decrepitude) is undemocratic and possibly extra-legal (as in not within the boundaries of law, but who will bell the cat?).

To ask private companies and use his influence to bully them into curtailing the constitutionally provided freedom of speech and expression is in bad taste. There is enough regulation that could be invoked to seek arbitration between Sibal’s opinion and somebody else’s about how Sonia Gandhi should be represented online.

Second, Sibal might pretend that he is only asking for censorship of online content the way in which we have for other media, but that is a fallacy. What he is advocating is an ethos of pre-censorship, where, even before the material becomes public, it is screened through human agents who, through some divine right would know the right from wrong — read as what the powers to be want and don’t. To override existing regulation and ask for this extra layer of human scrutiny of all information being produced online is the equivalent of certain unnamed people in Mumbai, who, when Mani Ratnam was about to release his film Bombay, asked for a private screening of the film and then recommended some friendly cuts in it.

Third, is perhaps, and I write this with regret, Sibal has undermined the critical intelligence and engagement of the social media’s ardent users. He has fallen into the trap of suggesting that impressionable minds will be easily corrupted if they are introduced to "undesirable" information online, the same information that will apparently not drive human pre-screeners to prurient activities because they will be protected by the mantle of government sanction. Instead of drawing upon the wisdom of crowds, which invites communities and people to flag information that they find offensive and asks for independent arbitration, he has asked for an undemocratic and unconstitutional call for censorship which threatens the very structures of political protest, resistance and dialogue in the country.

If such draconian measures are going to be carried through, we might soon regress to a dystopia where all information is censored, filtered and reshaped only to suit the interests of those in power.

Nishant Shah, Director-Research wrote this article for the Indian Express. It was published on December 18, 2011. The original can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/spy-in-web

India's Techies Angered Over Internet Censorship Plan

praskrishna — 2011-12-22T05:30:09Z

India has the world's largest democracy, and one of the most rambunctious. Millions of its young people are cutting edge when it comes to high-tech. Yet the country is still very conservative by Western standards, and a government minister recently said that offensive material on the web should be removed.

The way it was reported in India, Communications Minister Kapil Sibal started the whole row by assembling the heads of social networking sites at a meeting in his office in New Delhi.

At the time, he was reported to have asked companies, like Google and Facebook, to devise a system to filter through and edit out objectionable material before it could make its way online.

In an interview with the Indian cable channel CNN-IBN, Sibal pointed to offensive religious content that could cause ethnic or inter-communal conflict.

"We will defend any citizens' right to freedom of speech until our last breath. But we don't want this kind of content to be on the social media," Sibal said in the interview.

India's civil society, and more particularly its very active blogosphere, was outraged.

Pranesh Prakash from the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore says even the suggestion of censorship is a dangerous idea. Particularly if it's done before the content is posted online.

Indian Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal has said that Internet giants such as Facebook and Google have ignored his demands screen derogatory material from their sites, so the government would have to take action on its own.

"Pre-censorship is a very dangerous idea and is also something that actually doesn't happen in countries that are known for censoring the internet," Prakash says. "It will be charting a new path in Internet censorship."

Prakash says the proposal would be impractical, as well as undemocratic. Even with an army of censors, it would impossible to filter through content before it's uploaded, he says.

Stung by the criticism, Kapil Sibal now says he was misunderstood and that it "would be madness" to ask for pre-screening of content on electronic media and social media.

But in that fateful meeting, the Communications Minister also reportedly objected to unflattering portrayals of India's political leaders on the Internet and in Twitter messages. And that idea reinforced concerns that the government was overreaching and muffling dissent.

Censoring hate speech is one thing, but leaving it to the likes of Google to monitor political speech is problematic, says Apar Gupta, an Internet lawyer in New Delhi.

"It may offend you today, it may not cater to your taste, but at the end of the day: is it legal?" says Gupta. "The new proposals are quite a dramatic change, not only in terms of enforcement, but also in terms of what kind of speech it will prohibit."

Up till now, there has been some legal room for the government to censor inflammatory speech. For example, movies in India are subjected to a government censor board that monitors their content before they can be released to the general public. This year, a controversial movie about India's social caste system, was banned in some parts of the country.

But the Internet is less restrictive, says Apar Gupta.

"You can voice your opinion without any social sanctions for your opinions," he says. "So it's been a pressure valve which has allowed a lot of people to let off steam."

But even so, when debate online boils over in India it's the website or search engine that's held responsible. So critics of the proposed restrictions don't see the need for further action.

All this has left Communications Minister Kapil Sibal as something of a hate figure among Internet-savvy Indians. Although he says he's going to be pressing for tighter controls, he has agreed to meet with the Internet companies again.

This article by Elliot Hannon was published in NPR on 20 December 2011. Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/techies-angered-over-censorship

Censorship — A Death Knell for Freedom of Expression Online

praskrishna — 2011-12-19T10:12:46Z

On December 8, 2011, NDTV aired an interesting discussion on internet censorship. Shashi Tharoor, Soli Sorabjee, Shekhar Kapoor, Ken Ghosh and Sunil Abraham participated in this discussion with NDTV's Sonia Singh.

Sunil said that we need to reflect upon the limitations of freedom of expression which was listed out by Soli Sorabjee and then ask the question whether they are the same limitations in the IT Act. If one reads section 66A, one comes to the conclusion that the IT Act places many additional limitations on the freedom of expression (annoying speech, speech harmful to minors, inconvenient speech) and these are limitations that don’t have existing definitions either in the IT Act or any other statute or case laws.

Sunil further said that through section 79 which is the intermediary liability regime, the government places together a private censorship regime. We did some research at CIS. We sent fraudulent take down notices to seven large international and national intermediaries and through our empirical research we can demonstrate that these intermediaries over-comply with these fraudulent take down notices. So there is already (since the amended IT Act and the notification of the Rules in April this year) a huge chilling effect on the internet thanks to post facto censorship and what the minister is now calling for is preemptive or pro-active censorship which is really going to be the death knell for freedom of expression online.

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-censorship

Free Speech Online in India under Attack?

praskrishna — 2012-03-02T03:03:24Z

When the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal suggested pre-censorship for a range of popular online platforms and social networking sites, the suggestion was met by a barrage of criticism, which soon forced him to back down. Yet Sibal’s suggestion is not the only threat to free speech on the Internet in India today. Legislation such as the Intermediary Due Diligence Rules and Cyber Café Rules (also jointly known as the IT Rules) issued in April 2011 is equally dangerous for free speech online.

Achal Prabhala, Anja Kovacs and Lawrence Liang will join Sunil Abraham to discuss in more detail some of the direct threats to freedom of expression online in India today including the larger legal and social context of freedom of expression and censorship, control and resistance in which they have to be understood and the steps that can be taken to ensure that substantive protections for freedom of expression online will be put into place.

The Speakers

Achal Prabhala

Achal is based in Bangalore, Karnataka. He is a researcher, activist and writer in the areas of access to knowledge and access to medicine besides being a member of the Advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Anja Kovacs

Anja works with the Internet Democracy Project, which engages in research and advocacy on the promises and challenges that the Internet poses for democracy and social justice in the developing world.

Lawrence Liang

Lawrence is a researcher and lawyer based in Bangalore, who is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern. He is a co-founder of the Alternative Law Forum and works on the intersection of law, technology and culture. He has worked closely with filmmakers and artists in a number of anti-censorship campaigns.

The Moderator

Sunil Abraham

Sunil is the Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-profit organization. He is also a social entrepreneur and Free Software advocate. He founded Mahiti in 1998 which aims to reduce the cost and complexity of Information and Communication Technology for the Voluntary Sector by using Free Software.

This event is jointly organised by the Internet Democracy Project and the Centre for Internet and Society. Join us at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, on Wednesday 21 December, at 5.30 pm.

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/free-speech-online-in-india-under-attack

Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen

pranesh — 2012-01-04T08:59:14Z

The Indian government wants to censor the Internet without being seen to be censoring the Internet. This article by Pranesh Prakash shows how the government has been able to achieve this through the Information Technology Act and the Intermediary Guidelines Rules it passed in April 2011. It now wants methods of censorship that leave even fewer traces, which is why Mr. Kapil Sibal, Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology talks of Internet 'self-regulation', and has brought about an amendment of the Copyright Act that requires instant removal of content.

Power of the Internet and Freedom of Expression

The Internet, as anyone who has ever experienced the wonder of going online would know, is a very different communications platform from any that has existed before. It is the one medium where anybody can directly share their thoughts with billions of other people in an instant. People who would never have any chance of being published in a newspaper now have the opportunity to have a blog and provide their thoughts to the world. This also means that thoughts that many newspapers would decide not to publish can be published online since the Web does not, and more importantly cannot, have any editors to filter content. For many dictatorships, the right of people to freely express their thoughts is something that must be heavily regulated. Unfortunately, we are now faced with the situation where some democratic countries are also trying to do so by censoring the Internet.

Intermediary Guidelines Rules

In India, the new 'Intermediary Guidelines' Rules and the Cyber Cafe Rules that have been in effect since April 2011 give not only the government, but all citizens of India, great powers to censor the Internet. These rules, which were made by the Department of Information Technology and not by the Parliament, require that all intermediaries remove content that is 'disparaging', 'relating to... gambling', 'harm minors in any way', to which the user 'does not have rights'. When was the last time you checked wither you had 'rights' to a joke before forwarding it? Did you share a Twitter message containing the term "#IdiotKapilSibal", as thousands of people did a few days ago? Well, that is 'disparaging', and Twitter is required by the new law to block all such content. The government of Sikkim can run advertisements for its PlayWin lottery in newspapers, but under the new law it cannot do so online. As you can see, through these ridiculous examples, the Intermediary Guidelines are very badly thought-out and their drafting is even worse. Worst of all, they are unconstitutional, as they put limits on freedom of speech that contravene Article 19(1)(a) and 19(2) of the Constitution, and do so in a manner that lacks any semblance of due process and fairness.

Excessive Censoring by Internet Companies

We, at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, decided to test the censorship powers of the new rules by sending frivolous complaints to a number of intermediaries. Six out of seven intermediaries removed content, including search results listings, on the basis of the most ridiculous complaints. The people whose content was removed were not told, nor was the general public informed that the content was removed. If we hadn't kept track, it would be as though that content never existed. Such censorship existed during Stalin's rule in the Soviet Union. Not even during the Emergency has such censorship ever existed in India. Yet, not only was what the Internet companies did legal under the Intermediary Guideline Rules, but if they had not, they could have been punished for content put up by someone else. That is like punishing the post office for the harmful letters that people may send over post.

Government Has Powers to Censor and Already Censors

Currently, the government can either block content by using section 69A of the Information Technology Act (which can be revealed using RTI), or it has to send requests to the Internet companies to get content removed. Google has released statistics of government request for content removal as part of its Transparency Report. While Mr. Sibal uses the examples of communally sensitive material as a reason to force censorship of the Internet, out of the 358 items requested to be removed from January 2011 to June 2011 from Google service by the Indian government (including state governments), only 8 were for hate speech and only 1 was for national security. Instead, 255 items (71 per cent of all requests) were asked to be removed for 'government criticism'. Google, despite the government in India not having the powers to ban government criticism due to the Constitution, complied in 51 per cent of all requests. That means they removed many instances of government criticism as well.

'Self-Regulation': Undetectable Censorship

Mr. Sibal's more recent efforts at forcing major Internet companies such as Indiatimes, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, to 'self-regulate' reveals a desire to gain ever greater powers to bypass the IT Act when censoring Internet content that is 'objectionable' (to the government). Mr. Sibal also wants to avoid embarrassing statistics such as that revealed by Google's Transparency Report. He wants Internet companies to 'self-regulate' user-uploaded content, so that the government would never have to send these requests for removal in the first place, nor block sites officially using the IT Act. If the government was indeed sincere about its motives, it would not be talking about 'transparency' and 'dialogue' only after it was exposed in the press that the Department of Information Technology was holding secret talks with Internet companies. Given the clandestine manner in which it sought to bring about these new censorship measures, the motives of the government are suspect. Yet, both Mr. Sibal and Mr. Sachin Pilot have been insisting that the government has no plans of Internet censorship, and Mr. Pilot has made that statement officially in the Lok Sabha. This, thus seems to be an instance of censoring without censorship.

Backdoor Censorship through Copyright Act

Further, since the government cannot bring about censorship laws in a straightforward manner, they are trying to do so surreptitiously, through the back door. Mr. Sibal's latest proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, which is before the Rajya Sabha right now, has a provision called section 52(1)(c) by which anyone can send a notice complaining about infringement of his copyright. The Internet company will have to remove the content immediately without question, even if the notice is false or malicious. The sender of false or malicious notices is not penalized. But the Internet company will be penalized if it doesn't remove the content that has been complained about. The complaint need not even be shown to be true before the content is removed. Indeed, anyone can complain about any content, without even having to show that they own the rights to that content. The government seems to be keen to have the power to remove content from the Internet without following any 'due process' or fair procedure. Indeed, it not only wants to give itself this power, but it is keen on giving all individuals this power.

It's ultimate effect will be the death of the Internet as we know it. Bid adieu to it while there is still time.

The article was translated to Marathi and featured in Lokmat

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/invisible-censorship

Online gag:Existing rules give little freedom

praskrishna — 2011-12-12T05:42:05Z

Even as the controversy over Kapil Sibal's attempt to get internet giants such as Google and Facebook to prescreen user-generated content to weed out 'offensive' material rages, a yet-to-be-published study by Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society reveals that rules already in place can have "chilling effects on free expression on the internet".

The study set out to examine if the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011, notified in April 2011, could create a gagging effect on websites that provide a platform for user-generated content in the form of opinion and comments. Websites such as Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube and Twitter fall under this category. The study was commissioned by the Centre for Internet and Society, which was invited to comment on the department of information technology when it framed the seminal Information Technology Act 2000.

The study author set out to test the process of 'takedown' (requesting an internet entity to remove material that can be interpreted as 'hateful', 'disparaging', 'defamatory', etc) by notifying seven separate internet entities of content linked to their websites or hosted by them that could, in very loose terms, be deemed offensive. The entities are not named in the study.

This first-of-a-kind experiment included actions such as sending search engines a takedown notice alerting it to results on searching the keywords 'online gambling' and alerting a news website about comments on a news story related to the Telangana dispute.

In six of the seven cases, the intermediaries and hosts - technical terms for websites that host content - acted promptly to not only remove the 'offensive' content without due processes of investigation but in some cases went beyond their brief to remove all content connected with the one mentioned in the takedown notice.

For instance, a news website that was sent a takedown notice about a well-argued and non-abusive comment to an article on the Telangana issue took down not just that comment, but all 15 comments published below the article In the case of the results of a search for 'online gambling', despite the fact that intermediaries are exempted from being implicated in such cases, one search engine notified took down not just the three links mentioned in the notice but another 25 sub-domains as well, "presumably to avoid legal risk and to err on the side of caution," the CIS report says.

"Our criticism is of the policy and not of the websites and Internet entities that are forced to err on the side of caution when faced by such notices," says Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society. "We are aware that they do not always have the legal and manpower resources necessary to monitor the enormous volumes of content they host." These companies often overstep their brief in order to avoid legal hassles resulting from what Abraham calls "unconstitutional limits on free speech".

The original story was published by the Times of India on 9 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in it. Read the story on Times of India here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/online-gag

That’s the unkindest cut, Mr Sibal

sunil — 2011-12-12T04:59:00Z

There’s Kolaveri-di on the Internet over Kapil Sibal’s diktat to social media sites to prescreen users’ posts. That diktat goes far beyond the restrictions placed on our freedom of expression by the IT Act. But, says Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society, India is not going to be silenced online.

Thanks to leaked reports about unpublicised meetings that communications minister Kapil Sibal had with social media operators – or Internet intermediaries, to use legalese — such as Facebook, Google and Indiatimes.com, censorship policy in India has gained public attention, and caused massive outrage.

According to The New York Times India Ink reportage, quoting unnamed sources from the Internet intermediaries, Mr Sibal demanded proactive and pre-emptive screening of posts that people make on social media sites, ostensibly to filter out or remove “offensive” content and hate speech. In a television interview, however, the minister denied he wanted to censor what Indians thought and shared with others online.

One is tempted to believe him. He was, after all, the amicus for the landmark People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL) wiretapping judgment of 1996, which is pivotal to protecting our civil liberties when using communication technology in India.

Last week, though, Mr Sibal came out in public with his demands, saying that there was a lot of content that risked hurting the sensibilities of people and could lead to violence. “It was brought to my notice some of the images and content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google are extremely offensive to the religious sentiments of people ...”We will not allow Indian sentiments and religious sentiments of large sections of the community to be hurt,” he said.

There was even a threat of state action if Internet companies did not comply with demands to screen content before it was posted online.

The NYT blogpost said, however, quoting executives from the Internet companies Mr Sibal had reportedly met, that the minister showed them a Facebook page that maligned Congress president Sonia Gandhi and told them, “This is unacceptable.”

Google responded to Mr Sibal by releasing its Transparency Report, saying that out of 358 items that it had been requested to remove between January and June 2011, only eight requests pertained to hate speech, while as many as 255 complaints were against “government criticism”.

Indian netizens raged against Mr Sibal, and very quickly #IdiotKapil Sibal was ‘trending’ on Twitter, with thousands posting comments against attempts to ‘censor’ Internet content. Much has changed, in Mr Sibal’s reckoning, between 1996 and 2011.

So, what’s all the fuss over ‘pre-screening’ and what’s at stake here? Critics of Mr Sibal say, our freedom of speech and expression is under threat. They see a pattern in the way the government has sought to impose rules and restrictions on Internet and telecommunications players, with demands on BlackBerry-maker RIM to give it access to its users’ email and messenger content, on telecom players to install electronic surveillance equipment and let the government eavesdrop as it sees fit, and on the likes of Google and Yahoo to part with email content and users’ details.

It all started with the amendments to the Information Tech-nology Act 2000 in 2008. Together, they constitute damaging consequences for citizens, including the creation of a multi-tier blanket surveillance regime, inappropriate security recommendations, and undermining freedom of speech and expression.

The amendments passed in 2008 — without any discussion in Parliament – did solve some existing policy concerns, but simultaneously introduced new ones. For instance, Section 66, introduced during this amendment, criminalises sending offensive messages through any ICT-based communication service.

Offensive messages are described as “grossly offensive, menacing character..... or causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will.” These terms are not defined in the IT Act or in any other existing law, rules or case-law, except for a couple of exceptions such as what constitutes “criminal intimidation”. These limits on the freedom of expression go well beyond Article 19(2) of the Constitution, which only permits “reasonable restrictions...in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.”

If Mr Sibal himself were to don his lawyer’s coat again and launch a legal challenge to Section 66, in all likelihood, courts in India would strike it down as unconstitutional.

Section 79, which was amended, brought into being an intermediary liability regime. This was in part precipitated by the arrest of Avnish Bajaj, the former CEO of bazee.com in December 2004 for the infamous Delhi Public School MMS clip which was being sold on his e-commerce platform. Policy-makers were, however, convinced to follow international best practices and grant intermediaries immunity under certain conditions.

Just as the postal department is not considered liable for the content of letters or telecom operators liable for the content of phone conversations, Internet intermediaries, too, were to be considered “dumb pipes” or “common carriers” of content produced and distributed by users. Intermediaries therefore earned immunity from legal action so long as they acted upon take-down notices, or written requests for deletion of illegal content.

Section 79 was further clarified in April this year when the Intermediaries Guidelines Rules were notified. Stakeholders from the technology industry, media and civil society had sent feedback to the Department of Information Technology under the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in February, but DIT choose to ignore the feedback and finalised rules with serious flaws in them. For one, a standardised “Terms of Service” that focused on limits on free expression had to be implemented by all intermediaries – forcing a one-size-fits-all approach.

Content that was 'harmful to minors' was not permissible regardless of the target market of the website. All intermediaries were supposed to act upon take-down notices within 36 hours, something that a Google may be able to do, but an average blogger could not.

Two, the vague terms introduced in Section 66A were left undefined. Intermediaries were asked to sit on judgment on the question of whether an article, image or video was causing 'inconvenience'.

Three, all principles of natural justice were ignored – the person responsible for posting the content would not be informed, s/he would not be given an opportunity to file a counter-notice to challenge the intermediary’s decision in court.

Four, the rules left it open for economically or politically motivated actors to seriously damage opponents online using fraudulent take-down notices, instead of treating abuse of the take-down notice system as an offence.

How the take-down system terrorises free expression on the Internet was illustrated when the Centre for Internet and Society, where this author works, undertook a research project. A pro-bono independent researcher who led the exercise sent fraudulent take-down notices to seven Internet companies in India. These included some of the largest and most popular Indian and foreign search engines, news portals and social media platforms.

Although they all employ the most competent lawyers in the country, six of the seven intermediaries over-complied, confirming our worst fears. In one case, a news portal deleted not just the specific comment that was mentioned in the take-down notice but 14 other comments as well. Most importantly, it must be pointed out, the comment identified in the take-down notice was itself an excellent piece of writing that could not be construed as “offensive” by any stretch!

In the single exception to the rule, one e-commerce portal refused to act upon a take-down notice trying to prevent the sale of diapers on the grounds that it was “harmful to minors”, rightly dismissing the notice as frivolous. But that exception simply proved a rule: Private intermediaries use their best lawyers to protect their commercial interests, but are highly risk-averse and do not value freedom of expression, unless it affects their bottomline.

Proactive and pre-emptive screening of social media content, as Mr Sibal has demanded, will only further compromise online civil liberties in what’s already a dismal situation. In short, we move from a post-facto to a pre-emptive censorship regime.

In fact, given the magnitude of the task of pre-screening in a nation with a 100 million Internet users and growing, such an intense censorship regime will mean not only that what Indian citizens say or post will be censored by private companies, but those private companies will, in turn, use machines to screen what humans are saying and doing! After all, otherwise, companies would require armies of human censors to screen the millions of posts that are made on Twitter and Facebook every minute.

But the Supreme Court has held that even the executive arm of government cannot engage in censorship prior to publication, let alone ordering private companies to do so. In any case, it’s a policy that’s bound to fail, for both technical reasons and for its failure to take into account human motivations.

Machines, as we know, continue to be poor judges of the nuances of human expression and will likely cause massive damage to the idea of public debate. Humans, on the other hand, will begin to circumvent machine filters – for example, content labelled as PRON instead of PORN will go through.

Draconian crackdown on certain types of fringe content is likely to have the counterproductive result of the general society developing an unhealthy obsession for exactly such content. Despite the comprehensive censorship controls in Saudi Arabia, for instance, pornography consumption is rampant, usually accessed via pirated satellite TV and circulated using personal computing devices and mobile phones.

But all is not lost yet, perhaps. Faced with the barrage of criticism, Mr Sibal has now called for public consultations on the issue of pre-screening content. There’s hope yet for freedom of speech and expression in India. Thanks to the Internet, a throwback to 1975 simply does not look possible.

Sunil Abraham is executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru. He wrote this article in the Deccan Chronicle on December 11, 2011. Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/unkindest-cut-mr-sibal

Internet, social media access should not be blocked: Ban

praskrishna — 2011-12-12T04:16:25Z

Amidst a raging controversy over the federal government’s proposal to monitor content in cyber space, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Friday said access to the Internet and various social media must not be blocked as a way to prevent criticism and public debate.

In his speech on the eve of the Human Rights Day which was released at the United Nations Information Centre, Ban said: “Today, within their existing obligation to respect the rights of freedom of assemble and expression, governments must not block access to the Internet and various forms of social media as a way to prevent criticism and public debate.”

His comments came a few days after Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal said the government will take steps to stop offensive and defamatory content on Internet sites.

Ban said: “Many of the people seeking their legitimate aspirations were linked through social media.”

Sibal’s comments provoked anger and derision among Internet users. Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, said it would be “impractical on the level of scale and on the level of the objective test. What’s offensive for someone might be completely banal to somebody else,” he said. Any ham-fisted government crackdown would “have a high impact on our credibility as a democracy” and risk alienating India’s growing online community, Abraham said.

The story was published in the Oman Tribune on December 10, 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article. Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-social-media-access-should-not-be-blocked-ban

India entering the Minority Report age?

praskrishna — 2011-12-10T06:40:57Z

Indian government efforts to block offensive material from the Internet have prompted a storm of online ridicule along with warnings of the risk to India's image as a bastion of free speech.

Communications Minister Kapil Sibal pledged a crackdown on “unacceptable” online content, saying Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo! and Facebook had ignored India's demands to screen images and data before they are uploaded.

“We will evolve guidelines and mechanisms to deal with the issue,” Sibal told reporters this week, without detailing what steps might be taken.

His comments provoked anger and derision among Indian Internet users, while experts raised doubts about the practicalities of enforcing any directive and others questioned the government's motives.

Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, said it would be “impractical on the level of scale and on the level of the objective test”.

“What's offensive for someone might be completely banal to somebody else,” he told AFP.

Any ham-fisted government crackdown would “have a high impact on our credibility as a democracy” and risk alienating India's growing online community, Abraham said.

“We should be doing almost everything to promote the take-up of the Internet. It's almost tragic that we're pushing in the opposite direction,” he added.

India, the world's largest democracy, has more than 110 million Internet users out of a population of 1.2 billion, with predictions that 600 million people will be online in the next five years.

#KapilSibal has this week become one of the most trending topics among Indian users of the micro-blogging site Twitter, with many resorting to humour to mock the minister.

Some likened his comments to attempts by Pakistan's telecoms regulator last month to ban text messages containing nearly 1,700 words it deemed “obscene”, which was shelved after outrage from users and campaigners.

The satirical Indian web site fakingnews.com compared Sibal's plans to the futuristic Hollywood film “Minority Report”, in which criminals are arrested before committing their crimes.

It also carried a spoof news article headlined: “All Facebook posts to have 'Kapil Sibal likes this' by default”.

The mainstream media has been generally critical of Sibal as well, warning the government that it could not be seen to over-step the boundaries protecting India's treasured democratic values.

“Pre-screening of content amounts to unacceptable censorship,” the Business Standard said in an editorial.

There was even a mild expression of concern from Washington where US State Department spokesman Mark Toner was asked about the Indian government's stance.

“We are concerned about any effort to curtail freedom of expression on the Internet,” Toner said, while carefully avoiding any direct criticism of Sibal's proposals.

Sibal rejected any suggestion of an assault on free speech, saying the government had pleaded for self-regulation by companies such as Google to filter out deeply “insulting” material.

He highlighted examples of faked pictures of naked politicians, including Congress Party head Sonia Gandhi, and other images and social network pages that he said could inflame religious tensions.

India has in the past moved to block the publication of books and other material seen as disrespectful to Gandhi, or other members of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has dominated India's political life since independence.

Vijay Mukhi, a Mumbai-based freelance consultant who writes on Internet security, said Sibal had shown a fundamental lack of understanding about technology and was badly-advised.

He also saw in the reaction to the proposals a sign of how the Internet is undermining traditional unquestioning respect and deference towards elders and authority figures.

“Most of us in India are very sensitive about what people say. The problem also is that whilst the Internet is there, you have to have a thick hide,” said Mukhi.

“Politicians have got to create a second, third or fourth skin to be immune to the criticism that they get.”

New Delhi has been accused before of censorship after demanding that BlackBerry makers Research In Motion give Indian security services access to encrypted messaging and email services.

Analysts agreed that under certain circumstances, particularly national security, pre- or post-censorship was acceptable, as India was the frequent target of extremists.

Abraham, though, said any ban on data and images on decency grounds without a prior complaint was doomed to fail and likely to be contrary to the constitutional right of freedom of expression if challenged in court. - Sapa-AFP

The blog post by Phil Hazlewood was published in ioL scitech. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this. Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/minority-report-age

Google V/s Kapil Sibal

praskrishna — 2011-12-09T11:12:58Z

Mr Kapil Sibal was quoted by the Hindu* today as saying that "he had been left with no choice" because the internet companies "refused to delete incendiary hate-speech."

In response, Google pointed to its Transparency Report which effectively demolishes Mr Sibal's claims, as it points out that out of 358 items requested to be removed in the period Jan-June 2011, only 8 requests pertained to hate speech, while there were as many as 255 complaints against "Government criticism".

Google also told Medianama:

“We believe that access to information is the foundation of a free society. Google Search helps spread knowledge, enabling people to find out about almost anything by typing a few words into a computer. And services like YouTube and Google+ help users to express themselves and share different points of view. Where content is illegal or breaks our terms of service we will continue to remove it.”

Mr Sibal's claims fail to stand up to scrutiny and are contradicted by another, yet unpublished, draft report by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) which shows that intermediaries are erring “on the side of caution” and "over-complying after complaints are filed" and that free speech on the Internet in India is already being curtailed in a “chilling” manner.

The NYT blog today points to two such examples of over-compliance from this CIS study:

The researcher objected to a comment below an article on a news Web site about the Telangana movement, which aims to create a separate state in Andhra Pradesh. The comment, which was well-written and not obscenity-laced, condemned the violence in the Telangana movement and called its leaders selfish, but supported the cause over all.

The researcher wrote the intermediary that the comment was “racially and ethnically objectionable” and “defamatory.” The researcher received no written response, but within 72 hours the intermediary had taken down not just the “offensive” comment, but all 15 comments that were published below the article.
The researcher sent a take-down notice to another intermediary, defined as a “host and information location tool,” asking that it remove three links provided on its search engine after entering the words “online gambling.” The links, the researcher complained, were “relating or encouraging money-laundering or gambling,” which is illegal under the April rules.

The intermediary wrote back to the complainant, saying that the intermediary’s search engine was a “mere conduit” with no control over the information passing through its platform.

But it subsequently removed the three links mentioned in the take-down notice, and all other URLs of the three Web sites, including their subdomains.

Citing the same as yet unpublished study, The Legally Indian blog notes:

The only response that was rejected outright was a facetious takedown request to a shopping portal that an ad for baby’s diapers “harmed minors” by potentially causing babies’ rashes.

"Of the 7 intermediaries to which takedown notices were sent, 6 intermediaries over-complied with the notices, despite the apparent flaws in them," stated the draft report on the research. "From the responses to the takedown notices, it can be reasonably presumed that not all intermediaries have sufficient legal competence or resources to deliberate on the legality of an expression."

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," commented Abraham, adding that he was told by at least one major international intermediary company operating in India that it was “constantly" receiving takedown requests.

"Our empirical research demonstrates that intermediaries are unable to make the subjective test that is required of them," he added. "They are highly risk averse and they often choose to completely comply with the person sending a takedown notice."

"There is clear anecdotal evidence that […] the recently notified rules have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and expression, and that there is no transparency or accountability."

"What we have is a private censorship regime that is alive and kicking in India."

At the CIS blogs, Pranesh Prakash points out how Online Pre-Censorship is Harmful and Impractical, after noting that there can, of course, be reasonable limitations on freedom of speech as provided in Article 19 of the ICCPR and in Article 19(2) of the Constitution:

What he [Kapil Sibal]is proposing is not enforcement of existing rules and regulations, but of a new restriction on online speech. This should have, in a democracy, been put out for wide-ranging public consultations first...

The more fundamental disagreement is that over how the question of what should not be published should be decided, and how that decision should be and how that should be carried out, and who can be held liable for unlawful speech...

...Newspaper have editors who can take responsibility for content in the newspaper. They can afford to, because the number of articles in a newspaper are limited. Youtube, which has 48 hours of videos uploaded every minutes, cannot. One wag suggested that Mr. Sibal was not suggesting a means of censorship, but of employment generation and social welfare for censors and editors. To try and extend editorial duties to these 'intermediaries' by executive order or through 'forceful suggestions' to these companies cannot happen without amending s.79 of the Information Technology Act which ensures they are not to be held liable for their user's content: the users are.

...Internet speech has, to my knowledge, and to date, has never caused a riot in India. It is when it is translated into inflammatory speeches on the ground with megaphones that offensive speech, whether in books or on the Internet, actually become harmful, and those should be targeted instead. And the same laws that apply to offline speech already apply online. If such speech is inciting violence then the police can be contacted and a magistrate can take action. Indeed, Internet companies like Facebook, Google, etc., exercise self-regulation already (excessively and wrongly, I feel sometimes). Any person can flag any content on Youtube or Facebook as violating the site's terms of use. Indeed, even images of breast-feeding mothers have been removed from Facebook on the basis of such complaints. So it is mistaken to think that there is no self-regulation. In two recent cases, the High Courts of Bombay (*Janhit Manch* case) and Madras (*Karthikeyan R.* case) refused to direct the government and intermediaries to police online content, saying that places an excessive burden on freedom of speech...

Pranesh Prakash goes on to say that the problem stems from the IT Rules that have been in force since April 2011:

While speech that is 'disparaging' (while not being defamatory) is not prohibited by any statute, yet intermediaries are required not to carry 'disparaging' speech, or speech to which the user has no right (how is this to be judged? do you have rights to the last joke that you forwarded?), or speech that promotes gambling (as the governments of Assam does through the PlayWin lottery), and a myriad other kinds of speech that are not prohibited in print or on TV. Who is to judge whether something is 'disparaging'? The intermediary itself, on pain of being liable for prosecution if it is found have made the wrong decision. And any person may send a notice to an intermediary to 'disable' content, which has to be done within 36 hours if the intermediary doesn't want to be held liable. Worst of all, there is no requirement to inform the user whose content it is, nor to inform the public that the content is being removed. It just disappears, into a memory hole. It does not require a paranoid conspiracy theorist to see this as a grave threat to freedom of speech.

Many human rights activists and lawyers have made a very strong case that the IT Rules on Intermediary Due Diligence are unconstitutional. Parliament still has an opportunity, till the 2012 budget session of Parliament, to reject these rules. Parliamentarians must act now to uphold their oaths to the Constitution.

This blog post by Sundeep Dougal was published in Outlookindia.com on 8 December 2011. Pranesh Prakash's work at CIS has been extensively quoted in this blog post.

* Kapil Sibbal was quoted by the Hindu in their article dated 7 December 2011.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/google-vs-kapil

India bid to censor Internet draws flak

praskrishna — 2011-12-09T10:36:30Z

Indian government efforts to block offensive material from the Internet have prompted a storm of online ridicule along with warnings of the risk to India's image as a bastion of free speech.

Communications Minister Kapil Sibal pledged a crackdown on "unacceptable" online content, saying Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo! and Facebook had ignored India's demands to screen images and data before they are uploaded.

"We will evolve guidelines and mechanisms to deal with the issue," Sibal told reporters this week, without detailing what steps might be taken.

His comments provoked anger and derision among Indian Internet users, while experts raised doubts about the practicalities of enforcing any directive and others questioned the government's motives.

Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, said it would be "impractical on the level of scale and on the level of the objective test".

"What's offensive for someone might be completely banal to somebody else," he told AFP. Any ham-fisted government crackdown would "have a high impact on our credibility as a democracy" and risk alienating India's growing online community, Abraham said.

"We should be doing almost everything to promote the take-up of the Internet. It's almost tragic that we're pushing in the opposite direction," he added.

India, the world's largest democracy, has more than 110 million Internet users out of a population of 1.2 billion, with predictions that 600 million people will be online in the next five years.

#KapilSibal has this week become one of the most trending topics among Indian users of the micro-blogging site Twitter, with many resorting to humour to mock the minister.

Some likened his comments to attempts by Pakistan's telecoms regulator last month to ban text messages containing nearly 1,700 words it deemed "obscene", which was shelved after outrage from users and campaigners.

The satirical Indian web site fakingnews.com

compared Sibal's plans to the futuristic Hollywood film "Minority Report", in which criminals are arrested before committing their crimes. It also carried a spoof news article headlined: "All Facebook posts to have 'Kapil Sibal likes this' by default".

The mainstream media has been generally critical of Sibal as well, warning the government that it could not be seen to over-step the boundaries protecting India's treasured democratic values.

"Pre-screening of content amounts to unacceptable censorship," the Business Standard said in an editorial.

There was even a mild expression of concern from Washington where US State Department spokesman Mark Toner was asked about the Indian government's stance.

"We are concerned about any effort to curtail freedom of expression on the Internet," Toner said, while carefully avoiding any direct criticism of Sibal's proposals.

Sibal rejected any suggestion of an assault on free speech, saying the government had pleaded for self-regulation by companies such as Google to filter out deeply "insulting" material.

He highlighted examples of faked pictures of naked politicians, including Congress Party head Sonia Gandhi, and other images and social network pages that he said could inflame religious tensions.

India has in the past moved to block the publication of books and other material seen as disrespectful to Gandhi, or other members of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has dominated India's political life since independence.

Vijay Mukhi, a Mumbai-based freelance consultant who writes on Internet security, said Sibal had shown a fundamental lack of understanding about technology and was badly-advised.

He also saw in the reaction to the proposals a sign of how the Internet is undermining traditional unquestioning respect and deference towards elders and authority figures.

"Most of us in India are very sensitive about what people say. The problem also is that whilst the Internet is there, you have to have a thick hide," said Mukhi.

"Politicians have got to create a second, third or fourth skin to be immune to the criticism that they get."

New Delhi has been accused before of censorship after demanding that BlackBerry makers Research In Motion give Indian security services access to encrypted messaging and email services.

Analysts agreed that under certain circumstances, particularly national security, pre- or post-censorship was acceptable, as India was the frequent target of extremists.

Abraham, though, said any ban on data and images on decency grounds without a prior complaint was doomed to fail and likely to be contrary to the constitutional right of freedom of expression if challenged in court.

Phil Hazlewood spoke to Sunil Abraham and published this article for AFP. Read the original hosted by Google here

Related Media Coverage
Various newspapers and channels also published this news on their sites:

India bid to censor Internet draws flak [France 24, 9 December 2011]
Indian push to screen Internet content draws flak [Khaleej Times, 9 December 2011]
India bid to censor Internet draws flak [Physorg.com, 9 December 2011]
India censorship bid gets flak [TimesLive, 9 December 2011]
India bid to censor Internet draws flak [Bangkok Post, 9 December 2011]
India bid to censor Internet draws flak [Yahoo News, 9 December 2011]
India bid to censor Internet draws flak [MSN News, 9 December 2011]
Indian push to screen Internet content draws flak [Emirates 24/7, 9 December 2011]
Indian push to screen internet content draws flak [Business Live, 9 December 2011]
Indian Push to Screen Internet Content Draws Flak [Jakarta Globe, 9 December 2011]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/india-bid-to-censor-net-draws-flak

Los internautas indios se oponen a la censura a través de la Red

praskrishna — 2011-12-09T00:25:11Z

La idea del Gobierno indio de censurar los contenidos de internet ha chocado con el rechazo de la empresas del sector y de los internautas, que están usando las redes sociales para ridiculizar al ministro

La idea del Gobierno de la India de censurar los contenidos de internet ha chocado con el rechazo de la empresas del sector y, sobre todo, de los internautas, que están usando las redes sociales para ridiculizar al ministro del ramo.

Esta semana, el titular de Comunicaciones, Kapil Sibal, reveló que ha contactado con los gestores de la más importantes redes sociales y buscadores para plantear la eliminación de contenidos "objetables", lo cual ha sublevado a los internautas.

Los foros de la red hierven de opiniones en contra de la simple posibilidad de que se censure internet y en el Twitter indio las cadenas de "tuiteos" más seguidas llevan por título el nombre del ministro; la más exitosa es de hecho "IdiotKapilSibal".

Los medios locales afirman que la iniciativa del Ejecutivo indio surgió a raíz de la publicación en algunos portales de fotos deformadas del primer ministro, Manmohan Singh, y de la líder del gobernante Partido del Congreso, Sonia Gandhi.

Esto último ha motivado que muchos de los mensajes que corren por la red bromeen con que la nueva normativa de control debería llamarse SONIA, acrónimo de Social Networking Inspection Act (Norma de inspección de las redes sociales).

La idea del ministro Kapil también ha topado con la más moderada oposición de portales como Facebook o Google, que se han negado a aplicar nuevos sistemas de control más allá de los previstos por las mismas páginas de internet.

Aunque dijeron "reconocer el interés del Gobierno en minimizar el contenido abusivo" en la red, los responsables de Facebook en India recalcaron en un comunicado que su portal ya tiene mecanismos para eliminar textos o imágenes contrarias a su propia normativa interna.

Según datos de Facebook, la India es, con 34 millones, el tercer país del mundo con más usuarios de esta red social, solo por detrás de Estados Unidos e Indonesia.

Google India recalcó en un comunicado, citado por la agencia local IANS, que "hay que diferenciar lo que es controvertido de lo que es ilegal" y también se remitió a los mecanismos de control de contenidos del propio buscador.

La oposición de los operadores y los internautas no ha hecho desistir, de momento, al ministro, que advirtió en una rueda de prensa convocada por sorpresa de que el Gobierno seguirá adelante con la cooperación de las empresas o sin ella.

"Les pediremos información (a los portales web), déjennos tiempo para gestionarlo. Pero una cosa es segura: no permitiremos ese tipo de contenido objetable", dijo Kapil a los medios. El plan del ministro choca, sin embargo, con problemas de diversa índole.

"En el control de internet hay una dificultad técnica, ya que es imposible que una máquina discrimine lo que es 'objetable' de lo que no, por lo se producen multitud de falsos positivos", dijo el responsable de una organización india de estudios sobre la red.

Pero el director del Centro Internet y Sociedad, Sunil Abraham, cree que el problema es más ético que tecnológico, ya que "solo un juez está facultado para eliminar contenidos y debe haber evidencia del daño cometido, algo casi imposible cuando hay censura previa".

This article appeared in the Spanish newspaper Diario de Navarra on 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this. Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internautas-indios-se-oponen