Centre for Internet and Society

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 13) - Pranesh Prakash

purba — 2014-01-20T06:20:44Z

CIS interviews Pranesh Prakash, lawyer and policy director with Centre for Internet and Society, as part of the Cybersecurity Series.

"When it comes to things cyber we completely lose our sense of proportion. While killing someone by negligence only attracts two years of punishment, saying something that people can define "offensive" attracts even more under 66A of the Information Technology Act. Something that can be a nuisance, under the Criminal Laws, can attract up to six months punishment, whereas under the IT act, it is up to three years..." - Pranesh Prakash, lawyer and policy director, Centre for Internet and Society

Centre for Internet and Society presents its thirteenth installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

Pranesh is a Policy Director with the Centre, and is a graduate of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, with a degree in Arts and Law.

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-13-pranesh-prakash

It’s Common Practice

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:41:47Z

Technologies are no longer abstract. They're habits. What constitutes a habit? The gestures that you make as you read this, the way your eyes flick when you encounter somebody you like, the way you stroke your chin in a moment of reflection, or the split second decisions that you make in times of crises — these are all habits. They are pre-thought, visceral, depending upon biological, social and collective memories that do not need rational thinking. Habits are the customised programming of human life.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on May 12, 2013.

However, habits are not natural. They are, in fact, man-made nature. They appear as natural, matter-of-fact, instinctive and intuitive, but they are built over years of shared experiences, learning and empathy. And more often than we realise, habits are formed because of the different technologies that surround us.

If you are reading this column on paper, look at the way you are holding the magazine, folding the paper and note how you can read this easily because the text has been arranged from left to right, top to bottom. If you are browsing through this piece on a digital device, look at how your fingers move on your scroll button, or on your touchscreen, helping you make sense of complex devices without a second thought.

Habits that are formed through technologies work so seamlessly because they make technologies transparent. They make us forget that there is a complex network of machines, devices, grids and information that shape our lives. Do you remember the time when you came across something online and didn't look for the 'Like' button that is now a part of everyday internet practice? Do you remember the last time you struggled to manage the cursor on your screen using a mouse? Do you realise how the mouse has already become obsolete and is now being replaced by other touch-and-flick devices for a new generation?

I recently encountered this habit when my three-going-on-90-year-old Kindle — the Amazon device I use to read books — fell in the hands of a six-year-old. Like many digital natives of her time, she is unfazed by technology and, as her parents confess, is much better at operating most things digital in the house than them. She thinks nothing of streaming her favourite cartoon show from a website. She is adept at customising the many screens on her father's smartphone and has accepted that specific movements of her fingers will produce information on brightly-lit touchscreens.

However, when she used my non-backlit, non-touch Kindle that requires buttons to be pushed, she faced acute frustration. After trying to scroll, flick, activate, zoom and pinch on the screen she flung it at me, bewildered and angry that her habits were suddenly redundant and challenged. I want to use this moment of reflection to understand how technologies are integral to our ways of living. Technologies are habits. You don't need to be online 24x7, constantly upgrading yourself to the latest version of Android to interact with technology. Instead, we need to think about technologies as outlets that allow us to think about who we are and how we relate to the world around us.

One way of looking at technology as habits is to see how we have started thinking of ourselves through metaphors of the machines that we use. For example, it's quite common to hear people complain about "lack of bandwidth" to describe busy schedules. We now think of ourselves as systems that need upgrading. Life has long been lived on windows through which we recycle ourselves.

If technologies are such an inseparable part of ourselves, maybe it is time to stop making a distinction between the human and the technological. It is time to stop thinking about technologies only in terms of gadgets that can be removed from our biological assemblage. And indeed, if we are ready to recognise these technologies as a part of being human, then we need to think of technology politics in a new way. The questions around piracy, privacy, intellectual property, proprietary technologies, openness, etc. which are relegated to the digital world are also questions of us. They are not external problems but are centrally shaping how we construct ourselves as humans. Through habits.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-may-12-2013-nishant-shah-its-common-practice

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 1) - Christopher Soghoian

purba — 2013-07-12T10:26:59Z

CIS interviews Christopher Soghoian, cybersecurity researcher and activist, as part of the Cybersecurity Series

"We live in a surveillance state. The government can find out who we communicate with, who we talk to, who we are near, when we are at a protest, which stores we go to, where we travel to... they can find out all of these things. And it's unlikely it's going to get rolled back, but the best we can hope for is a system of law where the government gets to use its powers only in the right situation." – Christopher Soghoian, American Civil Liberties Union.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its first installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

In this installment, CIS interviews Christopher Soghoian, a privacy researcher and activist, working at the intersection of technology, law and policy. Christopher is the Principal Technologist and a Senior Policy Analyst with the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Christopher is based in Washington, D.C. His website is http://www.dubfire.net/

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-1-christopher-soghoian

Pleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law

namita — 2011-08-02T08:37:23Z

In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.

When Justicia, blindfolded, cannot see the profane …

In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity (1). Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, I would like to explore certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncover the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.

For instance, in the case of Fatima Riswana V. Chennai & Ors. (2) both the public prosecutor and counsel for the petitioners applied to the court for transfer to another (male) judge, to save the District Lady Judge from embarrassment. The order for transfer was passed, so that the District Lady Judge does not have to view certain CDs that are part of the evidence. The justification for this is that the 'said trial would be about the exploitation of women and their use in sexual escapades by the accused, and the evidence in the case is in the form of CDs, viewing of which would be necessary in the course of the trial; therefore, for a woman Presiding Officer it would cause embarrassment'.

This is a rather obvious case, where explicit and pornographic material is made to disappear before the eyes of the law, gesturing towards the larger complicity that allows society and law to create a ruckus about Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty’s kiss, HBO's English movie channel, dance bars and other such aspects of the sleazy modernity that we inhabit (3), but simultaneously is oblivious to circulation of pornography, both online and offline.

In a rather confrontational visual juxtaposition, I place Savita Bhabhi alongside Husain’s Mother India, to be able to ask several questions, including the question of which one’s existence has been more threatened by the law. There is almost no doubt about it; Savita Bhabhi’s chequered career as a slutty housewife has been marred only by two scandals (and several almost patriotic accounts of India having finally arrived (4)) – once when a child sent an MMS about his teacher and it made references to Savita Bhabi, which led to some mention of action that might be taken against the website (5), and another time when Karan Johar (Mid Day, Delhi – 31 March 2009) remarked that one of the characters, Jeet, has a look similar to that given to Amitabh Bachchan in 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', and this might be a case of copyright infringement. Neither of these have resulted in any serious charge against the alleged anonymous producers, Indian Porn Empire, or what is more probable, the blocking of the website regardless of whether the producers/creators can be found and prosecuted. However Husain’s untitled painting, which surfaced on a website for an auction for victims of a Kashmir earthquake in 2006 (two years after it was first sold by the painter), was dragged to court on serious charges of obscenity, which fortunately led to a rather progressive judgment on obscenity by the Delhi High Court.

Returning to the two images of nude women, obscenity law in India has laid down that “nudity in art and literature is not per se evidence of obscenity”. As stated in the judgment that dealt with the circulation of Hussain’s untitled painting (later titled 'Bharat Mata') 'the work as a whole must be considered, the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort'. What renders an object obscene is the transaction rather than the text -- a transaction involving the depiction-consumption of the female body , and the sexualisation of the viewer who in turn sexualises the object. It is not just that the painting/image may already be sexualized but also that the public is in turn sexualised by looking at it (and sexualises it with its gaze), thus making them vulnerable to the perversion that is modernity itself and the pornographic gaze (Nitya Vasudevan and Namita A. Malhotra, State of Desire - Unpublished article). To put it simply, the anxiety of the state is not just about the object, but also about its circulation in the public, and the meanings it acquires through these series of transactions.

Legal and public discourse is often obsessed with the various meanings that become possible because of the placing of this naked body - or the transactions of this naked body with the context, background, narrative that it is placed in. Though seemingly sexualised already as a naked body (this can be refuted not only by the Indian court but various examples in art, religious architecture, etc.) the meanings it may carry are further complicated when it is placed in a pornographic comic online, bearing a crown and saying 'I will be Miss India', or as a faceless hazy outline in the foreground of the map of India. Hussain’s depiction of the naked woman on the map of India, embodying India (in pain or anger) carries many jostling, conflicting meanings. Inspite of the furore over the painting, the High Court finally held that the painting was not obscene, stating that the intention of the painter was to evoke sympathy for a woman – indeed a nation – in distress (6) . However what is intriguing, is that Savita Bhabi’s body, her markings of Indian-ness, her poses and postures are not examined to that extent either by the court or the public.

Pornography, as obscenity in its aggravated form or explicit depiction of sexual acts without a relevant or coherent narrative, has been dropped from both legal discourse and academic and cultural analysis--is it possible to surmise that this has happened because it can be read as a blank slate, a place where meanings cannot be read, felt or inferred? Pornographic movies are spliced into mainstream films, circulate surreptitiously through video stores, piracy markets or though online spaces that cannot be easily accessed because of regulations and filters in most places –- colleges, homes, schools, offices, cybercafes (7) etc. Can we surmise that the transaction of the sexualized gaze with the obscene object has been, in this way, so removed from public gaze that it does not merit discomfort and anxiety for the state or public, unless it nefariously slips into public discourse (DPS MMS, Noida MMS, Mysore Mallige)? As long as it is a secretive (even if mass) consumption, it does not disturb the heternormative familiar and familial in the manner that an object whose obscenity is not quite obvious or clear does – for example, HBO's English movie channel (8).

In this context, let us look at an excerpt from the progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, which demonstrates the extent to which the court has to read the meanings of an image to determine whether it is obscene or not, but simultaneously, by not ever having to interact with a pornographic text, the court (or the public) does not have to see that there are many meanings embedded in such an image as well.

'One of the tests in relation to judging nude/semi nude pictures of women as obscene is also a particular posture or pose or the surrounding circumstances which may render it to be obscene, but in the present painting, apart from what is already stated above, the contours of the woman’s body represent nothing more than the boundaries/map of India.

Even if a different view had to be taken that if the painter wanted to depict India in human form, it may have been more appropriate to cloth the woman in some manner may be by draping a sari or by a flowing cloth etc., but that alone cannot be made a ground to prosecute the painter. There can be a numbers of postures or poses that one can think of which can really stimulate a man’s deepest hidden passions and desires. To my mind, art should not be seen in isolation without going into its onomatopoetic meaning and it is here I quote Mr. Justice Stewart of the US Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964) who defined ‘obscenity’ as, “I will know it when I see it”. The nude woman in the impugned painting is not shown in any peculiar kind of a pose or posture nor are her surroundings so painted which may arouse sexual feelings or that of lust in the minds of the deviants in order to call it obscene. The placement of the Ashoka Chakra or the States in the painting is also not on any particular body part of the woman which may be deemed to show disrespect to the Ashoka Chakra/States and the same was conceded by the learned counsel for the respondent during the course of the arguments advanced.

It is possible that some persons may hold a more orthodox or conservative view on the depiction of Bharat Mata as nude in the painting but that itself would not suffice to give rise to a criminal prosecution of a person like the petitioner who may have more liberal thoughts in respect of mode and manner of depiction of Bharat Mata.' (9)

A body that doesn’t carry inscriptions of cities on different body parts, but is definitely inscribed as Indian is that of Savita Bhabi – from the mangalsutra that never comes off even during doggy-style sex, the sari that slips off rather easily, the bindi, the gestures and mannerisms, to the stories that place her in sexual encounters with familiar people – the bra salesman, the old boyfriend, the cousin, the doctor, the woman colleague, the boss, the aging star and many others.

Savita Bhabhi thus carries as many confusing, jostling meanings as a pornographic text. For instance, she refers to recession and aspirations to become Miss India. She ventures into the fantasy world of her fans, since many of her stories are drawn from their stories on the Savita Bhabi website and fansite –- whether these stories are make-believe or true is irrelevant. These resonances of the text beyond mere sexual arousal are obvious. Even if one were to ignore Linda Williams (10) and inferences from Foucault that pornography becomes one of the many forms in which knowledge of pleasure is organised, it is obvious that from varied perspectives within film studies and legal studies, pornography merits examination. Williams' point also seems to provide some insight into why pornographic circulation doesn't merit much anxiety from the state or in the law; if pornography is organised in consonance with the heteronormative familiar and familial and accessible primarily by men, then maybe it is not such a big surprise that the state or the law is not really invested in controlling pornography, since pornography itself is controlling modes of sexuality and/or sexual expression.

Returning to the comparison, Hussain's untitled nude body on the map of India is literally marked. She carries these inscriptions -- Gujarat on one breast, Bangalore between her thighs, Chennai on her calves, Goa on her hip. Savita Bhabi is marked by her sari, her bindi, her blouse, her aesthetic sense, her fantasies of film stars, her stories of encounters in dressing rooms and myriad other recognizable details -- that mark her as Indian, or at least as living in India, in an Indian (albeit a privileged fair North Indian) body. However, it is Husain's untitled painting -- not called Bharat Mata (and the painting doesn't seem to signify a maternal relation but that of a wounded woman or pained woman) -- that goes to court on charges of obscenity.

Before looking at the few judgments that deal with the actual pornographic text, I take a detour to look at another iconic female figure -- that of Justice. Though clothed, she is blindfolded, so as to be able to discern even a fraction of a slip in the scales of justice; visual cognition would not be sufficient for her to recognise such a slip. As explained by Costas Douzinas, ('The Legality of the Image, lecture – December, 1999), ‘Justice must be blindfolded to avoid the temptation of facing the concrete person and putting individual characteristics before the abstract logic of the institution'. Martin Jay traces the trajectory of how justice became blindfolded through the ages, in the article 'Must Justice Be Blind' (11). Justice was initially wide-eyed and alert; she was blindfolded by the Fool in a period when corruption of the rulers was rampant; she was immortalised by Vermeer as staring at empty scales; and in a transitory state before being completely blinded she had two heads, with a pair of eyes that could see, and a pair that was blindfolded -- shielded, maybe, from the profane and from embarrassment.

I look at this blindness of the judicial system that allows pornography to circulate, while pinning down the obscene and examining minutely its various meanings. The obscene ('Satyam Shivam Sundarmam', 'Prajapati' – a Bengali magazine which carries short stories, 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover', 'Bandit Queen') is examined firstly, for whether it is so gross, though grossness or vulgarity as such is not enough to establish obscenity. And secondly, for whether it has the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences and into whose hands -- or rather, vision -- such an object might fall (this is what allows for the circulation in limited publics -- adult audiences, time slots on television).

Hard and Near Hard Pornography: Close Encounters of the Law with the Profane

In the case of Anonymous vs. the Commissioner Of Police (12), yet another encounter takes place between the embarrassed law and the pornographic text. The excerpt below describes the encounter of two women advocates asked by the court to examine what movies are being exhibited at a specific theatre. In the peculiar clash of social mores, that ensure who has access to pornography, and the law, that ensures equal access to all legally sanctioned media to everyone, the movie theatre was held responsible for violating the fundamental right of women to have access to their premises -- and thus access to pornography.

'We approached the booking counter of Rs. 20/- and asked for tickets. The booking clerk first informed us that it is an English movie and it is not meant for ladies to view. When we insisted for tickets, he asked us to come inside the booking room from the main entrance of the theatre. When we were entering the theatre, the gate-man informed us that ladies are not permitted as it is a "SEX MOVIE".

However, we walked into the booking room. Booking clerk issued us Box-A tickets and further asked us to see the Manager before taking seats. We did not see the Manager but directly went to Box-A and took seats. Even the Box-A doorman asked us to leave the theatre advising us that we being ladies cannot see it as the movie is a "SEX MOVIE". When the movie began at 12.00 P.M. simultaneously the Manager along with two men switched on the lights in Box-A and asked us to leave the hall immediately. Since he repeatedly insisted us to leave, we both came out of Box-A. On coming out we enquired as to why we should not see the movie, to which the Manager replied that it is a "BF". On asking for further clarification of "BF", the Manager stated that it means "BLUE FILM". When we asked him to identify himself, he informed us that he is Mr. Prasad, Manager of the Theatre, as such he has every right to ask us to leave. When we asked as to how it was not advertised that the movie is meant for men only, he retorted that "It is understood that whenever English movies are played in this theatre, ladies are strictly not permitted." As such we were forced to leave the theatre immediately.'

The question before the court was whether the films exhibited in this theatre were being exhibited in accordance with the censor certificate or whether there was any tampering; whether there was any other device or contrivance to interpolate or intermingle blue films with any otherwise innocent-looking film. Here, though the court had taken it upon itself to address the pornographic text, it ran into a series of complications when merely trying to access the text or the evidence itself, as two women advocates were sent to determine if there was an illegal film exhibition taking place. Pornography seems to be continuously disappearing even on the rare occasion when it is addressed directly by the court, especially in the court's attempt to precisely locate the moment of transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object.

The court, when allowed to examine the film exhibited, found that it was 'a hotch potch of short films, advertisement films, party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature film bits'. (13) The court finally located the pornographic segments (squeezing breasts in a tub, cunnilingus, brutal murder scene) and the court’s comment was that 'normal scenes were replaced by sexy scenes'. The recommendation of those who examined the films that were ostensibly being spliced into Secret Games 3 and Dark Dancers is that, 'The only course proper is not to permit entry into the country for such films which prima facie may be classified hard or near-hard'. Though the term near-hard is amusing and unique classification of pornography, maybe it's a Freudian slip by a judicial system caught between disgusted arousal and embarrassment.

Finally, in this judgment, the court had to acknowledge its own blindness -- that there is ‘some hole somewhere in the system so that even excised portions by the Censor Board of the films have found their way to the theatres’, including portions that were never passed through the censor certification process at all.

Whose Hard-On (or Near Hard-On) Are We Looking for: The Law in Its Search for the Profane

In 2005, two teenagers frolicking were captured on a mobile phone camera, and the clip circulated first through mobile phones and then subsequently on the internet. The clip sparked off a phenomenon of hidden camera and mobile phone clips -- a booming pornographic enterprise now on the internet. For a split second, it seemed as though any kind of desire could become pornographic, captured in an ubiquitous medium and transmitted throughout the country. That thrill and anxiety was possibly grasped at slightly in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D, where Chanda -- the prostitute, or the other of the good girl -- is the one depicted as the unknown girl who was part of the MMS clip. Very few films have been able to grasp the visceral embarrassment and immediacy of desire as Dev.D does, and it is possibly not the story of Chanda, but that of Paro that achieves this. Paro, who sends nude pictures of herself across continents; Paro, the cyber-sexer; Paro, the entirely relatable slut who cycles with a mattress across fields of mustard in small town Punjab because she desires sex.

After three and a half years (countless MMSs, one movie reference, and a few academic articles later) the court passes judgment in this case – of who possibly can be held liable for the circulation of the MMS clip online, and specifically its sale on Bazee.com (an eBay subsidiary) by an IIT student (Avnish Bajaj vs State on 29/5/2008 by Muralidhar J.). In this case, it is not the pornographic text that keeps slipping and eluding the grasp of the court; the problem is in the inability, especially in the age of the internet, to fix the transactions around such an object that is rapidly changing hands and circulating at an exponential speed through the internet.

The court is in a bind -- the wrong person is accused. Not the corporate body of Bazee but the CEO of Bazee himself (the boy is a juvenile so is facing lesser charges in the juvenile court). The court has the responsibility to fix the blame of the circulation of the obscene object on Avinash Bajaj, without being able to establish that there is any knowledge on his part about the existence of the clip. Though the court was able to establish that there was negligence on the part of Bazee in running the website (in spite of notification, the clip remained on sale for a whole working day after the complaint), and that the filters used by Bazee were obviously inadequate to control what is sold through the website, it was still not possible to find the CEO liable for obscenity charges. If the company had been charged, this would have been possible. Eventually, even though obscenity as a charge couldn’t stick, similar provisions in the IT Act (Section 67 read with Section 85) were used to charge Avinash Bajaj himself, as opposed to Bazee (the corporate body or the company itself).

Here again the court is forced to confront a pornographic text only in instances where there has been a public furore around it, and the eventual judgment is not likely to be able to even remotely address the phenomenon of MMS clips and hidden camera footage from cybercafes and hostels that has been spawned as a result of this incident. The slippery transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object is difficult to fix though in a different way from the earlier judgment – here the pornographic nature of the text is understood rather than examined, more for its violation of privacy than actual elements of obscenity. But it is still hard to determine for the law, especially with the internet, how and by whom has circulation of the pornographic object has taken place and to fix these transactions to ensure legal culpability.

*****
Curiously this tale of women advocates and judges as representatives of law and justice, who are averting their gaze from the pornographic text or find that the text is constantly eluding their legal stare, must deal in its closure with the figure of the male judge. Anne McClintock’s male judge in her article ‘Screwing the System’ (14) is a judge who gets a hard-on each time he sentences a prostitute -- a judge who otherwise pays to be beaten by the very same prostitutes. The Hidayatullah paradox of obscenity law is that the judge who decides on obscenity has to decide on the basis of whether he is affected, or rather aroused -- and if he is turned on, then how is he any longer the reasonable judge, or even the 'reasonable man' who can be expected to pass judgment with the dispassionate authority of law? The work of both Shrimoyee N. Ghosh (on the dance bar judgment) and Lawrence Liang (on cinema and the law) on the relation between law and affect, gestures towards an interesting puzzle for us to consider here: if we could look into the eyes of justice, if she were not blindfolded, what would we see? And is the purpose of the blindfold indeed to prevent us from observing the affective life of law itself – its arousal, disgust and embarrassment?

Endnotes:

1. Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra. Only in the recent fairly progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, that held eventually after examining it, that it was not obscene, was there an attempt at giving some distinction to the category of pornography apart from it being an aggravated form of obscenity and to say that it, as a class of objects, images, paintings, videos, is designed for sexual arousal, while other material which may or may not be obscene is meant to have other meanings. Such reading of the author’s intentions is a convoluted way of restating Justice Potter’s statement – 'I know it (hard core), when I see it'.
2. Fatima Riswana v. State Rep. By A.C.P., Chennai & Ors.Case No.: Appeal (crl.) 61-62 of 2005
3. -'…in a clear shift of subject matter, what we are now seeing is an explicitly politicized moral censor looking at all this—looking not so much at the sex industry as at society-in-general, at society itself now theatricalised into a morbid stage of sleaze'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his essay ‘Is Realism Pornographic?,’ which deals with the writings of Pramod Navalkar, former Minister for Culture in Maharashtra, points to how explicit or hard-core pornography does not seem to be the concern as much as a whole range of practices attached to the phenomenon of modernity
4. Anastasia Guha, The Beatitudes Of A Bountiful Bhabhi, Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 19, Dated May 17, 2008. Available online at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=hub170508the_beatitudes.asp
5. Savitha Bhabi threatened, http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3476748.cms
6. For instance, the court held that in Bandit Queen, the nudity during the sequence of rape and torture of Phoolan Devi is necessary in the narrative and essential for the impact and the moral that the story is trying to convey – her anger with the upper caste feudal landlords and her quest for justice become identifiable for the viewer, and hence the nudity is in fact necessary in the story, and has no ‘tendency to deprave or corrupt’.
7. The regulation of cybercafes takes place in a manner reminiscent of how cinema spaces such as movie theatres were sought to be regulated by the colonial law. Current laws demand placing of computers so monitors face outward, use of identity cards for every visit, data retention for at least a month for most users, etc.
8. Though the latter might be a valid assumption (and certainly beneficial for us) it is an assumption whose presumptuous certainties are shaken in the age of the internet, especially that primarily men access pornography and cyber sex through these newly opening up online spaces.
9. Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey CRL. REVISION PETITION No. 114/2007. Decided on 08-05-2008

10. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989
11. Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead (Eds), Law and the Image: the Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. University of Chicago Press, 1999
12. Anonymous Letter-Un-Signed vs The Commissioner Of Police And Others on 26 December, 1996
13. For a judicial system that is invested in narrative film or narrative structure for reasons of copyright law (see generally Anne Baron, The Legal Property of Film) or for aesthetic reasons, as is evident from the judgment in Bandit Queen (that held nudity when she was paraded naked in front of the villagers to not be obscene because those scenes are needed for a narrative impact – for people to feel moved and disgusted by Phoolan Devi’s plight) it must also be a different kind of horror to find films chopped up into twenty sundry pieces, the last piece thrown somewhere else.
14. Anne McClintock, Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), 70-95.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography

Pleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects

namita — 2011-08-02T08:35:20Z

In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn.

The etymology of fetish derives from the word fetico (Portuguese) which means sorcery or magic arts. In 1760, it was used to refer to primitive religions, especially in relation to the growing project of imperialism. In 1867, Marx coined the term commodity fetishism – using the implied meaning of primitive magic to express the central social form of modern industrial economy, whereby the social relation between people metamorphoses into the relation between things. It was only after this, in 1905, that Freud transferred the word, with all these meanings still clinging to it, to the realm of sexuality and perversions. As Anne McClintock points out, in her useful account and re-understanding of the fetish in the book Imperial Leather (ii), psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Marxism all take shape around the invention of the primitive fetish, which conveniently displaces what the modern mind cannot accommodate onto the invented domain of the primitive. She states that the not-so-concealed rationale of imperialism is fetishism. Fetishists (racial, sexual and other) became a mode of warranting and justifying conquest and control -- whether it was the policing of sexual fetishism for control of classes in Europe and colonies, or the invention of racial fetishism central to the regime of imposing sexual surveillance in the colonies. The imperial discourse on fetishism became a discipline of containment (iii) .

On the other hand in the realm of sexuality, fetish becomes a question of male sexuality alone -- male perversion par excellence. There are no female fetishists, either for Freud or Lacan, for to speak of female fetishism would involve displacing the basic precepts of psychoanalysis -- namely the scene of castration leading to phallic fetishism. However, McClintock points to the usefulness of studying female fetishism, as it allows for certain things to happen. First, it dislodges the centrality of the phallus in this discourse, which surprisingly makes way for the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs, and contradictions that can’t be resolved or reduced merely to the desire to preserve the phallus. Very often, feminists such as McClintock read the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of the phallus as itself a fetishistic nostalgia for a single, male myth of origins and fetishistic disavowal of difference. Such a notion of fetish, embedded in phallic theory, gets easily reduced to sexual difference and does not allow/admit race or class as crucially formative categories as well; thus, race and class remain continuously of secondary status in the primarily sexually signifying chain.

“The racist fetishizing of white skin, black fetishizing gold chains, the fetishizing of black dominatraces, lesbians, cross dressing as men the fetishizing of national flags, slave fetishism, class cross-dressing, fetishes such as nipple clips and bras in male transvestism, leather bondage, PVC fetishism, babyism and so on -- these myriad different deployments of fetishistic ambiguity cannot be categorized under a single mark of desire, without great loss of theoretical subtlety and historical complexity.” Also McClintock points to racist, nationalistic and patriotic fetishes -- such as flags, crowns, maps, swastikas (or for instance chaddis) -- that can’t be simply rendered equivalent to the disavowal of male castration anxiety.

McClintock calls for a renewed investigation of fetishism -- to open it up to a more complex and valuable history in which racial and class hierarchies would play as formative a role as sexuality. Rejecting the Lacanian and Freudian fixation on the phallus as central to psychoanalysis would call for a mutually transforming investigation into the disavowed relations of psychoanalysis and social history. In a way, it would be the bringing together of the varied ways in which fetish has been used -- by Freud (in the domain of psychoanalysis) in the realm of domesticity and the private, and by Marx (in the domain of male socio-economic history) in the realm of the market and possibly in the public. If these meanings were to speak to each other, what we discover is that fetish is in fact the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.

Fetishism involves the displacement onto an object of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions could indeed be social, though lived with profound intensity in the imagination and flesh of the person. The fetish -- rather than being a merely an insignificant sexual or personal practice -- inhabits both personal and historical memory. It marks a crisis in social meaning -- the embodiment of an impossible resolution. This crisis/contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur in compulsive ways. By displacing this power onto the fetish, then manipulating or controlling the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.

The fetish then can be called an impassioned object; something that emerges from a variety of social contradictions, rather than merely from the scene of castration or phallic centric domains. Hence they are neither universal, nor are they entirely about personal histories alone, but are about personal and historical memory or a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level. “As composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction” (McClintock). This reading of fetishism gives rise to far richer possibilities of cultural analysis.

Fetish was neither proper to African or Christian European culture, but sprang into being from an abrupt encounter between two heterogeneous worlds during an era of mercantile capitalism and slavery. At this point it clearly embodies the problem of contradictory social value -- whether it is gold as valuable, or gold as warding off bad luck. Though initially just about heathen customs and rituals, it later also becomes a marking of certain groups of people for conquest. It is from this context that Freud transports the word, laden with meanings of conquest and violence, to the realm of sexuality. Obviously these meanings stain future connotations of fetish, the word fetish itself becoming prey to contradictory meanings of race and sex and difference.

For Freud, the fetish is the embodiment in one object of two positions -- castration and its denial. Though this does capture some sense of the ambiguity that McClintock also refers to, here the meanings oscillate between two, and only two, fixed options (a recurring male economy). The fetish becomes both a permanent memorial to the horror of castration, embodied not in the male but in the female -- as well as a token of triumph, and safeguard against the threat of castration. This has, of course, been critiqued by feminists quite severely. McClintock’s basic argument is that it is indeed hard, considering the varied nature of fetish objects, to find a single originary explanation in the psychic development of the individual -- in a single originary trauma. What is important here, however is to take on this notion of the fetish as an historical enactment of ambiguity itself, and see if as a theoretical concept it has any value to the study of the loose category of Indian porn, especially MMS porn.

Soap in these strange days: fetish objects

“Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness, as the grounds for extensive experience.”
Dana Polan (iv)

Anne McClintock’s work on fetish also looks at the seemingly ubiquitous object of soap as the carrier of many ambiguous meanings around gender, class, imperialism -- both the cult of domesticity (the running of the empire of home with servants, sweepers, cleaners, women, maids etc.) and the cult of new imperialism found in soap in its exemplary mediating form. The story of soap, for McClintock, reveals that fetishism rather than a quintessentially African propensity (belonging in the realm of lands and peoples that were being discovered through imperialism) was in fact central to industrial modernity; fetishism was not original either to industrial capitalism or precolonial economies, but was from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter (between two or more heterogenous cultures) and about rapid changes of modernity, rather than about the ‘primitive’.

Marx says that the mystique of the commodity fetish lies not in its use value, but in its exchange value and its potency as a sign: “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it”. This could be linked to the idea of a mobile phone that is supposed to achieve so much beyond mere communication, at least according to the advertising -- they should mend ruptured relations and homes, get all the hot chicks, grow beautiful gardens, change the boring routine of life. For some time, the Samsung mobile phone ad with Estella Warren played in India, which probably moves the mobile phone with camera out of merely its symbolic use as enhancing attractiveness, to actually ‘getting’ or rather capturing girls by clicking. Magically in the ad, the act of clicking photographs make the girl not just willing, but she also takes the phone and photographs herself. Barring one scary moment when it looks like she might turn into an avenging warrior like Xena or The Bride, but instead she simpers into a loving sexy pose, she is willing. The ad can’t be easily dismissed as misogynistic, but it does give an intriguing glimpse of the intimate pictures and moments that can be captured with a mobile phone.

That a mobile phone is fetishized as a commodity is probably evident, from the rush to get the more enhanced phone with the better camera and features, though mobile phones are also a ubiquitous element of one’s life, in some ways exactly like soap. Probably in a country like India, having a mobile phone can be read as opening up sexual possibilities in a way that wouldn’t be obvious in a more developed country. If the fetish is a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level, then the mobile phone, especially after the DPS MMS clip, is precariously located between the zones of the private and personal, and that which is entirely in the public domain beyond any control of the person(s). This ability of the mobile phone to occupy simultaneous universes because of its interconnectedness in a network, and that it is (for most people now) an entirely personal object with messages, numbers, conversations, images, videos, is what makes it unpredictable.

Looking at MMS porn
“Memories were meant to fade. They were built that way for a reason”
Mace, Strange Days

When looking at MMS porn, I’m irresistibly reminded of the movie Strange Days, in which Angela Basset’s character Mace expresses her frustration with Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes). Lenny is obsessed with preserving memory and accessing other people’s experiences, through what in the movie are called playbacks. Playbacks are recordings of events in the brain that were fed back into brain waves to reproduce the earlier event -- the feelings, the sensations of touch, the smells and not just the visual. Playbacks haven’t been invented yet, but the obsessiveness with which Lenny wheels and deals (he’s also a dealer and collector of playbacks) gives a peculiar insight into how mobile phones are becoming fetish objects of sorts -- particularly MMSs recorded on mobile phones where other people are able to occupy the space of an unknown character that conveniently rarely ever appears on the screen. The famous pornographic ones are the DPS MMS clip and other MMS scandals, including the hidden voyeuristic ones taken without permission, and a precursor of this is Mysore Mallige where the man appears rarely on the screen and only at the end, almost like a signature. In a peculiar way MMS porn becomes like playback from Strange Days, a movie that is attempting to unravel the unknown future mired in technological changes that are messily intertwined with human desire and frailty. A future (set on the date of turning the millennium) that we’ve hopelessly gone past without even asking many of the questions that the characters in the movie pose.

Indian websites advertise MMS scandals as a specific category of pornography. This category also includes genuine MMS clips of celebrities kissing (Kareena Kapoor), wardrobe malfunctions from Fashion Week, and also fake ones with celebrity look-alikes bathing, changing, having sex (Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat). Mostly what is being talked about are videos made on mobile phones by men, who record themselves having sex with ‘gullible’ women. The alleged gullibility of these women is probably essential to the erotic charge of such videos. They are shaky videos, especially when sex is underway, and have a grainy quality that makes them eerily real. Their perspective is usually that of the man who is holding the phone camera and rarely enters the frame himself, whereas the woman is definitely the desirable object that is being captured. Maybe this phenomenon can be understood better if one looks at McClintock’s idea of fetish and whether MMS/images on mobile phones can be located within that category -- whether the ambiguous nature of the video or image recorded on the mobile phone and its ability to be an intensely personal and private object and also to be so easily transmitted into networks signifies a crisis in social meanings around private and public. The mobile phone then merely becomes an object onto which this anxiety is displaced, and the recording of images repeatedly (and anxieties and fears triggered when they accidentally slip into the public domain) are ways of trying to control terrifying ambiguities over the private and the public (where aspects of sexuality, family and selfhood could be calamitously disrupted by a slip between the two categories). (v)

In a strange way this is a parable for a larger phenomenon of pornographic circulation and the law, as well. The mass circulation of pornography is perceived as a private secret that is kept by all, and whenever there is slip between the two categories, the law and public discourse are barely able to deal with the furore of anxieties. And if not, then the law and public discourse proceed to deal with the banal unbuttoning of Akshay Kumar’s jeans by his wife as obscenity in courtrooms, as if we hadn’t all imagined an MMS that allowed us to be doing the same.

i. Anne Mcclintok’s work on sadomasochism illuminates some of the arguments that I make in relation to sexual subjectivity and the state’s interests and desires in policing it. (unpublished article for book on queer issues and the law). Her work borrows from notions developed by Foucault. “Sadomasochism plays social power backwards, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the centre of western reason.” The analysis of sexual subjectivity and State’s interest in it also looks at the judgment on sadomasochism by the House of Lords, England that declares such activities that cause severe injuries and maim the body, as illegal, regardless of consent of parties.
ii. Anne Mcclintok, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, 1995.
iii. Ibid
iv. Cited from Laura Mulvey, Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture, October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20.

v. As in the story of Chanda in Dev.d loosely inspired from the DPS MMS clip incident

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish

The Future of the Moving Image

nishant — 2008-11-11T09:06:57Z

All dissimilar technologies are the same in their own way, but all similar technologies are uniquely different. This was probably at the core of the zeitgeist at the international seminar on “The Future of Celluloid” hosted by the Media Lab at the Jadavpur University, Kolkata, at which Nishant Shah, Director - Research CIS, presented a research paper. Practitioners, film makers, artists, theoreticians and academics, blurring the boundaries of both their roles and their disciplines and areas of interest, came together to move beyond convergence theories – to explore the continuities, conflations, contestations and confusions that Internet Technologies have led to for earlier technologies, but specifically for the technology of the moving image.

How Digital Cinema changes the notion of authorship...

The concerns that emerged at the Jadavpur University Media Lab's international seminar on The Future of Celluloid, were manifold and not confined to cinema or the moving image. These are concerns that are voiced on all realms of cultural production, where the traditional forms feel stranded at digital intersections, threatened by the emergence of new cultural productions which are so much more quintessentially the form and ideal that the traditional forms aspired to.

The blog, as we saw at the “Writing the Future Conference” was seen as a threat and more fundamentally replacing the novel form. Ars electronica or digital music has long since played the swan song of traditional orchestration practices. Similarly, the digital film (often broadcast on video sharing spaces like YouTube and MySpace) or even mainstream feature films that embody digital technologies of hypervisualisation, show necessarily more than celluloid could ever capture. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha pointed out, “The capacity to pay almost infinite attention to the celluloid image was made possible only with the digitisation of the celluloid image”.

Through the different presentations, this strain of thought was apparent – will we lose celluloid altogether? Is the future of cinema going to be in infantile pre-lapsarian representations of smiling/dancing/gurgling babies and furry pets made by indulgent mothers and doting pet owners? When cinema transitions from deep celluloid to shallow pixels, will the loss in depth also result in the death of meaning and processes of reading the image? And finally, the question that seems to surface, sometimes in the guise of academic concern, sometimes in the shape of alarm and anxiety, and sometimes in the form of paranoia and raging uncertainty: “Is this the end of Celluloid? “ to which Matt Hanson, who presented his open source film A Swarm of Angels, nuancedly added: "Only the end of celluloid as we know it!”

In my presentation titled ´Of Pranksters, Jesters and Clowns – YouTube Videos and Conditions of Collaborative Authorship´ I made a call to identify these questions as symptomatic of another more deep seated anxiety which makes for a fundamental revisiting of the relationship between the author, the text and the reader. Looking particularly at YouTube videos and the kind of arguments that have surrounded them – on copyright, defamation, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, remix, authorship, ownership – I proposed that at the centre of all these anxieties is the question of authorship, what constitutes it and the need to expand the scope of authorship by looking at the series of engagements that happen online.

I presented two cases to make my argument. The first was the case of 13-month-old Holden Lenz, dancing to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy. In February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s family had a digital equivalent of a Kodak moment. Her 13-month-old son Holden, pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, started moving to the addictive rhythms of Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy song and Stephanie recorded him on her digicam. Wanting more of the family to share the joy, she uploaded the video on to YouTube and it was viewed scores of times. Laughs were shared, gaps were bridged, digital technologies brought families scattered across time-zones and lifestyles together.

However, the lawyers at Universal Music did not seem to share the enthusiasm or the joy. They fired off a notice to YouTube asking them to remove the video because it amounted to a copyright infringement. YouTube, fearing legal ramifications, removed the video. Stephanie Lenz approached the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which challenged Universal’s claims that held Lenz liable for up to 150,000 USD in fines for sharing the 29 seconds of her son dancing. While it is very easy to draw the battle-lines and look upon the well educated, highly paid lawyers of Universal as ‘idiots’ who spent probably millions of dollars in starting the legal battle, I think there is more at play here than who is right and who is wrong. What is really being debated, is not whether Lenz indulged in wilful copyright infringement or not, but the questions of who is an author, what are the mechanisms of attribution, and how do we understand these in the complex digital worlds that we populate?

Historically, the author was constructed as a communitarian figure whose work depended on and was enhanced by the collaborations and the collective knowledge of the people s/he interacted with. Chaucer, to quote the most canonical example, for instance, was recognised as the author of The Canterbury Tales only after the print industry finds its footing, thus neglecting the fact that the text was heavily distorted, enhanced, mutated, corrected, revised, edited and transformed by the various users of the manuscripts, who were not merely audience or receptors but also collaborative authors of the text. It is only with the establishment of the cultural industries, that such a fluid understanding of authorship gets crystalised into specific forms of engagement, where the author, the reader, the distributor, the consumer, the audience and the end user are all clearly defined and contained within presumed roles.

It is the blurring of these boundaries in the digital world that leads to the kind of debates that we observe around the Stephanie Lenz case. The inability of the newly emerging digital cultural industry to recognise different forms of engagement – remixing, sampling, embedding, referencing, distributing, editing, etc. – as creative and productive forms of authorship is at the basis of the anxieties that run amok in these debates. My presentation made a call for not only a de-criminalisation of pirate positions in the realm of cultural production, but also to recognise and celebrate the various conditions of collaborative authorship – be it by Holden Lenz who probably made the song twice as popular than it was, or by Avril Lavigne fans who went on a spree to make her song Girlfriend, the first video to be viewed one million times on Youtube – not merely as derivative or acts of prank and jests, but as legitimate and distinctive forms of authorship which expand the scope of the cultural object and give it unprecedented layers of meaning and engagement.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/future-of-the-moving-image

Chutnefying English - Report

nishant — 2009-08-27T06:03:23Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, was an institutional partner to India's first Global Conference on Hinglish - Chutnefying English, organised by Dr. Rita Kothari at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. A photographic report for the event is now available here.

In January of 2009, Dr. Rita Kothari, at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, organised the first global conference called “Chutneyfying English”, calling in various stakeholders from different walks of life – academics, scholars, researchers, actors, cultural producers, authors and consumers to critically examine the growing phenomenon of Hinglish and how it intersects with our globalised lives. The two day conference brought together a series of presentations, ranging from academic papers to lively round table discussions to panels that looked at the different manifestations of Hinglish and the political and aesthetic potential of this particular form. Scholars like Rita Kothari, Harish Trivedi, Nishant Shah, Daya Thussu, Shanon Finch and Rupert Snell were complemented by cultural producers like Nandita Das, R. Raj Rao, and Shuchi Kothari. Literary stakeholders like Urvashi Bhutalia, Bachi Karkaria, and Tej Bhatia rubbed shoulders with more mainstream practitioners like Prasoon Joshi, Mahesh Bhatt and Cyrus Broacha.

The Centre for Internet and Society was an institutional partner for the event, and supported the panel on New Media, which saw four paper presentations and a discussion moderated by Nishant Shah, Director Research at the CIS. The panel explored diverse presentations from Mattangi Krishnamurthy, Pramod Nair and Supriya Gokarn, who looked at the diverse ways in which the rise of Internet and digital technologies is not only changing the ways in which people express themselves, but they are also leading to complex ways in which new conditions of identity, consumption and politics are manifesting themselves. Nishant Shah responded to the panel by positing the idea of Hinglish as a paradigm, rather than a set of characteristics, which goes beyond the questions of language and actually resides in the aesthetic conditions of the internet technologies.

A photographic documentation of the event with an introduction by Dr. Rita Kothari, the chief organiser and curator for the conference is now available for a free download here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/hinglish

WikiWars - A report

nishant — 2010-10-06T11:21:56Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, hosted WikiWars – an international event that brought together scholars, researchers, academics, artists and practitioners from various disciplines, to discuss the emergence and growth of Wikipedia and what it means for the information societies we inhabit. With participants from 15 countries making presentations about Wikipedia and the knowledge ecology within which it exists, the event saw a vigorous set of debates and discussions as questions about education, pedagogy, language, access, geography, resistance, art and subversion were raised by the presenters. The 2 day event marked the beginning of the process that hopes to produce the first critical reader – Critical Point of View (CPOV) - that collects key resources for research and inquiry around Wikipedia.

The debates around Wikipedia, the de facto dynamic knowledge production system online, are very fairly divided into two competing camps. There is a group of people who swear by Wikipedia – celebrating its democratic processes of knowledge production, ease of access, and the de-canonisation of knowledge to produce the ‘WikiWay’; And then there is a group of people who swear at Wikipedia – raising concerns over authenticity, reliability, vulgarisation of knowledge and the de-hierarchisation of knowledge systems that Wikipedia seems to embody. The debates between the two groups are often passionate and situated in wildly speculative and often personal interests and investments in Wikipedia and the Web 2.0 Information Revolution that it seems to be a symptom of. The debates also play out in various international locations, most of them relying on personal anecdotes, experiences and half hearted data that does not stand the tests of rigour.

WikiWars, then, concentrated on things which are about Wikipedia but also not about Wikipedia. In many ways, as Geert Lovink, the Director of INC suggested, WikiWars was a recognition of the fact that Wikipedia has come of age and can now be systematically and philosophically examined as a work in progress that has long-term implications about our future. It was the ambition of the Editorial team (consisting of Geert Lovink, Sabine Nerdeer, Nathaniel Tkacz, Johanna Niyesito, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah) to veer away from the recognised battle-lines drawn in, around and about Wikipedia, and instead examine the fault-lines that run under many of our assumptions, prejudices and imaginations of Wikipedia. And Wikiwars, through careful screening and invested interests, became one of the first platforms in the world to initiate a critical discourse on Wikipedia, seeking to engage with its histories, it contemporary manifestations and practices, and the futures that it seeks to inhabit.

The different presentations brought in located debates, theoretical and philosophical concepts and personal experiences to build frameworks that explain and contextualise Wikipedia as one of the most contested spaces online. The eight panels across two days dealt with four major thematic areas which need to be summarised in brief:

1. Education, Pedagogy and Knowledge: At the very basis of Wikipedia (and other structures like it) is the question of knowledge production, the possibility of using it as an educational tool and the potentials it has for introducing new pedagogies and learning practices in and outside of institutionalised education. Presenters from various disciplines engaged with these questions in interesting ways.

Usha Raman from Teacher Plus in Hyderabad, brought in the question of primary education, the need for teacher training programmes and the ways by which infrastructure development needs to be thought through when talking of Wikipedia and education in the Indian context. The necessity of locating Wikipedia in a much larger debates on learning were also echoed by Noopur Rawal and Srikeit Tadepalli, students from Christ University who brought their experience of Wikipedia and the expectations from classroom education and learning in their presentation.

In the same field, but from a different approach, a panel examined Wikipedia as a site to critique Western Knowledge production systems. Stian Haklev and Johanna Niyesito concentrated on the questions of language and knowledge production. Haklev made an impassioned argument deconstructing the utopian idea of Wikipedia’s multilingual dreams and instead made a call for recognising the black-holes when it comes to non-English production and consumption of knowledge on Wikipedia. He further explored the implications that linguistic imbalance has on the very governance structure of Wikipedia and its communities. Niyesito challenged the ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ image that Wikipedia has built for itself and posited the idea of Wikipedia as a translingual space where different languages and cultures negotiate common understandings and processes of producing knowledge. HanTeng Liao explored knowledge production through the market economy of key-words to see how the linguistic biases of search engines that harvest these keywords, determines the access and visibility of different Wikipedia pages.

Resistance, Diversity and Representation: While these questions were present as undercurrents to most of the presentations at WikWars, they were perhaps most fiercely present in the debates that followed the presentations by Eric Ilya Lee (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), YiPing Tsou (National Central University, Taiwan), William Beutler and Eric Zimmerman (IDC, Israel).

For Lee and Tsou, the responses to the Chinese language Wikipedia from popular media and personal experiences, were demonstrative of the fact that the lack of diverse means of representation and participation lead to a strong resistance of Wikipedia in Taiwan. Beutler looked at the heavily contested editorial space and policies of Wikipedia to make a point about how lack of effective governance systems based on mutual tolerance and diversity lead to stressful and often traumatic experiences for users who might not be represented through the mainstream ideas and ideologies of an English speaking populace.

Zimmerman took a startling position, calling for a regime of attribution and dissolving the pseudonymous structures of knowledge production in Wikipedia in order to build designs of trust and verification into the system, thus leading to better and more credible research tools and representations.

The tone of debates was altered with presentations by Mark Graham (Oxford Research Institute) and the team of artists Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildal, the team responsible for the Wikipedia Art Project. Graham showed the complexity of visualising space and how the production of space (or physical geography) on Wikipedia often reflects the virtual density of access and presence online. Showing a nuanced set of images that help mapping these new geographies for a richer diversity and representation, Graham showed how systems like Wikipedia ‘cannot know what they cannot know’ despite the reliance on the wisdom of crowds.

Stern and Kildall, in giving an account of their project which used Wikipedia’s policies to undermine and challenge it, show how the institutionalisation of a space and its ‘canonisation’ can quickly lead to a new set of problems where the space becomes the very thing it had set itself against.

3. Politics of Free, Open and Exclusion: The rhetoric of free and open have been built into all popular discourses around Wikipedia. However, the presentations at WikiWars showed that these need to be taken with at least a pinch of salt and further examined for what they signify. Alok Nandi of Architempo made a dramatic and creative revisit of these guiding principles of Wikipedia. He showed how an inquiry into rituals of participation, distortion and access on Wikipedia can promote, not merely looking at the politics of exclusion but also at the politics of inclusion and the problems therein.

Dror Kamir’s evocative narrative of ‘Your side, my side and Wikipedia’ illustrated how the question of boundaries, of knowledges, of facts and truths get distorted as language, community, nationality, etc. come into play in recording and documenting knowledge on Wikipedia. Concentrating on conflict zones in the Middle East, he talked about the lack and perhaps the impossibility of producing neutrality the way in which Wikipedia demands of its users. These ideas resonated with the propositions that ShunLing Chen from Harvard had floated in the opening panel to explore the ‘boundary work’ of Wikipedia and how it defines and produces itself in relation to external forces and controversies. These discussions on the politics of presence, absence, inclusion and exclusion were further layered by presentations by Linda Gross, Elad Weider, Heather Ford and Nathaniel Tkacz who produced a critique of the Free and Open, taking a cautionary step away from accepting these as inherently good.

While Gross explored the structure of egalitarianism that Wikipedia builds for itself, Ford presented an analysis of the licensing regimes of the knowledge produced within Wikipedia and the problems they pose to traditional knowledges and non-mainstream information. Weider, trained as a lawyer, critiqued the neo-liberal discourse around Wikipedia and tried to correlate the communities with markets. Tkacz’s historical overview of Free and Open, resulted in a compelling inquiry into the very structures that inform the shape and functioning of objects like Wikipedia.

Twitter: #WikiWars http://twitter.com/wikiwars and www.twitter.com/jackerhack/wikiwars

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30479432@N03/sets/72157623193288710/

CPOV blog : http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/

The videos fom the Wikiwars event are embedded below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep

Critical Point of View: Videos

nishant — 2010-04-20T20:04:31Z

The Second event for the Critical Point of View reader on Wikipedia was held in Amsterdam, by the Institute of Network Cultures and the Centre for Internet and Society. A wide range of scholars, academics, researchers, practitioners, artists and users came together to discuss questions on design, analytics, access, education, theory, art, history and processes of knowledge production. The videos for the full event are now available for free viewing and dissemination.

These are the links to the videos of all the talks for the CPoV Conference
in Amsterdam - Enjoy!


SESSION 1
http://vimeo.com/10605801 Ramon Reichert (AT)
Rethinking Wikipedia: Power, Knowledge and the Technologies of the Self

http://vimeo.com/10606220 Jeanette Hofmann (DE)
Wikipedia between Emancipation and Self-Regulation

http://vimeo.com/10606547 Mathieu O’Neil
(AU) The Critique of Law in Free Online Projects

http://vimeo.com/10696489 Gerard Wormser(FR)
The Knowledge Bar

SESSION 2


http://vimeo.com/10607993 Joseph Reagle (USA)
Wikipedia and Encyclopedic Anxiety

http://vimeo.com/10608291 Charles van den Heuvel (NL)
Authoritative Annotations, Encyclopedia Universalis Mundaneum, Wikipedia
and the Stanford Encycloped

http://vimeo.com/10697853 Dan O’Sullivan (UK)
An Encyclopedia for the Times: Thoughts on Wikipedia from a His- torical
Perspective

http://vimeo.com/10699949 Alan Shapiro (USA/DE)
Gustave Flaubert Laughs at Wikipedia

http://www.vimeo.com/10607690 Discussion session 2 Encyclopedia Histories
Moderaror: Nathaniel Tkacz
Speakers: Joseph Reagle, Charles van den Heuvel, Dan O'Sullivan, Alan Shapiro

SESSION 3

http://www.vimeo.com/10701587 Hendrik-Jan Grievink (NL)
Wiki Loves Art

http://www.vimeo.com/10702729 Scott Kildall (USA)
Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act

http://vimeo.com/10741921 Patrick Lichty (USA)
Social Media, Cultural Scaffolds, and Molecular Hegemonies. Musings on
Anarchic Media, WIKIs, and De-territorialized Art

http://www.vimeo.com/10607690 Discussion session 3 Wiki Art
Moderator: Rachel Somers Miles
Speakers: Hendrik-Jan Grievink, Scott Kildall, Patrick Lichty

SESSION 4

http://vimeo.com/10747211 Felipe Ortega (ES)
New Trends in the Evolution of Wikipedia

http://vimeo.com/10748335 Stuart Geiger (USA)
Bot Politics: The Domination, Subversion, and Negotiation of Code in
Wikipedia

http://vimeo.com/10748727 Hans Varghese Mathews (IN)
Clustering the Contributors to a Wikipedia Page

http://vimeo.com/10748888 Esther Weltevrede  (NL) and Erik Borra (BE/NL)
Controversy Analysis with Wikipedia

http://www.vimeo.com/10749027 Discussion session 4 Wiki Analytics
Moderator: NIshant Shah
Speakers: Felipe Ortega, Stuart Geiger, Hans Varghese Mathews, Esther
Weltevrede & Erik Borra

SESSION 5

http://vimeo.com/10750350 Lawrence Liang (IN)
Wikipedia and the authority of knowledge

http://vimeo.com/10750495 Teemu Mikkonen (FI)
Kosovo War on Wikipedia, Tracing the Conflict and Concensus on the
Wikipedia Talk pages

http://vimeo.com/10799887 Andrew Famiglietti (USA)
Negotiating the Neutral Point of View: Politics and the Moral Economy of
Wikipedia

http://vimeo.com/10772241 Florian Cramer(DE/NL)
The German WikiWars and the limits of objectivism

http://www.vimeo.com/10799600 Discussion session 5 Designing Debate
Moderator: Caroline Nevejan
Speakers: Lawrence Liang, Teemu Mikkonen, Andrew Famiglietti, Florian Cramer

SESSION 6

http://vimeo.com/10772313 Mayo Fuster Morell (IT)
Wikimedia Governance: The Role of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Form
and Geopolitics of its Internationalization

http://vimeo.com/10800562 Athina Karatzogianni (UK)
Wikipedia’s Impact on the Global Power-Knowledge Hierarchies

http://vimeo.com/10800100 Maja van der Velden (NL/NO)
When Knowledges Meet: Database Design and the Performance of Knowledge

http://vimeo.com/10800206 Amit Basole (IN)
Knowledge Satyagraha: Towards a People’s Knowledge Movement

http://www.vimeo.com/10800354 Discussion session 6 Global Issues and Outlooks
Moderator: Johanna Niesyto
Speakers: Mayo Fuster Morell, Athina Karatzogianni, Maja van der Velden,
Amit Basole

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/cpovvid

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation

praskrishna — 2011-07-21T06:00:39Z

Deadline for submission: 26th July 2011-06-08; When: 19th - 22nd August, 2011; Where: Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, Ahmedabad; Organised by: Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Please Note: Travel support is only available for domestic travel within India.

LOCATING INTERNETS is an innovative, multi-disciplinary, workshop that engages with some of the most crucial debates around Internet and Society within academic scholarship, discourse and practice in India. It explores Where, When, How and What has changed with the emergence of Internet and Digital Technologies in the country. The Internet is not a singular monolithic entity but is articulated in various forms – sometimes materially, through accessing the web; at others, through our experiences; and yet others through imaginations of policy and law. Internets have become a part of our everyday practice, from museums and archives, to school and university programmes, living rooms and public spaces, relationships and our bodily lived realities. It becomes necessary to reconfigure our existing concepts, frameworks and ideas to make sense of the rapidly digitising world around us. The Internet is no longer contained in niche disciplines or specialised everyday practices. LOCATING INTERNETS invites scholars, teachers, researchers, advanced research students and educationalists from any discipline to learn and discuss how to ask new questions and design innovative curricula in their discipline by introducing concepts and ideas from path-breaking research in India.

Comprised of training, public lectures, open discussion spaces, and hands-on curriculum building exercises, this workshop will introduce the participants to contemporary debates, help them articulate concerns and problems from their own research and practice, and build knowledge clusters to develop innovative and open curricula which can be implemented in interdisciplinary undergraduate spaces in the country. It showcases the research outputs produced by the Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers @ Work Programme, and brings together nine researchers to talk about alternative histories, processes, and bodies of the Internets, and how they can be integrated into mainstream pedagogic practices and teaching environments.

Knowledge Clusters for the Workshop

LOCATING INTERNETS is designed innovatively to accommodate for various intellectual and practice based needs of the participants. While the aim is to introduce the participants to a wide interdisciplinary range of scholarship, we also hope to address particular disciplinary and scholarly concerns of the participants. The workshop is further divided into three knowledge clusters which help the participants to focus their energies and ideas in the course of the four days.

Bridging the Gap: This workshop seeks to break away from the utopian public discourse of the Internets as a-historical and completely dis-attached from existing technology ecologies in the country. This knowledge cluster intends to produce frameworks that help us contextualize the contemporary internet policy, discourse and practice within larger geo-political and socio-historical flows and continuities in Modern India. The first cluster chartsdifferent pre-histories of the Internets, mapping the continuities and ruptures through philosophy of techno-science, archiving practices, and electronifcation of governments,to develop new technology-society perspectives.
Paradigms of Practice:One of the biggest concerns about Internet studies in India and other similar developed contexts is the object oriented approach that looks largely at specific usages, access, infrastructure, etc. However, it is necessary to understand that the Internet is not merely a tool or a gadget. The growth of Internets produces systemic changes at the level of process and thought. The technologies often get appropriated for governance both by the state and the civil society, producing new processes and dissonances which need to be charted. The second cluster looks at certain contemporary processes that the digital and Internet technologies change drastically in order to recalibrate the relationship between the state, the market and the citizen.
Feet on the Ground: The third cluster looks at contemporary practices of the Internet to understand the recent histories of movements, activism and cultural practices online. It offers an innovative way of understanding the physical objects and bodies that undergo dramatic transitions as digital technologies become pervasive, persuasive and ubiquitous. It draws upon historical discourse, everyday practices and cultural performances to form new ways of formulating and articulating the shapes and forms of social and cultural structures.

Workshop Outcomes

The participants are expected to engage with issue of Internet and it various systemic processes through their own disciplinary interests. Apart from lectures and orientation sessions, the participants will actively work on their own project ideas during the period in groups and will be guided by experts. The final outcome of the workshops would be curriculum for undergraduate and graduate teaching space of various disciplines in the country.

Participation Guidelines

LOCATING INTERNETS is now accepting submissions from interested participants in the following format:

Name:
Institutional affiliation and title:
Address:
Email address:
Phone number:
A brief resume of work experience (max. 350 words)
Statement of interest (max. 350 words)
Key concerns you want to address in the Internet and Society field (max. 350 words)
Identification with one Knowledge-cluster of the workshop and a proposal for integrating it in your research/teaching practice (max. 500 words)
Current interface with technologies in your pedagogic practices (max. 350 words)
Additional information or relevant hyperlinks you might want to add (Max. 10 lines)

Notes:

Submissions will be accepted only from participants in India, as attachments in .doc, .docx or .odt formats at locatingInternets@cis-india.org
Submissions made beyond 26th July 2011 may not be considered for participation.
Submissions will be scrutinized by the organisers and selected participants will be informed by the 30th July 2011, about their participation.
Selected participants will be required to make their own travel arrangements to the workshop. A 2nd A.C. train return fare will be reimbursed to the participants. Shared accommodation and selected meals will be provided at the workshop.
A limited number of air-fare reimbursements will be available to participants in extraordinary circumstances. All travel support is only available for domestic travel in the country.

Chairs: Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore;

Pratyush Shankar, Associate Professor & Head of Undergraduate Program, Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University

Supported by: Kusuma Foundation, Hyderabad

Experts:Anja Kovacs, Arun Menon, Asha Achuthan, Ashish Rajadhykasha, Aparna Balachandran, Namita Malhotra, Nithin Manayath, Nithya Vasudevan, Pratyush Shankar, Rochelle Pinto and Zainab Bawa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop

Whose Change Is It Anyway? | DML2013

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:47:19Z

As a preparation for the DML conference, Nishant Shah had an interview with Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture pioneer, social media innovator, and author of "Smart Mobs. Nishant Shah is chair of 'Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)' track at DML2013. Here, he talks about shifts in citizen engagement in Indian politics and civics, and the underlying significance of these changes.

"More and more, you have young people who are trying to come together, not merely to express discontent, but actually take action so that they can build the kinds of futures they want to occupy."

The 2013 DML conference will be held in March 14-16, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. The conference is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California's systemwide Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.

More details about the DML2013 Conference and the Call For Workshop/Panel/Paper Proposals can be found at the conference website: dml2013.dmlhub.net.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-04-10T09:22:29Z

Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

Introduction

In the 21^st Century, we have witnessed the simultaneous growth of internet and digital technologies on the one hand, and political protests and mobilisation on the other. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are undergoing a significant transition, across in the world, in developed and emerging Information and Knowledge societies.

The young are often seen as forerunners of these changes because of the pervasive and persistent presence of digital and online technologies in their lives. The “ Digital Natives with a Cause?” is a research inquiry that uncovers the ways in which young people in emerging ICT contexts make strategic use of technologies to bring about change in their immediate environments. Ranging from personal stories of transformation to efforts at collective change, it aims to identify knowledge gaps that existing scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital technologies in processes of social and political change.

Methodology

In 2010-11, three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, brought together around 80 people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin America, to explore certain key questions that could provide new insight into Digital Natives research, policy and practice. The workshops were accompanied by a ‘Thinkathon’ – a multi-stakeholder summit that initiated conversations between Digital Natives, academic researchers, scholars, practitioners, educators, policy makers and corporate representatives to share learnings on new questions: Is one born digital or does one become a Digital Native? How do we understand our relationship with the idea of a Digital Native? How do Digital Natives redefine ‘change’ and how do they see themselves implementing it? What is the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social movements? What are the relationships that these technology based identities and practices have with existing social movements and political legacies? How do we build new frameworks of sustainable citizen action outside of institutionalisation?

Rationale

One of the knowledge gaps that this book tries to address is the lack of digital natives’ voices in the discourse around them. In the occasions that they are a part of the discourse, they are generally represented by other actors who define the frameworks and decide the issues which are important. Hence, more often than not, most books around digital natives concentrate on similar sounding areas and topics, which might not always resonate with the concerns that digital natives and other stake-holders might be engaged with in their material and discursive practice. The methodology of the workshops was designed keeping this in mind. Instead of asking the digital natives to give their opinion or recount a story about what we felt was important, we began by listening to their articulations about what was at stake for them as e-agents of change. As a result, the usual topics like piracy, privacy, cyber-bullying, sexting etc. which automatically map digital natives discourse, are conspicuously absent from this book. Their absence is not deliberate, but more symptomatic of how these themes that we presumed as important were not of immediate concerns to most of the participants in the workshop who are contributing to the book.

Structure

The conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class, education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide spectrum of style and content.

Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The first part, To Be, looks at the questions of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations? The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

In the second section, To Think, the contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes, logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.

Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

To Act is the third part that concentrates on stories from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging information and technology contexts.

Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The last section, To Connect, recognises the fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by these new processes of technologised change.

We see this book as entering into a dialogue with the growing discourse and practice in the field of youth, technology and change. The ambition is to look at the digital (alter)natives as located in the Global South and the potentials for social change and political participation that is embedded in their interactions through and with digital and internet technologies. We hope that the book furthers the idea of a context-based digital native identity and practice, which challenges the otherwise universalist understanding that seems to be the popular operative right now. We see this as the beginning of a knowledge inquiry, rather than an end, and hope that the contributions in the book will incite new discussions, invoke cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates, and consolidate knowledges about digital (alter)natives and how they work in the present to change our futures.

Click here to order your copy. We invite readers to contribute reviews of an essay they found particularly interesting. Contact us: nishant@cis-india.org and fjansen@hivos.nl if you want more information, resources, or dialogues

Nishant Shah

Fieke Jansen

For media coverage and book reviews, read here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook

Re:wiring Bodies - Dr. Asha Achuthan

nishant — 2011-09-21T07:23:44Z

First draft of the monograph on "Rewiring Bodies" by Dr. Asha Achutan; format for Microsoft Office users

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 8) - Jeff Moss

purba — 2013-07-30T09:25:44Z

CIS interviews Jeff Moss, Chief Security Officer for ICANN, as part of the Cybersecurity Series.

"Most consumers don't understand the privacy trade offs when they browse the web... the data that is being collected about them, the analytics that is being run against their buying behaviour, it is invisible... it is behind the scenes... and so it is very difficult for the consumer to make an informed decision." - Jeff Moss, Chief Security Officer, ICANN.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its eighth installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

In this installment, CIS interviews Jeff Moss. Jeff is the chief security officer for ICANN. He founded Black Hat Briefings and DEF CON, two of the most influential information security conferences in the world. In 2009, Jeff was sworn in as a member of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council (DHS HSAC), providing advice and recommendations to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security on matters related to domestic security.

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-8-jeff-moss

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 2) - Ram Mohan

purba — 2013-07-12T10:27:26Z

CIS interviews Ram Mohan, a pioneer in the field of Internet security and internationalization, as part of the Cybersecurity Series

"In the Indian context, I think the government does have a significant responsibility to protect its citizenry from cybercrime. There is a greater need for the government to work with private industries as well as academic institutions to ensure a strong understanding of the threats unique to India. After all there are many threats that either originate in the context of the Indian sub-continent and are specific to India." - Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President, & Chief Technology Officer of Afilias Limited.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its second installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

In this installment, CIS speaks to Ram Mohan, a pioneer in the field of Internet security and internationalization. Ram Mohan is Executive Vice President, & Chief Technology Officer of Afilias Limited. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-2-ram-mohan