Centre for Internet and Society

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 3) - Eva Galperin

purba — 2013-08-01T09:55:23Z

CIS interviews Eva Galperin, Global Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

"It is a vital tool for speaking truth to power. Unless you are able to speak anonymously, you are not really free to espouse unpopular ideas to people who have the power to do bad things to do... I think the value of anonymous speech vastly outweighs the difficulties that you can sometimes get into because people can speak anonymously. And on the whole, I think anonymity is worth protecting." - Eva Galperin, Global Policy Analyst at EFF.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its third 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 Eva Galperin, the Global Policy Analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).She has worked for the EFF in various capacities for the last five years, applying the combination of her political science and technical background to organizing activism campaigns, and doing education and outreach on intellectual property, privacy, and security issues.

EFF homepage: https://www.eff.org/

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-3-eva-galperin

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 4) - Marietje Schaake

purba — 2013-07-12T10:24:14Z

CIS interviews Marietje Schaake, member of the European parliament, as part of the Cybersecurity Series

"It is important that we don't confine solutions in military head quarters or in government meeting rooms but that consumers, internet users, NGOs, as well as businesses, together take responsibility to build a resilient society where we also don't forget what it is we are defending, and that is our freedoms... and we have learned hopefully from the war on terror, that there is a great risk to compromise freedom for alleged security and that is a mistake we should not make again." - Marietje Schaake, member of European parliament.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its fourth 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 Marietje Schaake, member of the European Parliament for the Dutch Democratic Party (D66) with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) political group. She serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, where she focuses on neighbourhood policy, Turkey in particular; human rights, with a specific focus on freedom of expression, Internet freedom, press freedom; and Iran. In the Committee on Culture, Media, Education, Youth and Sports, Marietje works on Europe’s Digital Agenda and the role of culture and new media in the EU´s external actions. In the Committee on International Trade, she focuses on intellectual property rights, the free flow of information and the relation between trade and foreign affairs.

Marietje's website is: http://www.marietjeschaake.eu/

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-4-marietje-schaake

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 5) - Amelia Andersdotter

purba — 2013-08-01T09:54:14Z

CIS interviews Amelia Andersdotter, member of the European parliament, as part of the Cybersecurity Series

"Normally a good security policy will also provide privacy to the citizen that is encompassed by the security policy. So things like encryption, for instance, bring a more secure communication, more private communication, where you are able to interact with other people on equal terms and you don't have to fear outside interference. And that is obviously good for both the individual and for security. But then of course, security policies can be framed in different ways. It depends on who you are trying to protect with the security policy. Are you trying to create a secure situation for a copyright holder, or are you trying to create a secure situation for a law enforcement officer, or for a private citizen?" - Amelia Andersdotter, member of European parliament.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its fifth 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.

Amelia Andersdotter is a Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party in Sweden. She works with industrial policy in the parliamentary committee of Industry, Research and Energy and is a substitute member of the committees for international trade, INTA, and budget control, CONT. Amelia is the Patron of the European Parliament Free Software User Group (EPFSUG), and also works in the delegations for the Andean community and Korean peninsula.

Amelia's website is: http://ameliaandersdotter.eu/

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-5-amelia-andersdotter

The Body in Cyberspace

nishant — 2014-05-13T10:13:22Z

Perhaps one of the most interesting histories of the cyberspace has been its relationship with the body. Beginning with the meatspace-cyberspace divide that Gibson introduces, the question of our bodies’ relationship with the internet has been hugely contested. There have been some very polarized debates around this question.

Where are we when we are online? Are we the person in the chair behind an interface? Are we the avatar in a social networking site interacting with somebody else? Are we a set of data running through the atmosphere? Are we us? Are we dogs? These are tantalising and teasing questions.

Early debates around the body-technology questions were polarized. There were people who offered that the cyberspace is a virtual space. What happens in that make-believe, performative space does not have any direct connections with who we are and how we live. They insisted that the cyberspace is essentially a performance space, and just like acting in a movie does not make us the character, all our interactions on the internet are also performances. The idea of a virtual body or a digital self were proposed, thinking of the digital as an extension of who we are – as a space that we occupy to perform different identities and then get on with our real lives.

Sherry Turkle, in her book Life on the Screen, was the first one to question this binary between the body and the digital self. Working closely with the first users of the online virtual reality worlds called Multiple User Dungeons, Turkle notes how being online started producing a different way of thinking about who we are and how we relate to the world around us. She indicates three different ways in which this re-thinking happens. The first, is at the level of language. She noticed how the users were beginning to think of their lives and their social relationships through the metaphors that they were using in the online world. So, for instance, people often thought of life through the metaphor of windows – being able to open multiple windows, performing multiple tasks and identities and ‘recycling’ them in their everyday life. Similarly, people saying that they are ‘low on bandwidth’ when they don’t have enough time and attention to devote to something, or thinking about the need to ‘upgrade’ our senses. We also are quite used to the idea that memory is something that resides on a chip and that computing is what machines do. These slippages in language, where we start attributing the machine characteristics to human beings are the first sign of understanding the human-technological relationship and history.

The second slippage is when the user start thinking of the avatars as human. We are quite used to, in our deep web lives, to think of machines as having agency. Our avatars act. Things that we do on the internet perform more actions than we have control of – a hashtag that we start on twitter gets used and responded to by others and takes on a life of its own. We live with sapient technologies – machines that care, artificial intelligence algorithms that customise search results for us, scripts and bots that protect us from malware and viruses. We haven’t attributed these kinds of human agencies to machines and technologies in the past. However, within the digital world, there is a complex network of actors, where all the actors are not always human. Bruno Latour, a philosopher of science and technology, posits in his ‘Actor Network Theory’ that the emergence of these non-human actors has helped us understand that we are not only dependent on machines and technologies for our everyday survival, but that many tasks that we had thought of as ‘human’ are actually performed, and performed better by these technologies. Hence, we have come to care for our machines and we also think of them as companions and have intimate relationships with them. And the machines, even as they make themselves invisible, start becoming more personal.

The third slippage that Turkle points out is the way in which the boundaries between the interior and the exterior were dissolved in the accounts of the users’ narratives of their digital adventures. There is a very simplistic understanding that what is human is inside us, it is sacred and organic and emotional. Earlier representational technology products like cinema, books, TV etc. have emphasised this distinction between real life and reel life. No actor is punished for the crime they commit in the narrative of a film. It is not very often that an author claims to be the character in a book. We have always had a very strong sense of distinction between the real person and the fictional person. But within the virtual reality worlds, these distinctions seem to dematerialize. The users not only thought of their avatars as human but also experienced the emotions, frustrations, excitement and joy that their characters were simulating for them. And what is more important, they claimed these experiences for themselves.

Namita Malhotra, who is a legal scholar and a visual artist, in her monograph on Pleasure, Porn and the Law, looks at the way in which we are in a process of data-stripping – constant revelation of our deepest darkest secrets and desires, within the user generated content rubric. Looking at the low-res, grainy videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, which have almost no narrative content and are often empty of sexual content, produce all of us in a global orgiastic setting, where our bodies are being extended beyond ourselves. In the monograph, Malhotra argues that the Internet is not merely an extension but almost like a third skin that we wear around ourselves – it is a wrapper, but it is tied, through ligaments and tendons, to the flesh and bone of our being, and often things that we do online, even when they are not sexual in nature, can become pornographic. Conversely, the physical connections that we have are now being made photographically and visually available in byte sized morsels, turned into a twitpic, available to be shared virally, and disseminated using mobile applications, thus making our bodies escape the biological containers that we occupy but also simultaneously marks our bodies through all these adventures that we have on the digital infobahn.

Case Study: A Rape in Cyberspace
A contemporary of Sherry Turkle, Julian Dibbell, in his celebrated account of ‘A Rape in Cyberspace’[1] describes a case-study that corroborates many of the observations that Turkle posits. Dibbell analyses a particular incident that occurred one night in a special kind of MUD – LambdaMOO (MUD, Object-Oriented) – which was run by the Xerox Research Corporations. A MUD, is a text-based virtual reality space of fluid dimensions and purposes, where users could create avatars of themselves in textual representations. Actions and interactions within the MUD are also in long running scripts of texts. Of course, technically all this means that a specially designed database gives users the vivid impression of their own presence and the impression of moving through physical spaces that actually exists as descriptive data on some remotely located servers. When users log into LambdaMoo, the program presents them with a brief textual description of one of the rooms (the coat closet) in the fictional database mansion. If the user wants to navigate, s/he can enter a command to move in a particular direction and the database replaces the original description with new ones, corresponding to the room located in the direction s/he chose. When the new description scrolls across the user’s screen, it lists not only the fixed features of the room but all its contents at that moment – including things (tools, toys, weapons), as well as other avatars (each character over which s/he has sole control). For the database program that powers the MOO, all of these entities are simply subprograms or data structures which are allowed to interact according to rules very roughly mimicking the laws of the physical world. Characters may leave the rooms in particular directions. If a character says or does something (as directed by its user), then the other users who are located in the same ‘geographical’ region within the MOO, see the output describing the utterance or action. As the different players create their own fantasy worlds, interacting and socialising, a steady script of text scrolls up a computer screen and narratives are produced. The avatars, as in Second Life or even on Social Networking Sites like Orkut, have the full freedom to define themselves, often declining the usual referents of gender, sexuality, and context to produce fantastical apparitions. It is in such an environment of free-floating fantasy and role-playing, of gaming and social interaction mediated by digital text-based avatars, that a ‘crime’ happened. Dibell goes on to give an account of events that unfolded that night. In the social lounge of LambdaMoo, which is generally the most populated of all the different nooks, corners, dimensions and rooms that users might have created for themselves, there appeared an avatar called Dr. Bungle. Dr. Bungle had created a particular program called Vodoo Doll, which allowed the creator to control avatars which were not his own, attributing to them involuntary actions for all the other players to watch, while the targeted avatars themselves remained helpless and unable to resist any of these moves. This Dr. Bungle, through his evil Vodoo Doll, took hold of two avatars – legba and Starsinger and started controlling them. He further proceeded to forcefully engage them in sexually violent, abusive, perverted and reluctant actions upon these two avatars. As the users behind both the avatars sent a series of invective and a desperate plea for help, even as other users in the room (# 17) watched, the Vodoo Doll made them enter into sexually degrading and extremely violent set of activities without their consent. The peals of his laughter were silenced only when a player with higher powers came and evicted Dr. Bungle from the Room # 17. As an eye-witness of the crime and a further interpolator with the different users then present, Dibbell affirms that most of the users were convinced that a crime had happened in the Virtual World of the digital Mansion. That a ‘virtual rape’ happened and was traumatic to the two users was not questioned. However, what this particular incident brought back into focus was the question of space. Dibbell suggests that what we had was a set of conflicting approaches to understand the particular phenomenon: Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba and Starsinger were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr. Bungle for a breach of civility … [R]eal life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any players life, limb, or material well-being…’ The meaning and the understanding of this particular incident and the responses that it elicited, lie in the ‘buzzing, dissonant gap’ between the perceived and experienced notion of Technosocial Space. The discussions that were initiated within the community asked many questions: If a crime had happened, where had the crime happened? Was the crime recognised by law? Are we responsible for our actions performed through a digital character on the cyberspaces? Is it an assault if it is just role playing? The lack of ‘whereness’ of the crime, or rather the placelessness of the crime made it especially more difficult to pin it to a particular body. The users who termed the event as rape had necessarily inverted the expected notion of digital space as predicated upon and imitative of physical space; they had in fact done the exact opposite and exposed digital spaces as not only ‘bleeding into reality’ but also a constitutive part of the physical spaces. Their Technosocial Space was not the space of the LambdaMoo Room # 17 but the physical locations (and thus the bodies, rather than the avatars) of the players involved. However, this blurring was not to make an easy resolution of complex metaphysical questions. This blurring was to demonstrate, more than ever, that the actions and pseudonymous performances or narratives which are produced in the digital world are not as dissociated from the ‘Real’ as we had always imagined. More importantly, the notional simulation of place or a reference to the physical place is not just a symbolic gesture but has material ramifications and practices. As Dibell notes in his lyrical style. ‘Months later, the woman in Seattle would confide to me that as she wrote those words posttraumatic tears were streaming down her face — a real-life fact that should suffice to prove that the words’ emotional content was no mere playacting. The precise tenor of that content, however, its mingling of murderous rage and eyeball-rolling annoyance, was a curious amalgam that neither the RL nor the VL facts alone can quite account for.’ The eventual decision to ‘toad’ Dr. Bungle – to condemn him to a digital death (a death only as notional as his crime) and his reappearance as another character take up the rest of Dibbell’s argument. Dibbell is more interested in looking at how a civil society emerged, formed its own ways of governance and established the space of LamdaMOO as more than just an emotional experience or extension; as a legitimate place which is almost as much, if not more real, than the physical places that we occupy in our daily material practices. Dibbell’s moving account of the entire incident and the following events leading the final ‘death’ and ‘reincarnation’ has now been extrapolated to make some very significant and insightful theorisations of the notions of the body and its representations online. Exercise: Based on this case-study, break into small groups to determine whether a rape happened on cyberspace and how we can understand the relationship of our online personas with our bodies.

Cyberspace and the State

The history of body and technology is one way of approaching the history of the internet. However, as we realise, that more than the management of identity or the projection of our interiority, it is a narrative about governance. How does the body get regulated on the internet? How does it become the structure through which communities, networks, societies and collective can be imagined? The actions and transactions between the internet and the body can also help us to look at the larger questions of state, governance and technology which are such an integral part of our everyday experience of the internet. Questions of privacy, security, piracy, sharing, access etc. are all part of the way in which our practices of cultural production and social interaction are regulated, by the different intermediaries of the internet, of which the State is one.

Asha Achuthan, in her landmark work Re:Wiring Bodies[2] that looks at the history of science and technology in India, shows that these are not new concerns. In fact, as early as the 1930s and 1940s, when the architects of India’s Independence movements were thinking about shaping what the country is going to look like in the future, they were already discussing these questions. It is more popularly known that Jawaharlal Nehru was looking to build a ‘scientific temperament’ for the country and hoping to build it through scientific institutions as well as infrastructure – he is famously credited to having said that ‘dams are the temples of modern science.’ Apart from Nehru’s vision of a modern India, there was a particular conversation between M.K. Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, that Achuthan analyses in great detail. Achuthan argues that the dialogue between Gandhi and Tagore is so couched in ideology, poetry and spirituality that we often forget that these were actually conversations about a technology – specifically, the charkha or the spinning wheel.

For both Gandhi and Tagore, the process of nation building was centred around this one particular charkha. The charkha was the mobile, portable, wearable device (much like our smart phones) that was supposed to provide spiritual salvation and modern resources to overcome the evils of both traditional and conservative values as well as unemployment and production. The difference in Gandhi and Tagore was not whether the charkha – as a metaphor of production and socio-economic organisation – should be at the centre of our discourse. The difference was that Gandhi thought that the usage of charka, complete immersion in the activity, and the devotion to it would help us weave a modern nation For Gandhi, the citizen was not somebody who used the charkha, but the citizen was somebody who becomes a citizen in the process of using the charkha. Tagore, meanwhile, was more concerned about whether we are building a people-centred nation or a technology-centred device. He was of the opinion that building a nation with the technology at its core, might lead to an apocalyptic future where the ‘danavayantra’ or demonic machine might take over and undermine the very human values and ideals that we are hoping to structure the nation through.

If you even cursorily look at this debate, you will realise that the way Gandhi was talking about the charkha is in resonance with how contemporary politicians talk about the powers of the internet and the way in which, through building IT Cities, through foreign investment, through building a new class of workers for the IT industry, and through different confluences of economic and global urbanisation, we are going to Imagine India[3] of the future. Similarly, the caution that Tagore had, of the charkha as superseding the human, finds its echoes in the sceptics who have been afraid that the human is being forgotten[4] in the e-governance systems that are being set up, which concentrate more on management of data and information rather than the rights and the welfare of people.

This historical continuity between technology and governance, also finds theorisation in Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s book The Cultural Last Mile[5] that looks at the critical turns in India’s governance and policy history and how the technological paradigm has been established. Rajadhyaksha opens up the State-technology-governance triad to more concrete examples and looks at how through the setting up of community science centres, the building of India’s space and nuclear programmes, and through on-the-ground inventions like radio and chicken-mesh wire-loops, we have tried to reinforce a broadcast based model of governance. Rajadhyaksha proposes that the earlier technologies of governance which were at our disposal, helped us think of the nation state through the metaphor of broadcast. So we had the State at the Centre, receiving and transmitting information, and in fact managing all our conversation and communication by being the central broadcasting agency. And hence, because the state was responsible for the message of the state reaching every single person, but also responsible that every single person can hypothetically communicate with every other single person, the last mile became important. The ability to reach that last person became important. And the history of technology and governance has been a history of innovations to breach that last mile and make the message reach without noise, without disturbance, and in as clean and effective a way as possible.

With the emergence of the digital governance set up, especially with the building of the Unique Identity Project,[6] we now have the first time when the government is not concerned about breaching the last mile. The p2p networks that are supposed to manage the different flows of information mean that the State is not a central addressee of our communication but one of the actors. It produces new managers – internet service providers, telecom infrastructure, individual hubs and connectors, traditional media agencies – that help us think of governance in a new way. Which is why, for instance, with the UID authorities, we are no longer concerned about the relay of state information from the centre to the subject. Hence, we have many anecdotal stories of people enrolling for the Aadhaar card without actually knowing what benefits it might accrue them. We also have stories coming in about how there are people with Aadhaar numbers which have flawed information but these are not concerns. Because for once, the last mile has to reach the Government. The State is a collector but there are also other registrars. And there is a new regime here, where the government is now going to become one of the actors in the field of governance and it is more interested in managing data and information rather than directly governing the people.

This historical turn is interesting, because it means that we are being subjected to different kinds of governance structures and institutions, without necessarily realising how to negotiate with them to protect us. One of the most obvious examples is the Terms of Services[7] that we almost blindly sign off when using online platforms and services and what happens when they violate rights that we think are constitutionally given. What happens when Facebook removes some content from your profile without your permission because it thinks that it is problematic? Who do you complain to? Are your rights as a user or a citizen? Which jurisdiction will it fall under? Conversely, what happens when you live in a country that does not grant you certain freedoms (of speech and expression, for instance) and you commit an infraction using a social media platform. What happens when your private utterances on your social networks make you vulnerable [8]. to persecution and prosecution in your country?

These are all questions of the human, the technological, and the governmental which have been discussed differently and severally historically, in India and also at the global level. Asking these questions, unpacking the historical concerns and how they have leap-frogged in the contemporary governmental debates is important because it helps us realise that the focus of what is at stake, what it means to be human, what we recognise as fair, just and equal are also changing in the process. Instead of thinking of e-governance as just a digitization of state resources, we have to realise that there is a certain primacy that the technologies have had in the state’s formation and manifestation, and that the digital is reshaping these formulations in new and exciting, and sometimes, precarious ways.

Cyberspace and Criminality

The history of the internet in India, but also around the world, is bookended between pornography and terrorism. While there has been an incredible promise of equity, equality, fairness, and representation of alternative voices on the internet, there is no doubt that what the internet has essentially done is turn us all into criminals – pornographers, pirates, terrorists, hackers, lurkers… If you have been online, let us just take for granted that you have broken some law or the other, no matter how safe you have been online, and where you live. The ways in which the internet has facilitated peer-2-peer connections and the one-one access means that almost everything that was governed in the public has suddenly exploded in one large grey zone of illegality.

Ravi Sundaram calls this grey zone of illegal or semi-legal practices the new ‘cyberpublics’. For Sundaram, the new public sphere created by the internet is not only in the gentrified, middle-class, educated people who have access to the cyberspaces and are using social media and user generated content sites to bring about active social and political change. More often than not, the real interesting users of the internet are hidden. They access the internet from cybercafés, in shared names. They have limited access to the web through apps and services on their pirated phones. They share music, watch porn, gamble, engage in illicit and surreptitious social and sexual engagements and they are able to do this by circumventing the authority and the gaze of the law.

On the other side are the more tech savvy individuals who create alternative currencies like Bitcoin, trade for weapons, drugs and sex on SilkRoute, form guerrilla resistance groups like Anonymous, and create viruses and malware that can take over the world. These cyberpublics are not just digital in nature. They erupt regularly in the form of pirate bazaars, data swaps, and the promiscuous USB drive that moves around the machines, capturing information and passing it on further. These criminalities are often the defining point of internet policy and politics – they serve as the subjects that need to be governed, as well as the danger that lurks in the digital ether, from which we need to be protected. For Sundaram, the real contours and borders of the digital world are to be tested in an examination of these figures. Because, as Lawrence Liang suggests, the normative has already been assimilated in the system. The normative or the good subject is no longer a threat and has developed an ethical compass of what is desirable and not. However, this ethical subject also engages in illicit activities, while still producing itself as a good person. This contradiction makes for interesting stories.

DPS MMS: Case Study
One of the most fascinating cases of criminality that captured both public and legal attention was the notoriously cases where the ideas of Access were complicated in the Indian context, was the legal and public furore over the distribution of an MMS (Multi-Media Message) video that captured two underage young adults in a sexual act. The clip, which was dubbed in popular media as ‘DPS Dhamaka’ became viral on the internet. The video clip was listed on an auction (peer-2-peer) website as an e-book and as ‘Item 27877408 – DPS Girl having fun!!! Full video + Bazee points’ for Rs. 125. This visibility of the clip on the auction site Bazee.com, brought it to the eyes of the State where its earlier circulation through private circuits and P2P networks had gone unnoticed. Indeed, the newspapers and TV channels had created frenzy around it, this video clip would have gone unnoticed. However, the attention that Bazee.com drew led to legal intervention. Following the visibility of the video clip, there was an attempt to find somebody responsible for the crime and be held liable for the ‘crime’ that had happened. Originally, Ravi Raj, a student at IIT Kharagpur, who had put up the clip on Bazee was arrested for possessing and selling pornography. He was arrested and kept in police custody for at least three days and so was the male student who made the clip. They were both made to go through proceedings in juvenile court (though he was the last to be arrested). Both the students in the video were suspended from school after the incident. Eventually, the most high profile arrest and follow up from the DPS MMS incident was the arrest of the CEO of Bazee.com – Avnish Bajaj. However, Bajaj was released soon because as the host of the platform and not its content, he had no liability. This is the beginning of a series of slippages where a punishable body in the face of public outcry had to be identified. We witnessed a witch-hunt that sought to hold the boy who made the video clip responsible, the student of IIT who attempted to circulate the clip and eventually the CEO of Bazee. The string of failed prosecutions seems to indicate that the pornographer-as-a-person was slipping through the cracks of the legal system. As NamitaMalhotra argues, it is not the pornographic object which is ‘eluding the grasp of the court’ but that it seems to be an inescapable condition of the age of the internet -that the all transactions are the same transactions, and all users are pornographers. We can see in the case that the earlier positions that were easily criminalised when it came to objects in mass media – producer, consumer, distributor of obscenity, were vacated rapidly in the DPS MMS case. We have a case where the bodies, when looked at through simplified ideas of Access, could not be regulated. The girl in the clip could not be punished because she was the victim in the case that could be read as statutory rape. In the case of the boy, a stranger argument was posed – ‘that in our fast urbanising societies where parents don’t have time for children, they buy off their love by giving them gadgets – which makes possible certain kinds of technological conditions...thus the blame if it is on the boy, is on the larger society’ (Malhotra, 2011). Eventually, the court held that the description of the object and the context of its presence indicates that the said obscene object is just a click away and such a ‘listing which informed the potential buyer that such a video clip that is pornographic can be procured for a price’. There is a suggestion that there was nobody in particular that could be fixed with the blame. What was at blame was access to technology and conditions of technology within which the different actors in this case were embedded. Malhotra points out that in earlier cases around pornography, judgements have held pornography responsible for itself. In the case of the DPS MMS, it seemed that technology – especially access to technology by unsupervised persons – has taken that role. The eventual directive that came out of this case was a blanket warning issued to the public that ‘anyone found in possession of the clip would be fined and prosecuted’. It is as if the attention of the court was on the ways in which the video clip was produced, circulated and disseminated, rather than the content. There was an anxiety around peoples’ unsupervised access to digital technologies, the networks that facilitated access to content without the permission of the state, and modes of circulation and dissemination that generated high access to audiences which cannot be controlled or regulated. The State’s interest in this case, is not in the sexual content of the material but in the way it sidesteps the State’s authorial positions and produces mutable, transmittable, and transferable products as well as conditions of access. Such a focus on practices and behaviours around the obscene object, rather than the content itself, seems not to disrupt the law’s neat sidestepping of the force of the image itself. These different tropes of access to technology informed the State’ attempt at control and containment of techno-social practices in the country, giving rise to imaginations of the User as being in conditions of technology which make him/her a potential criminal. This idea of access as transgression or overriding the legal regulatory framework does not get accounted for in the larger technology discourse. However, it does shape and inform the Information Technology regulations which are made manifest in the IT Act. The DPS MMS case complicated the notion of access and posited a potentially criminal techno-social subject who, because of access to the digital, will be able to consume information and images beyond the sanction of the law. The DPS MMS case shows how the ways in which public discourse can accuse, blame and literally hang technology seems to diverge from how the court attempts to pin down an offence or crime and prosecute by constructing a techno-social subject as the pervert, while also accusing pornography as a phenomenon. The court is unable to hold technology to blame but the accused is technology-at-large and modernity, which subsumes practices around technology and separates out the good and ethical ways in which a citizen should access and use technologies to rise from the potentially criminal conditions of technology within which their Techno-social identity is formed.

Summary

We started by making a distinction between Internet and Cyberspace to see how the two are separate objects of focus and have a relationship that needs to be examined in greater detail. It was argued that while the Internet – in material, infrastructural and technological forms – is important to understand the different policies and politics at the local, regional and global level, it has an account that is easier to follow. Cyberspace, on the other hand, because it deals with human interactions and experiences, allows for a more complex set of approaches into understanding our engagement with the digital domain. We began with the original definitions and imaginations of cyberspace and the ways in which it founded and resolved debates about the real-virtual, the physical-digital, and the brain-mind divides which have been historically part of the cybercultures discourse.

It was proposed, hence, that instead of looking at the history of the Internet, we will look at the history of cyberspace, and see if we can move away from a straight forward historical narrative of the Internet which focuses largely on the institutions, numbers, names and technological advances. The ambition was not to just produce a similar history of cyberspace but think of conceptual frameworks through which cyberspace can be studied. The proposition was that instead of just looking at history as a neutral and objective account of events and facts, we can examine how and why we need to create histories. Also, that it is fruitful to look at the aspirations and ambitions we have in creating historical narratives. It was then suggested that instead of trying to create a definitive history, or even a personal history of the internet, it might be more fruitful to look at the intersections that cyberspace has with different questions and concerns that have historically defined the relationship between technologies and society. 3 different conceptual frameworks were introduced as methods or modes by which this historical mode of inquiry can be initiated.

The first framework examined how we can understand the boundaries and contours of the internet and cyberspace by looking at its relationship with our bodies. The ways in which we understand our bodies, the mediation by technologies, and the extensions and simulations that we live with, help us to understand the human-technology relationship in more nuanced fashions. Looking at the case-study of a rape that happened in cyberspace, we mapped out the different ways in which we can think of a technosocial relationship.

The second framework drew from historical debates around technology and governance to see how the current concerns of e-governance and digital subjectivity are informed by older debates about technology and nation building. Looking at the dialogues between Gandhi and Tagore, and then the imagination of a nation through the broadcast technologies, we further saw how the new modes of networked governance are creating new actors, new conditions and new contexts within which to locate and operate technologies.

The third framework showed how the technological is not merely at the service of the human. In fact, the presence of the technological creates new identities and modes of governance that create potential criminals of all of us. Through the case-study of the DPS MMS, and in an attempt to look at the grey zone of illegal cyberpublics, we saw how at new technosocial identities are created at the intersection of law, technology, governance and everyday practices of the web. The fact that the very condition of technology access can create us as potential criminals, in need to be governed and regulated, reflects in the development of internet policy and governance.

It was the intention of this module to complicate three sets of presumptions and common knowledge that exist in the discourse around Internet and Cyberspace. The first was to move away from thinking of the Internet merely as infrastructure and networks. The second was to suggest that entering the debates around human-technology everyday relationships would offer more interesting ways of looking at accounts of the technological. The third was to propose that the history of the internet does not begin only with the digital, but it needs larger geographical and techno-science contexts in order to understand how the contemporary landscape of internet policy and governance is shaped.

The module was not designed to give a comprehensive history and account of the internet. Instead, it built a methodological and conceptual framework that would allow us to examine the ways in which we approach Internet and Society questions – in the process, it would also help us reflect on our own engagement, intentions and expectations from the Internet and how we create the different narratives and accounts for it.

Additional Readings

Johnny Ryan,“A History of the Internet and the Digital Future”, University of Chicago Press, http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo10546731.html
John Naughton,“A Brief History of the Future”, Overlook, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/john-naughton/a-brief-history-of-the-future/
Christos J.P. Moschovitis et al.,“History of the Internet”, Barnes & Noble, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/history-of-the-internet-christos-j-p-moschovitis/1100883985?ean=9781576071182
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, “Where Wizards Stay up Late”, Barnes & Noble, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/where-wizards-stay-up-late-katie-hafner/1113244151?ean=9780684812014
Janet Abbate,“Inventing the Internet”, MIT Press, http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventing-internet
Tim Berners-Lee,“Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web”,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving_the_Web:_The_Original_Design_and_UltimateDestiny_of_the_World_Wide_Web_by_its_inventor
Peter Salus,“Casting the Net: From ARPANET to INTERNET and Beyond”, Pearson, http://www.pearson.ch/1471/9780201876741/Casting-the-Net-From-ARPANET-to-INTERNET.aspx

[1]. Julian Dibbell “A Rape in Cyberspace”, available at http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/, last accessed on January 24, 2014.

[2]. Asha Achuthan, “Re:Wiring Bodies”, Centre for Internet and Society, available at http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/rewiring-bodies.pdf, last accessed on January 25, 2014.

[3]. Nandan Nilekani, “Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation”, Penguin, available at http://www.penguin.ca/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780670068449,00.html, last accessed on January 24, 2014.

[4]. Jahnavi Phalkey, “Focus: Science, History, and Modern India”, The University of Chicago Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670950, last accessed on January 24, 2014.

[5]. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Last Cultural Mile”, The Centre for Internet and Society, available at http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/last-cultural-mile.pdf, last accessed on January 24, 2014.

[6]. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “In the Wake of Aadhar: The Digital Ecosystem of Governance in India”, Centre for Study of Culture and Society, available at http://eprints.cscsarchive.org/532/, last accessed on January 23, 2014.

[7]. Terms of Service, Didn’t Read, available at http://tosdr.org/, last accessed on January 26, 2014.

[8]. Siva Vaidyanathan, “The Googlization of Everything: (And Why Should We Worry)”, University of California Press, available at http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520258822

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/body-in-cyberspace

IT and the cITy

nishant — 2009-09-18T10:45:27Z

Nishant Shah tells ten stories of relationship between Internet Technologies and the City, drawing from his experiences of seven months in Shanghai. In this introduction to the city, he charts out first experiences of the physical spaces of Shanghai and how they reflect the IT ambitions and imaginations of the city. He takes us through the dizzying spaces of Shanghai to see how the architecture and the buildings of the city do not only house the ICT infrastructure but also embody it in their unfolding. In drawing the seductive nature of embodied technology in the physical experience of Shanghai, he also points out why certain questions about the rise of internet technologies and the reconfiguration of the Shanghai-Pudong area have never been asked. In this first post, he explains his methdologies that inform the framework which will produce the ten stories of technology and Shanghai, and how this new IT City, delivers its promise of invisibility.

Shanghai. City of bits, bytes and Baozi. China’s home-grown success story that eclipses the colonial legends of HongKong. The city that was, until the Bejing Olympics, the showcase city which is now working hard at recovering some of its stolen glory as it prepares for the World Trade Expo in 2010. A city that is constantly at war with itself, trying to museumise its past, eradicate pockets of history and times, and running to escape its present and live in a futuristic tomorrow. A city that broke the distinctions of the public and the private, by privatising all that was public, and by encouraging the private to be constructed for a public spectacle. There are many stories of Shanghai to be told, but the one that needs to be told now, is about the space of the city and how, in its attempt to become an IT city, it has become a city of surfaces, all reminding you, in an overwhelming hypervisual way that is the predominant aesthetic of cyberspaces, that it is the city that not only houses technology but also embodies it, becoming, possibly, the only city in Asia that brings the IT back into the City.

A cursory glance around you, perhaps travelling in the uber efficient metro system that feeds into the mobile metaphor of accelerated speed and space that Shanghai has become, or just walking down the more touristy XinTianDi where the rich and the famous of Shanghai’s society hang out, or walking down the HuaiHai Road where sky-scrapers fortress the sky and shopping malls greet you with neon-lit spaces of consumption, you are overwhelmed at the significant and ubiquitous presence of internet technologies. The buildings are designed to be interfaces, rather than walls, covered constantly with the graffiti of digital advertisements, live weather and stock updates, displaying the latest block-buster movie, or just presenting a kaleidoscopic array of lights spiralling in a dizzying, schizophrenic style on the surfaces of the buildings. As you walk through the sci-fi inspired urban landscape, you try and suppress the feeling of being inside a giant-size arcade game, waiting for a gobbling monster to come and devour you, and continue browsing at the city that never remains the same – either the surfaces mutate so that not even signboards or billboards remain the same, or the very buildings disappear into rubble under the shadows of gigantic cranes, as a concentrated demand for real estate necessitates a constant recycling of limited space (The estimate says that 60 per cent of Shanghai gets rebuilt every ten years), or high speed transport dissolves the city into a blur so that only the biggest and the brightest buildings stay as north-stars to the fluid geography of the city.

If you happen to stand on the magnificent Bund in PuXi (The older Shanghai), you keep on looking down at the ground beneath your feet, making sure that it is still there, because the slightly lurid but dazzling sky-line that faces you, with huge LCD screens mounted on buildings, lights flirting with low lying clouds on the top of gigantic buildings, and a constant buzz of electricity breaking the waves in the Huangpu river, you know that you are in a city that gives IT its address. No other city in Asia – not even the almost-not-Asia spaces of Tokyo or Singapore – gives you the assurance of being completely and totally immersed in the glory of Internet technologies. Shanghai stands, networked, connected, mobile, accelerated, and in a time-less vacuum that hoovers the future into the present, as a city that technology studies will have to reckon with in a paradigm of its own.

And so strong is this seduction of technology that conversations about technology and its place in Shanghai, always revolves around the surface – about the building of the surface, about the dissolution of depth (temporal or spatial), and about imagining the city only in terms of light, connectivity, and speed. So that the historicity in PuXi becomes a flat display of the Chinese Way (Zhongguo Fangshi) and the work-in-progress present in PuDong remains a quest for the future. In this split discourse, the questions and concerns - about governance, about citizenship, about regulation, about cultural production and political negotiation - become invisible. Like the buildings, which get guised in digital cloaks, the questions that pressingly need to be asked but are always postponed, also get cloaked in the rhetoric of development propelled by ICTs and globalisation. In a city that was constructed to eternally deflect attention, ownership or voices, how does one begin to scratch at the surfaces (Literally and figuratively) to search for something more than narratives of consumption, solipsist self-gratification, and self-congratulatory development?

It is with this agenda, in this city, torn and marked and seamlessly stitched by technology, that I start to unravel my questions about Internet and Society in China, trying to look at relationships between technologies, city spaces and identities, drawing from seven months spent at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Shanghai University. These stories, written with retrospective memory and embellished by the privilege of hindsight, posit a set of questions about Internet technologies, construction of city spaces, and manifestation of identities in China, but especially in Shanghai, to locate potentials of social transformation, political participation, engagement and discourse, which has not been transplanted on technology studies in China. In the process it also lays down a framework to understand how, in an oppressive or authoritarian regime, the cultural becomes the grounds upon which foundations of new political intervention and social change can be built.

This blog, in its ten different entries, relies on academic and popular discourse, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, field work, conversations, and personal experiences that I collected in my stay there, trying to deal with the double translations of culture and language. Whenever I have been unsure – and those moments have been many – I have tried to discuss and debate ideas with colleagues, friends, peers and participants, to ensure that the observations or arguments are qualified by more than just a neo-colonial meaning making sensibilities. Despite that rigour, if faults remain, they are all mine, and hopefully will serve as points of entry into a fruitful discourse.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity

China's Generation Y : Youth and Technology in Shanghai

nishant — 2009-09-21T14:09:16Z

Within the context of internet technologies in China, Nishant Shah, drawing from his seven month research in Shanghai, looks at the first embodiment of these technologies in the urbanising city. In this post, he gives a brief overview of the public and academic discourse around youth-technology usage of China's Generation Y digital natives. He draws the techno-narratives of euphoria and despair to show how technology studies has reduced technology to tools and usage and hence even the proponents of internet technologies, often do a disservice to the technology itself. He poses questions about the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of technology and offers the premise upon which structures of reading resistance can be built. The post ends with a preview of the three stories that are to appear next in the series, to see how youth engagement and cultural production can be read as having the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the Digital Natives in China.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY

“Politics by other means”: Fostering positive contestation and charting ‘red lines’ through global governance in cyberspace

basu — 2019-10-21T15:40:38Z

The past year has been a busy one for the fermentation of global governance efforts in cyberspace with multiple actors-states, industry, and civil society spearheading a variety of initiatives. Given the multiplicity of actors, ideologies, and vested interests at play in this ecosystem, any governance initiative will be, by default, political, and desirably so.

Arindrajit Basu's essay for this year's Digital Debates: The CyFy Journal was published jointly by Global Policy and ORF. It was written in response to a framing essay by Dennis Broeders under the governance theme. The article was edited by Gurshabad Grover. Arindrajit also acknowledges the contributions of the editorial team at ORF: Trisha, Akhil and Meher.

There is no silver bullet that will magically result in universally acknowledged rules of the road. Instead, through consistent probing and prodding, the global community must create inclusive processes to galvanize consensus to ensure that individuals across the world can repose trust and confidence in their use of global digital infrastructure.^[2] This includes both ‘red lines’ applicable to clearly prohibited acts of cyberspace and softer norms for responsible state behaviour in cyberspace, that arise from an application of the tenets of International Law to cyberspace.

Infrastructure is political

Networked infrastructures typically originate when a series of technological systems with varying technical standards converge, or when a technological system achieves dominance over other self-contained technologies.^[3] Through this process of convergence, networked infrastructures must adapt to a variety of differing political conditions, legal regulations and governance practices.^[4] Internet infrastructure was never self-contained technology, but an amalgamation of systems, protocols, standards and hardware along with the standards bodies, private actors and states that define it.^[5] The architecture has always been deeply socio-technical^[6] and any attempt to severe the technology from the politics of internet governance would be a fool’s errand.

Politics catalyzed the development of the technological infrastructure that lead to the creation of the internet. During the heyday of nuclear brinkmanship between the USA and USSR, Paul Baran, an engineer with the US Department of Defense think tank RAND Corporation was tasked with building a means of communication that could continue running even if some parts were to be knocked out by a nuclear war.^[7]

As Baran’s ‘Bomb proof network’ morphed into the US Department of Defense funded ARPANET, it was initially apparent that it was not meant for either mass or commercial use, but instead saw its nurturing in the US as a tool of strategic defense.^[8]

This enabled the US to retain a disproportionate -- and till the 1990s, relatively uncontested -- influence on internet governance. As the internet rapidly expanded across the globe, various actors found that single state control over an invaluable global resource was unjust.^[9] Others (9which included US Senator Ted Cruz), argued that the internet would be safer in the hands of the United States than an international forum whose processes could be reduced to stalemate as a result of politicized conflict between democratic and non-democratic states who seek to use online spaces as an instrument of suppression.^[10] The ICANN and IANA transitions were therefore not rooted in technical considerations but much-needed geopolitical pressure from states and actors who felt ‘disregarded’^[11] in the governance of the internet. An inclusive multi-stakeholder process fueled by inclusive geopolitical contestation is far more effective in the long run and has the potential of respecting the rights of ‘disregarded’ communities all across the globe far more than a unilateral process that ignores any voices of opposition.

It is now clear that despite its continued outsized influence, the United States is no longer the only major state player in global cyber governance. China has propelled itself as a major political and economic challenger to the United States across several regimes^[12], including in the cyber domain. China’s export of the ‘information sovereignty’^[13] doctrine at various cyber norms proliferation fora, including at the United Nations-Group of Governmental Experts (GGE), and regional forums like the Shanghai Co-operation (SCO), is an example of its desire to impose its ideological clout on global conceptions of the internet.

As a rising power, China’s aspirations in global internet governance are not limited to ideology. China is at an ‘innovation imperative’, where it needs to develop new technologies to retain its status and fuel long-term growth.^[14] This locks it into direct economic, and therefore strategic competition with the United States that seeks to retain control over the same supply chains and continues to assert its economic and military superiority.

China has dominated the 5G space in an unprecedented way, and has been a product of a concerted ‘whole of government’ effort.^[15] Beijing charted out an industrial policy that enabled the deployment of 5G networks as a key national priority.^[16] China has also successfully weaponized global technical standard-setting efforts to promote its geo-economic interests.^[17] Reeling from the failure of its domestic 3G standard that was ignored globally, China realised the importance of the ‘first-movers’ advantage’ in setting standards for companies and businesses.^[18] Through an aggressive strategic push at a number of international bodies such as the International Telecommunications Union, China’s diplomatic pivot has allowed it to push standards established domestically with little external input, thereby giving Chinese companies the upper hand globally.^[19]

Politics continues to frame the technical solutions that enable cybersecurity.19 Following Snowden’s revelations, some stakeholders in the global community have shaped their politics to frame the problem as one of protecting individuals’ data from governments and private companies looking to extract and exploit it. The technical solutions developed in this frame are encryption standards and privacy enhancing technologies. However, intelligence agencies continue to frame the problem differently: they see it as an issue of collecting and aggregating data in order to identify malicious actors and threat vectors. The technical solutions they devise are increased surveillance and data analysis -- problems the first framing intended to solve. The techno-political gap, both in academic scholarship and global norms proliferation efforts continues to jeopardize attempts at framing cybersecurity governance.^[20] Instead of artificially depoliticizing technology, it is imperative that we ferment political contestation in a manner that holistically promulgates the perception that internet infrastructure can be trusted and utilised by individuals and communities around the world.

Fostering ‘red lines’ and diffusing ‘unpeace’ in cyberspace

‘Unpeace’ in cyberspace continues to ferment through ‘below the threshold’ operations that do not amount to the ‘use of force’ as per Article 2(4), or an ‘armed attack’ triggering the right of self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This makes the application of jus ad bellum (‘right to war’) inapplicable to most cyber operations.^[21] However, the application of ‘jus in bello’ (law that governs the way in which warfare is conducted) or International Humanitarian Law (IHL) does not require armed force to be of a specific intensity but seeks to protect civilians and prevent unnecessary suffering. Therefore the principles of IHL that have evolved in The Geneva Conventions should be used as red lines that limit collateral damage as a result of cyber operations.^[22] No state should conduct cyber operations that intend to harm civilians, and should us all means at its disposal to avoid this harm to civilians. It should act in line with the principles of necessity^[23] and proportionality.^[24]

Cultivating ‘red lines’ is easier said than done. The debate around the applicability of IHL to cyberspace was one of the reasons for the breakdown of the fifth UN-GGE in 2017.^[25] States have also been reluctant to state their positions on the rules developed by the International Group of Experts (IGE) in the Tallinn Manual.^[26] This is due to two main reasons. First, not endorsing the rules may allow them to retain operational advantages in cyberspace where they continue engaging in cyber operations without censure. Second, even those states who wish to apply and adhere to the rules hesitate to do so in the absence of effective processes that censure states that do not comply with the rules.

Both these issues stem from the difficulties in attributing a cyber attack to a state as cyber attacks are multi-stage, multi-step and multi-jurisdictional, which makes the attacker several degrees removed from the victim.^[27] Technical challenges to attribution, however should not take away from international efforts that adopt an integrated and multi-disciplinary approach to attribution which must be seen as a political process working in conjunction with robust technical efforts.^[28] The Cyber Peace Institute, which was set up earlier in September 2019, and adopts an ecosystem approach to studying cyber attacks, thereby improving global attribution standards may institutionally serve this function.^[29] As attribution processes become clearer and hold greater political weight, an increasing number of states are likely to show their cards and abandon their policy of silence and ambiguity -- a process that has already commenced with a handful of states releasing clear statements on the applicability of international law in cyberspace.^[30]

Below the threshold operations are likely to continue. However, the process of contestation should result in the international community drawing out norms that ensure that public trust and confidence in the security of global digital infrastructure is not eroded. This would include norms such as protecting electoral infrastructure or a prohibition on coercing private corporations to aid intelligence agencies in extraterritorial surveillance29 The development of these norms will take time and repeated prodding. However, given the entangled and interdependent nature of the global digital economy, protracted effort may result in universal consensus in some time.

The Future of Cyber Diplomacy

The recently rejuvenated UN driven norms formulation processes are examples of this protracted effort. Both the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) and Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) processes are pushing states towards publicly declaring their positions on multiple questions of cyber governance, which will only further certainty and predictability in this space. The GGE requires all member states to clearly chart out their position on the applicability of various questions of International Law, which will be included as an Annex to the final report and is definitely a step in the right direction.

There are multiple lessons from parliamentary diplomacy culminating in past global governance regimes that negotiators in these processes can borrow from.^[31] As in the past, the tenets of international law can influence collective expectations and serve as a facilitative mechanism for chalking out bargaining points, and driving the negotiations within an inclusive, efficient and understandable framework.^[32]

Both processes will be politicized as before with states seeking to use these as fora for furthering national interests. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Protracted contestation is preferable to unilateralism where a select group of states decides the future of cyber governance. The inclusive, public format of the OEWG running in parallel to the closed-door deliberations at the GGE enables concerted dialogue to continue. Most countries had voted for the resolutions setting up both these processes and while the end-game is unknown, it appears that states remain interested in cultivating cyber norms.

Of course, the USA and its NATO allies had voted against the resolution setting up the OEWG and Russia, China and the SCO allies had voted against the resolution resurrecting the GGE. However, given the economic interests of all states in a relatively stable cyberspace, it is clear that both these blocks desire global consensus on some rules of the road for responsible behaviour in cyberspace. This means that both processes may arrive at certain similar outcomes. These outcomes might over time evolve into norms or even crystallise into rules of customary international law if they are representative of the interests of a large number of states.

However, sole reliance on state-centric mechanisms to achieve a stable governance regime may be misplaced. As seen with Dupont’s contribution to the Montreal Protocol that banned the global use of Chloro-Fluoro-Carbons (CFCs)^[33] or the International Committee of the Red Cross’s concerted efforts in rallying states to sign the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions^[34], norm-entrepreneurship and the mantle of leadership in norm-entrepreneurship need not be limited to state actors. Non-state actors often have the gifts of flexibility and strategic neutrality that make them a better fit for this role than states. Microsoft’s leadership and its ascent to this leadership mantle in the cyber governance space must therefore be taken heed off. The key role it played in charting out the CyberSecurity Tech Accords, Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace and its most recent initiative, the Cyber Peace Institute, must be commended. However, the success of its entrepreneurship relies on how well it can work both with multilateral mechanisms under the aegis of the United Nations and multi-stakeholder fora such as the Global Commission on Stability in Cyberspace. This will lead to a cohesive set of rules that adequately govern the conduct of both state and non-state actors in cyberspace.

It is unfortunate, however, that most governance efforts in cyberspace are driven by the United States or China or their allies. For example, only UK^[35], France^[36], Germany,^[37] Estonia^[38],Cuba^[39] (backed by China and Russia), and the USA^[40] have all engaged in public posturing advocating their ideological position on the applicability of International Law in cyberspace in varying degrees of detail with other countries largely remaining silent. Other emerging economies need to get into the game to make the process more representative and equitable.

More recently, India has begun to take a leadership role in the global debate on cross-border data transfers, spurred largely by their domestic political and policy ecosystem championing ‘digital nationalism.’ At the G20 summit in Osaka in July this year, India, alongside the BRICS grouping emphasized the development dimensions of data for emerging economies and pushed the notion of ‘data sovereignty’-broadly understood as the sovereign right of nations to govern data within their territories/jurisdiction in the national interest and for the welfare of its people.^[41] Resisting calls from Western allies including the United States to get on board Japan’s initiative promoting the free flow of data across borders, Vijay Gokhale also mentioned that discussions on data flows must not take place at plurilateral forums outside the World Trade Organization as this would prevent inclusive discussions.^[42]This form of posturing should be sustained by emerging economies like India and extended to the security domain as well through which the hegemony that a few powerful actors retain over the contours of cyber governance can be reduced.

To paraphrase Clausewitz, technological governance is the conduct of politics by other means. Internet infrastructure has become so deeply intertwined with the political ethos of most countries that it has become the latest front for geopolitical contestation among state and non-state actors alike. Politicizing cyber governance prevents a deracinated approach to the process that ignores simmering inequalities, power asymmetries and tensions that a limited technical lens prevents us from viewing.

The question is, not if but how cyber governance will be politicized. Will it be a politics of inclusion that protects the rights of the disregarded and adequately represents their voices in line with the requirements of International Law, or will it be a politics of convenience through which states and non-state actors utilise cyber governance for reaping strategic dividends? The global cyber policy ecosystem must continue the battle to ensure that the former remains essential.

Endnotes

^[1] Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok (2018) “Cyberspace and External Affairs: A memorandum for India”, 8-13.

^[2] In its draft definition of cyber stability, The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace has adopted a bottom up user centric definition of Cyber Stability where individuals can be confident in the stability of cyberspace as opposed to an objective top-down determination of cybersecurity metrics.

^[3] PN Edwards, GC Bowker Jackson SJ, R Williams 2009. Introduction: an agenda for infrastructure studies. J. Assoc. Inf. Syst.10(5):364–74

^[4] Brian Larkin, “ The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure” Annual Rev. Anthropol 2013,42:327-43

^[5] Ibid.

^[6] Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall, “Four Internets: The Geopolitics of Digital Governance” CIGI Report No.208, December 2018.

^[7] Cade Metz, “Paul Baran, the link between nuclear war and the internet” Wired, 4th Sept. 2012.

^[8] Kal Raustila (2016) “Governing the Internet” American Journal of International Law 110:3,491

^[9] Samantha Bradshaw, Laura DeNardis, Fen Osler Hampson, Eric Jardine & Mark Raymond, The Emergence of Contention in Global Internet Governance 3 (Global Comm’n on Internet Governance, Paper Series No. 17, July 2015).

^[10] Klint Finley, "The Internet Finally Belongs to Everyone”, Wired, March 18th, 2016.

^[11] Richard Stewart (2014), Remedying Disregard in Global Regulatory Governance: Accountability, Participation and Responsiveness” AJIL 108:2

^[12] Tarun Chhabra, Rush Doshi, Ryan Hass and Emilie Kimball, “Global China: Domains of strategic competition and domestic drivers” Brookings Institution, September 2019.

^[13] According to this view, a state can manage and define its ‘network frontiers; through domestic legislation or state policy and patrol information at it state borders in any way it deems fit. Yuan Yi,. “网络空间的国界在哪 ” [Where Are the National Borders of cyberspace]? 学习时报.May 19, 2016.

^[14] Anthea Roberts, Henrique Choer Moraes and Victor Ferguson (2019), “Toward a Geoeconomic Order in International Trade and Investment” (May 16, 2019).

^[15] Eurasia Group (2018), “The Geopolitics of 5G”

^[16] Ibid.( In 2013, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and the Ministry of Science and technology (MOST) established the IMT-2020 5G Promotion Group to push for a government all-industry alliance on 5G.)

^[17] Bjorn Fagersten&Tim Ruhlig (2019), "China’s standard power and it’s geopolitical implications for Europe” Swedish Institute for International Affairs.

^[18] Alan Beattie, “Technology: how the US, EU and China compete to set industry standards” Financial Times, Jul 14th, 2019

^[19] Laura Fitchner, Walter Pieters.,&Andre Herdero Texeira(2016). Cybersecurity as a Politikum: Implications of Security Discourses for Infrastructures. In Proceedings of the 2016 New Security Paradigms Workshop (36-48). New York: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

^[20] Michael Crosston,” Phreak the Speak: The Flawed Communications within cyber intelligentsia” in Jan-Frederik Kremer and Benedikt Muller,”Cyberspace and International Relations: Theory, Prospects and Challenges (2013, Springer) 253.

^[21] “Fundamental Principles of International Humanitarian Law".

^[22] Veronique Christory “Cyber warfare: IHL provides an additional layer of protection” 10 Sept. 2019.

^[23] See (The “principle of military necessity” permits measures which are actually necessary to accomplish a legitimate military purpose and are not otherwise prohibited by international humanitarian law. In the case of an armed conflict, the only legitimate military purpose is to weaken the military capacity of the other parties to the conflict.

^[24] See Proportionality; The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks against military objectives which are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”

^[25] Declaration by Miguel Rodriguez, Representative of Cuba, At the final session of group of governmental experts on developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security (June 23 2017).

^[26] Dan Efrony and Yuval Shany (2018), “ A Rule Book on the Shelf? Tallinn Manual 2.0 on Cyberoperations and Subsequent State Practice” AJIL 112:4

^[27] David Clark and Susan Landau. “Untangling Attribution.” Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard University) 2 (2011

^[28] Davis, John S., Benjamin Adam Boudreaux, Jonathan William Welburn, Jair Aguirre, Cordaye Ogletree, Geoffrey McGovern and Michael S. Chase. Stateless Attribution: Toward International Accountability in Cyberspace. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, (2017). At

^[29] See “CyberPeace Institute to Support Victims Harmed by Escalating Conflicts in Cyberspace”.

^[30] Dan Efrony and Yuval Shany (2018), “ A Rule Book on the Shelf? Tallinn Manual 2.0 on Cyberoperations and Subsequent State Practice” AJIL 112:4

^[31] Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok (2018), “Conceptualizing an International Security architecture for cyberspace”.

^[32] Monica Hakimi (2017), “The Work of International Law,” Harvard International Law Journal 58:1.

^[33] James Maxwell and Forrest Briscoe (2007),” There’s money in the air: The CFC Ban and Dupont’s Regulatory Strategy” Business Strategy and the Environment 6, 276-286.

^[34] Francis Buignon (2004). “The International Committee of the Red Cross and the development of international humanitarian law.” Chi. J. Int’l L.5: 19137

^[35] Jeremy Wright, “Cyber and International Law in the 21st Century” Govt. UK.

^[36] Michael Schmitt, “France’s Major Statement on International Law and Cyber: An Assessment” Just Security, September 16th, 2019.

^[37] Nele Achten, "Germany’s Position on International Law in Cyberspace”, Lawfare, Oct 2, 2018,

^[38] Michael Schmitt, “Estonia Speaks out on Key Rules for Cyberspace” Just Security, June 10, 2019.

^[39] https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Cuban-Expert-Declaration.pdf

^[40] https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Brian-J.-Egan-International-Law-and-Stabilityin-Cyberspace-Berkeley-Nov-2016.pdf

^[41] Justin Sherman and Arindrajit Basu, "Fostering Strategic Convergence in US-India Tech Relations: 5G and Beyond”, The Diplomat, July 03, 2019.

^[42] Aditi Agrawal, "India and Tech Policy at the G20 Summit”, Medianama, Jul 1, 2019.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/arindrajit-basu-orfonline-october-21-2019-politics-by-other-means-fostering-positive-contestation-and-charting-red-lines-through-global-governance-in-cyberspace

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 9) - Saikat Datta

purba — 2013-08-05T05:24:35Z

CIS interviews Saikat Datta, Resident Editor of DNA, Delhi, as part of the Cybersecurity Series.

"Anonymous speech, in countries which have extremely severe systems of governments, which do not have freedom, etcetera, is welcome. But in a democracy like India, I do not see the need for anonymous speech because it is anyways guaranteed by the Constitution of India. So, no, I do not see the need for anonymity in an open and democratic state like India and I would be seriously worried if such a requirement comes up. Shouldn't I strive to be ideal? The ideal suggests that the constitution has guaranteed freedom of speech. Anonymity, for a time being may be acceptable to some people but I would like a situation where a person, without having to seek anonymity, can speak about anything and not be prosecuted by the state, or persecuted by society. And that is the ideal situation that I would like to strive for." - Saikat Datta, Resident Editor, DNA, Delhi.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its ninth 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.

Saikat Datta is a journalist who began his career in December 1996 and has worked with several publications like The Indian Express, the Outlook magazine and the DNA newspaper. He is currently the Resident Editor of DNA, Delhi. Saikat has authored a book on India's Special Forces and presented papers at seminars organized by the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, the Centre for Air Power Studies and the National Security Guards. He has also been awarded the International Press Institute Award for investigative journalism, the National RTI award in the journalism category and the Jagan Phadnis Memorial Award for investigative journalism.

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-9-saikat-datta

Collaborative Projects Programme

nishant — 2011-08-23T03:04:56Z

The Centre for Internet and Society recognises collaboration and consultation as its primary mode of engaging with research and intervention. The Collaborative Projects Programme (CPP) is CIS’ platform for partnering (intellectually, logistically, financially, and administratively) with other organisations, individuals and practitioners in projects which are of immediate concern to the work that CIS is committed to.

The Collaborative Projects Programme also expands the scope of research to produce a synergy between research and praxis. The CPP is, in many ways, the in-house research that CIS undertakes, in collaboration and consultation with other organisations, institutions and individuals who have a stake and a say in the field of Internet and Society. The CPP is not bound by any theme of programmatic modalities and is envisioned more as a way for CIS to extend its field and establish a strong network with other exciting spaces in the Global South.

The Collaborative Projects Programme can include, but is not limited to, organising of large conferences or workshops; developing tools for better research and advocacy; data mining towards a specific goal that complements CIS’ vision; producing original monographs/publications/books targeted at different audiences; experimenting with new technologies to affect policy and usage; implementing pilot studies and instances of existing ideas; developing schemes to integrate education and technology; public intervention and awareness campaigns geared towards particular outcomes; celebrating certain aspects of internet technologies; engaging with digital natives; and creating new environments of learning and participation online.

The CPP is NOT a grant making programme. However, we are interested in partnering on new and innovative ideas and would welcome conversations with people and organisations in the field. If you have an interesting idea that you think fits our larger vision, please contact us and we can begin the discussions.

List of Projects under the Collaborative Projects Programme:

1. The Promise of Invisibility: Technology and the City - A seven month research project initiated by Nishant Shah, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, enabled by a grant from the Asia Scholarship Foundation, Bangkok.

2. Disability, Learning and Digital Participation - in partnership with Inclusive Planet

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme

Jurisdictional Issues in Cyberspace

Justice S Muralidhar — 2012-03-21T10:00:24Z

This article by Justice S Muralidhar was published in the Indian Journal of Law and Technology, Volume 6, 2010. It explores in detail the jurisdiction of courts when dealing with disputes arising from commercial transactions on the Internet.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/issues-in-cyberspace

i4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:51:57Z

Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.

Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks

Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?

A call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However, given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and interests that are represented there, governance, which is non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations. However, there is also another form of governance - governance as provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these signs are present and garner the attention of the user.

How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?

The question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world. When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for safety online, it is a question of education and training and some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact, adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.

What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?

The main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and 'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these new models of trust and friendship.

How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?

I am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the 'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard. Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world.

What perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand and the maintenance of law and order on the other.

Link to original article on i4donline.net

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access

First Thing First

maesy — 2011-08-04T10:31:48Z

Studies often focus on how digital natives do their activism in identifying the characteristics of youth digital activism and dedicate little attention to what the activism is about. The second blog post in the Beyond the Digital series reverses this trend and explores how the Blank Noise Project articulates the issue it addresses: street sexual harassment.

To try to understand youth digital activism is to first understand what the issue it deals with is all about. This point is made clear by the 13 people involved in Blank Noise, who all started our conversation with a discussion on eve teasing, the issue that Blank Noise deals with and the reason for its existence. Taking the hint from them, I start sharing my research journey by sharing how Blank Noise thinks of the issue it takes. As I recall our conversations, I am still amazed by how everyone, regardless of whether they have been involved as an initiator of a 15-day Facebook campaign or as a coordinator for five years, share the following articulation

‘Eve teasing’ is a euphemism in English that refers to the various forms of sexual harassment experienced by women in public places, be it parks, streets, or buses. It takes different forms, ranging from staring, verbal lampooning, accidental jostling, or outright groping. While public sexual harassments also occur in almost every place in the globe, the term ‘eve teasing’ itself is particular to South Asia, especially India. The term plays on the biblical Eve that is considered as a temptress, playing on the dichotomy of ‘good and bad’ women and placing the blame on women for enticing men to tease them. The word ‘tease’ itself downplays the severity of the action and making it a trivial, funny, non-issue - so much that it is regarded as a rite of passage into womanhood and ignored by the authorities unless it leads to violent deaths. This term is what Blank Noise seeks to address; it aims to denounce the word ‘eve teasing’ and call it by its appropriate name: street sexual harassment.

While in the popular perception street sexual harassment happen only to young women who dress in Western fashion, actually all women irrespective of age, class, or dress have experienced it. In a much lesser degree, men also experienced street sexual harassment. However, the norms of masculinity deny their victimhood and a typical reaction would be ‘yes, I got felt up but I pity the bugger because he’s gay’ (Blank Noise, 2005).

The root of the problem is how eve teasing is internalized by all members of the society, including women. Laura Neuhaus, a 27 year old American woman who became active in Blank Noise when she worked in Bangalore for a few years, was shocked to find that the senior women in her department, who had PhD degrees and were at the top of their career, turned a blind eye to the harassment they experience and advised her to do the same. Tanvee Nabar, a 19 year old student who was one of the initiators of Blank Noise’s ‘I Never Ask for It’ Facebook campaign, stated that victims may also perpetuate the problem by thinking that accusing themselves of being responsible for the harassment because of the way they dress or behave. She said, “Even by thinking that way I am validating eve teasing, so this needs to stop.”

The problem thrives on the silence of victims, who are further deterred from speaking up by negative reactions ranging from agreeing that it’s a problem but it should be ignored because nothing can be done about it, increased restrictions from protective parents, or even offers to beat up the perpetrator to get even by men relatives or spouses.

However, Blank Noise recognizes that the issue is not as straightforward as it may seem. While some actions like groping are clearly a form of harassment, other forms such as looking or verbal taunting are not as obvious. Therefore, rather than offering a rigid guideline to what is or is not street sexual harassment, Blank Noise attempts to build a definition of ‘eve teasing’ through public polls, both online on its blog and on the streets.

Blank Noise does not advocate for any specific, tangible solution either. It is not proposing for a new legislation or service provision. Many youth experts would say that it is a sign of youth’s decreasing trust to the state, but actually this is an extension of Blank Noise’s acknowledgement of the ambiguity of street sexual harassment. Hemangini Gupta, a 29 years old Blank Noise coordinator, asked, “Should we be allowing the state to legislate an issue like street sexual harassment where there is so much grey even with how it is understood and defined - from ‘looking’ to physical violence?” Instead, Blank Noise aims at creating public dialogue to break the ignorance on street sexual harassment and change the mindset of both men and women, young and old. Blank Noise does not promote a specific course of action for women affected by the harassment either; it promotes the confidence to choose how to react to harassment.

What is unique about Blank Noise from this articulation? Some would argue that Blank Noise is unique for being the first collective that addresses eve teasing, but a closer inquiry into the history of the Indian women movements show that it is widely acknowledged as a form of violence against women. However, perhaps due to the limited resources of the movement, efforts to address eve teasing have been taken up very systematically (Gandhi and Shah, 2002). In this sense, when it was born in 2003, Blank Noise was unique for being the only group whose existence is solely dedicated to address this issue.

Blank Noise is not unique in problematizing the issue of violence against women. The women’s movements in India and elsewhere have been refusing to prescribe any solutions to the victims and identifying patriarchal mindset of both men and women as the root cause either. Yet, it is exceptional in not identifying an opponent or an entity where concrete demands are proposed to push for a tangible progress towards a change of mindset.

Intangible changes are as good as tangible ones. This might be a new characteristic of how digital natives think about their causes, but it could also be more related to their reading of the specific issue they are dealing with. Perhaps, if the issue at hand is climate change, the same people will advocate for specific solutions to the state or promote concrete behavior change. Either way, the message is clear: we need to always take into account what a digital natives activism is about and not just how they do it!

This is the second post in the Beyond the Digital series, a research project that aims to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina with The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

Reference:

Blank Noise (2005) ‘Frequently Asked Questions’. Accessed 21 September 2010. http://blog.blanknoise.org/2005/03/frequently-asked-questions.html

Gandhi, N. and Shah, N. (1992) The Issues at Stake: Theory and Practice in the Contemporary Women’s Movement in India. New Delhi: Kali for Women

Source for the picture: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=2703755288

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

Talking Back without "Talking Back"

maesy — 2011-09-22T11:37:54Z

The activism of digital natives is often considered different from previous generations because of the methods and tools they use. However, reflecting on my conversations with The Blank Noise Project and my experience in the ‘Digital Natives Talking Back’ workshop in Taipei, the difference goes beyond the method and can be spotted at the analytical level – how young people today are thinking about their activism.

Last August, I had the opportunity to participate in the three-day grueling yet highly rewarding ‘Digital Natives Talking Back’ workshop in Taipei. On the very first day, Seema Nair, one of the facilitators and a good friend, asked us to reflect about what ‘talking back’ means in the context of activism. At first glance, activism is almost always interpreted as a confrontational resistance towards an identifiable opponent over a certain issue - a group of activists protesting against a discriminatory legislation passed by a government, for example. Although this is definitely the most popular form, is this the only way activism could be done?

While reflecting on Seema’s question, I thought of my conversations with people in the Blank Noise Project and how they seem to defy this popular imagination through their efforts to address street sexual harassment. From the way it articulates its issue (I have shared it before in here), Blank Noise challenges the idea of an opponent in activism by refusing to identify an entity as the “enemy” or the one responsible for the issue, given the grey areas of street sexual harassment. The opponent is intangible instead: the mindset shared by all members of society that enables the violation to continue.

Consequently, Blank Noise ‘talks back’ differently. While it is common for many movements to set an intangible vision as its goal (for instance: a society where women is treated as equals with men), they also have a tangible intermediary targets to move towards the broader vision (e.g. a new legislation or service provision for women affected by domestic violence). Blank Noise sticks with the intangible. The goal is to form a collective where eve teasing is everybody’s shared concern, spreading awareness that street sexual harassment is happening every day and it is unacceptable because it is a form of violence against women. Pooja Gupta, a 19 year old art student who is one of the initiators of the ‘I Never Ask for It’ Facebook campaign, underlined this intangible goal by saying that “The goal really is to spread awareness. It is not about pushing any specific agenda or telling people what to do.”

Because of this goal, I initially thought that there is a clear demarcation between people within the Blank Noise and the ‘public’ whose awareness they would like to raise – that there is a clear “us” (the Blank Noise activists) and “them” (the target group). However, I was corrected by Jasmeen Patheja, the founder of Blank Noise, when we chatted one day. “I haven’t ever put it that way. Since the beginning, the collective is meant to be inclusive and there is no specific target group. The public is invited to participate and there is no audience, everyone is a participant and co-creator.”

The strategy for this is to open up a public dialogue. When Blank Noise first started in 2003, it started with the street as the public space and uses art as its method of intervention. It takes many forms: performative art, clothes exhibition, street polls, and many others. Although today Blank Noise is much more known for its engagement with the virtual public through its prolific Internet presence (4 blogs, a Twitter account, 2 Facebook groups, many Facebook events, and a YouTube channel), the street interventions remain a significant part of its activities. Regardless of the methods, which I will elaborate more in future blog posts, the principles of creativity, play, and non-confrontation are always maintained.

At this point, some critical questions could be raised. What is Blank Noise actually trying to achieve through the dialogue? Can public dialogue really address the issue? How does Blank Noise know if it is interventions have an impact?

When I asked the last question, many people in the Blank Noise admitted that impact measurement is something that they are still grappling with. Some said that the public recognition of Blank Noise by bloggers and mainstream media is an indicator; others said that the growth of volunteers is also an impact. However, I found that this is not an issue many people were concerned with and was a bit puzzled. After all, if one were to dedicate their time and energy to a cause, wouldn’t s/he want to know what kind of difference made?

The light bulb for this puzzle switched on when Apurva Mathad, one of Blank Noise male volunteers, said, “Eve teasing is an issue that nobody talks about. It seems like a monumental thing to try and change it, so the very act of doing something to address it and reaching as many people as possible right now seems to be enough.”

Apurva basically told me that it is the action of doing something about the issue is what counts – and that it is the personal level change among people who are active within the Blank Noise is the real impact. I recalled that everyone else I talked with mentioned individual transformation after being a part of Blank Noise intervention – something I would elaborate upon in future posts.

This observation was confirmed in a later conversation with Jasmeen, where I discovered that Blank Noise also has another goal that was not as easy to identify as the first: to allow people involved with the collective to undergo a personal transformation into “Action Heroes” - people who actively takes action to challenge the silence and disregard towards street sexual harassment. In this sense, Blank Noise is similar to many women collectives that became organized to empower themselves and hence could be said to also adopt a feminist ideology.

The difference with most women collectives, however, lies on Blank Noise’s aim to allow a personalization of people’s experience with the collective. “The nature of this project is that people are in it for a reason close to them and they give meaning to their involvement as they see fit,” Jasmeen said.

Blank Noise does face challenges in doing this. Some people found it difficult to understand that an issue could be addressed without shouting slogans or advocating for a specific solution and others joined with anger due to their personal experiences. Hence, the non-confrontational dialogue approach becomes even more important. The discussion and debates it raises help the Blank Noise volunteers to also learn more about the issue, reflect on their experiences and opinions, as well as to give meaning to their involvement. This is when I finally understood the point of “no target group”: the Blank Noise people also learn and become affected by the interventions they performed. Influencing ‘others’ is not the main goal although it is a desired effect, the main one is to allow personal empowerment.

Going back to the ‘talking back’ discussion in Taipei, Seema then shared her experiences working with women groups in India and showed how ‘talking back’ could also be ‘talking with’, engaging people in a dialogue. It need not always address the state; it could also be aiming to make a change at the personal level in everyday life. It could also be ‘talking within’, keeping the discussion and debates alive within a movement to avoid a homogenized, simplification of the activism and provide a reflective element to the action. ‘Talking back’ could also take form other than “talking”, which usually is done through slogans and placards in a street protest, petition, or statements. It could be done through art, theatre performance, and many, many other possibilities.

Blank Noise is definitely an example of these different forms and its experience shows that the difference is not arbitrary. It is based on a well-thought analysis of the issue that extends to how it formulates its objectives which is then translated into its strategies. Blank Noise is not only an example of how activism is done differently, but also on how the thought behind it is different.

As I looked around the workshop room I was reminded that Blank Noise was not the only one. A few seats away from me sat two people who combined technology and poetry to create everyday resistance towards consumerism in Taiwan and a young woman who held urban camps in India to mobilize young people to volunteer Regardless of the issue and the technology used, many digital natives with a cause across the world remind us that ‘talking back’ could be done in many other ways than “talking back”.

This is the third post in the Beyond the Digital series, a research project that aims to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina with The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

*The photo is from one of Blank Noise's interventions in Cubbon Park, Bangalore. You can learn more about this intervention here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/talking-back-without-talking-back

Reflecting from the Beyond

maesy — 2015-05-14T12:21:29Z

After going ‘beyond the digital’ with Blank Noise through the last nine posts, the final post in the series reflects on the understanding gained so far about youth digital activism and questions one needs to carry in moving forward on researching, working with, and understanding digital natives.

Throughout the series, I have argued the following points. Firstly, the 21^st century society is changing into a network society and that youth movements are changing accordingly. I have outlined the gaps in the current perspectives used in understanding the current form and proposed to approach the topic by going beyond the digital: from a youth standpoint, exploring all the elements of social movement, and based on a case study in the Global South – the uber cool Blank Noise community who have embraced the research with open arms. The methodology has allowed me to identify the newness in youth’s approach to social change and ways of organizing. Although I do not mean to generalize, there are some points where the case study resonates with the broader youth movement of today. In this concluding post, I will reflect on how the research journey has led me to rethink several points about youth, social change, and activism.

While social movements are commonly imagined to aim for concrete structural change, many youth movements today aim for social and cultural change at the intangible attitudinal level. Consequently, they articulate the issue with an intangible opponent (the mindset) and less-measurable goals. Their objective is to raise public awareness, but their approach to social change is through creating personal change at the individual level through engagement with the movement. Hence, ‘success’ is materialized in having as many people as possible involved in the movement. This is enabled by several factors.

The first is the Internet and new media/social technologies, which is used as a site for community building, support group, campaigns, and a basis to allow people spread all over the globe to remain involved in the collective in the absence of a physical office. However, the cyber is not just a tool; it is also a public space that is equally important with the physical space. Despite acknowledging the diversity of the public engaged in these spaces, youth today do not completely regard them as two separate spheres. Engaging in virtual community has a real impact on everyday lives; the virtual is a part of real life for many youth (Shirky, 2010). However, it is not a smooth ‘space of flows’ (Castells, 2009) either. Youth actors in the Global South do recognize that their ease in navigating both spheres is the ability of the elite in their societies, where the digital divide is paramount. The disconnect stems from their acknowledgement that social change must be multi-class and an expression of their reflexivity in facing the challenge.

The second enabling factor is its highly individualized approach. The movement enables people to personalize their involvement, both in terms of frequency and ways of engagement as well as in meaning-making. It is an echo of the age of individualism that youth are growing up in, shaped by the liberal economic and political ideologies in the 1990s India and elsewhere (France, 2007). Individualism has become a new social structure, in which personal decisions and meaning-making is deemed as the key to solve structural issues in late modernity (Ibid).

In this era, young people’s lives consist of a combination of a range of activities rather than being focused only in one particular activity (Ibid). This is also the case in their social and political engagement. Very few young people worldwide are full-time activists or completely apathetic, the mainstream are actually involved in ‘everyday activism’ (Bang, 2004; Harris et al, 2010). These are young people who are personalizing politics by adopting causes in their daily behaviour and lifestyle, for instance by purchasing only Fair Trade goods, or being very involved in a short term concrete project but then stopping and moving on to other activities. The emergence of these everyday activists are explained by the dwindling authority of the state in the emergence of major corporations as political powers (Castells, 2009) and youth’s decreased faith in formal political structures which also resulted in decreased interest in collectivist, hierarchical social movements in favour of a more individualized form of activism made easier with Web 2.0 (Harris et al, 2010).

A collective of everyday activists means that there are many forms of participation that one can fluidly navigate in, but it requires a committed leadership core recognized through presence and engagement. As Clay Shirky (2010: 90) said, the main cultural and ethical norm in these groups is to ‘give credit where credit is due’. Since these youth are used to producing and sharing content rather than only consuming, the aforementioned success of the movement lies on the leaders’ ability to facilitate this process. The power to direct the movement is not centralized in the leaders; it is dispersed to members who want to use the opportunity.

This form of movement defies the way social movements have been theorized before, where individuals commit to a tangible goal and the group engagement directed under a defined leadership. The contemporary youth movement could only exist by staying with the intangible articulation and goal to accommodate the variety of personalized meaning-making and allow both personal satisfaction and still create a wider impact; it will be severely challenged by a concrete goal like advocating for a specific regulation. Not all youth there are ‘activist’ in the common full-time sense, for most everyday activists their engagement might not be a form of activism at all but a productive and pleasurable way to use their free time - or, in Clay Shirky’s term, cognitive surplus (2010).

Revisiting my initial intent to put the term activism under scrutiny, I acknowledge this as a call for scholars to re-examine the concepts of activism and social movements through a process of de-framing and re-framing to deal with how youth today are shaping the form of movements. Although the limitations of this paper do not allow me to directly address the challenge, I offer my own learning from this process for the quest of future researchers.

The way young people today are reimagining social change and movements reiterate that political and social engagement should be conceived in the plural. Instead of “Activism” there should be “activisms” in various forms; there is not a new form replacing the older, but all co-existing and having the potential to complement each other. Allowing people to cope with street sexual harassment and create a buzz around the issue should complement, not replace, efforts made by established movements to propose a legislation or service provision from the state. This is also a response I offer to the proponents of the aforementioned “doubt” narrative.

I share the more optimistic viewpoint about how these new forms are presenting more avenues to engage the usually apathetic youth into taking action for a social cause. However, I also acknowledge that the tools that have facilitated the emergence of this new form of movement have existed for less than a decade; thus, we still have to see how it evolves through the years.

Hence, I also find the following questions to be relevant for proponents of the “hope” narrative. Social change needs to cater to the most marginalized in the society, but as elaborated before, the methods of engagement both on the physical and virtual spaces are still contextual to the middle class. Therefore, how can the emerging youth movements evolve to reach other groups in the society? Since most of these movements are divorced from existing movements, how can they synergize with existing movements to propel concrete change? These are open questions that perhaps will be answered with time, but my experience with Blank Noise has shown that these actors have the reflexivity required to start exploring solutions to the challenges.

The research started from a long-term personal interest and curiosity. In this journey, I have found some answers but ended up with more questions that will also stay with me in the long term. As a parting note before, I would like to share a quote that will accompany my ongoing reflection on these questions.

My advice to other young activists of the world: study and respect history... but ultimately break the mould. There have never been social media tools like this before. We are the first generation to test them out: to make the mistakes but also the breakthrough.

(Tammy Tibbetts, 2010)

This is the tenth and final post in the Beyond the Digital series, a research project that aims to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina with Blank Noise under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

References:

Bang, H.P. (2004) ‘Among everyday makers and expert citizens’. Accessed 21 September 2010. http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf

Castells, M. (2009) Communication Power. New York: Oxford University Press.

France, A. (2007) Understanding Youth in Late Modernity. Berkshire: Open University Press.

Harris, A., Wyn, J., and Younes, S. (2010) ‘Beyond apathetic or activist youth: ‘Ordinary’ young people and contemporary forms of participaton’, Young Vol. 18:9, pp. 9-32

Shirky, C. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. London: Penguin Press

Image source:

http://blog.blanknoise.org/2009/08/street-signs.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond

Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:34:22Z

Digital Natives live their lives differently. But sometimes, they also die their lives differently! What happens when we die online? Can the digital avatar die? What is digital life? The Web 2.0 Suicide machine that has now popularly been called the 'anti-social-networking' application brings some of these questions to the fore. As a part of the Hivos-CIS "Digital Natives with a Cause?" research programme, Nishant Shah writes about how Life on the Screen is much more than just a series of games.

In the new year, 2010, one of the most startling stories was of mass suicides. About 50,000 people were affected. Legal cases were filed. The interwebz were abuzz with the tale of how they did it. There was talk about a website that was responsible for this. The blogosphere went into a frenzy discussing the ‘new lease of life’ that these suicides provided. Videos of people caught in the act found their way onto popular video distributing spaces. And for everybody who talked about it, it was partly a joke and partly a gimmick. However, for a significant population, across the globe, the news came as a shock and a moment of self-reflection.

Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. It is a simple online machine which helps people commit digital suicide by destroying their digital identities on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Myspace. It is software that deletes every single transaction which you may have ever performed in your digital avatar. Messages sent to and received from friends, stored notes, results of viral quizzes, pictures of the last party that you attended, status messages describing state of mind, high scores and social assets on social networking games, links shared, videos uploaded – everything gets deleted, allowing you one last chance to re-live your digital life before it locks you out of the 2.0 web for once and for all. To many this might sound funny, but for the people, whose lives are lived, stored, shared and experienced in the online spaces that Web 2.0 has developed.

We find them in universities and colleges, multitasking, preparing a classroom presentation while chatting with friends and keeping track of their online gaming avatars. We encounter them in offices, glued with equal passion, to dating or social networking sites, and moderating geek mailing lists. We chance upon them in homes and bedrooms, sharing the most private and intimate details of their lives using live cam feeds and audio/video podcasts. If these images are familiar to you, you have encountered a digital native. It might have, recently, been a ‘child’ who knows how to use the mobile phone more effectively than you do, or a teenager who can connect your machine online while thumb typing on the cell phone, in a language which is not very familiar to you. It could also be the saucy colleague in office, who is always on the information highway, making jazzy presentations and animations or playing games with their virtual avatars, or the taxi driver who has learned the power of GPS maps or even the chaiwallah around the corner who uses his mobile phone to download new music and conduct a romantic affair.

These techno-mutants are slowly, but surely taking over the world. By the end of 2010, the global youth population will be about 1.2. Billion and 85 per cent of it will be in the developing countries of the world, growing up with digital and Internet technologies as an integral part of their life. They might not be a significant number now, but they are going to be the citizens of the future, taking important decisions about the destinies of nations and states, creating businesses and running economies, educating young learners and shaping public opinions. And they are learning the fundamentals of these actions in their online interactions on Web 2.0 spaces using digital tools to morph, mobilise, mutate, and manage their social, cultural and political lives and identities. It is of these people that this column writes of – people who are marked by digital and Internet technologies in strange and unprecedented ways.

Originally published at http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News as a part of the Knowledge Programme: "Digital Natives with a Cause?"

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn1

Centre for Internet and Society

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 3) - Eva Galperin

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 4) - Marietje Schaake

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 5) - Amelia Andersdotter

The Body in Cyberspace

Case Study: A Rape in Cyberspace

Cyberspace and the State

Cyberspace and Criminality

DPS MMS: Case Study

Summary

Additional Readings

IT and the cITy

China's Generation Y : Youth and Technology in Shanghai

“Politics by other means”: Fostering positive contestation and charting ‘red lines’ through global governance in cyberspace

Infrastructure is political

Fostering ‘red lines’ and diffusing ‘unpeace’ in cyberspace

The Future of Cyber Diplomacy

Endnotes

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 9) - Saikat Datta

Collaborative Projects Programme

Jurisdictional Issues in Cyberspace

i4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access

Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks

Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?

First Thing First

Talking Back without "Talking Back"

Reflecting from the Beyond

Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine