Centre for Internet and Society

UID Project in India - Some Possible Ramifications

Liliyan — 2012-03-21T10:13:27Z

Having a standard for decentralized ID verification rather than a centralized database that would more often than not be misused by various authorities will solve ID problems, writes Liliyan in this blog entry. These blog posts to be published in a series will voice the expert opinions of researchers and critics on the UID project and present its unique shortcomings to the reader.

Researchers at CIS have been grappling with the UID project from research, advocacy, and legal standpoints though all approach it from their own perspective and opinions are rarely duplicated. In an attempt to make their expert opinions more accessible to readers, a series of blog posts, this being the first, will be put up. These posts will not, and cannot because of its length and format, try to address all the possible issues the UID poses. However, they will present the bare bones of the arguments and research questions that the independent voices at CIS see as crucial. These posts will also ask many more questions than they answer, in an attempt to spur further dialogue about the UID project.

Central to understanding the nature of the UID project and its possible ramifications is the idea that technology is not merely a tool to be used by an unchanging, monolithic state. In fact, its very adoption can create ripple effects throughout the apparatus of the state. When the state adoptsa mainstream and ubiquitous technology, the structure of the government and methods of governance change. These changes are not always so dramatic as to be immediately noticeable without some informed inspection, but if one considers the way the state and the citizen interact the significance of these changes becomes starkly apparent. Can we trust the government to use touch screen voting machines like the ones we see every day at the bank? Do government surveillance cameras make us safer or introduce worrisome intrusion into our privacy, or both? Technology is not as neutral as it appears. That is not to say that it is inherently good or bad, but that it is not inert, it is transformative in nature.

The nation state as we know it is built on the printed word, or at least analogue technology. The ways in which we codify, distribute, and assimilate information have, for centuries, been dominated by the printing press. With the introduction of “database governance” there will inevitably be a shift, and a radical one at that. The Indian government has announced its intention to move towards “SMART” (simple, moral, accountable, responsive and transparent) governance, and this implies both an acceptance of the neo-liberal philosophy of government and techno-governance. To achieve a new level of transparency, accountability, and responsiveness, the move towards e-governance could be a major turning point, but how does this shift complicate and change the citizen-state relationship in India? How does this change shift the relationship of India with the rest of the international community?

The UID and Shifts in the Citizen-State Relationship

One way that the citizen-state relationship will change with the shift towards techno-governance, specifically in regard to the UID project, is that the UID posits the state as both the safe-keeper and arbiter of identity. Proponents of the UID project are adamant that it is a voluntary program, but even the UID website states that “in time, certain service providers may require a person to have a UID to deliver services”. As the UID becomes increasingly ubiquitous, could not having a number mean being cut off from some or many of the basic privileges of citizenship if one's identity is becoming more difficult to verify? If having a UID number is the most prominent marker of identity, then it is through state definition, arbitration and upon the state's technical capacity that all will rely.

Moreover, how do we begin to address the privacy issues raised by technological advances in relation to non-changing legal structures? What does it mean to capture all this identity data without introducing a new privacy legislation to protect the citizen? Without new legal accommodation, otherwise benign processes like a statistical census can become a potent tool in a shift towards a police state. As state apparatus's shift, there must be some paradigmatic shift in law to accompany these new technologies and government roles.

If the state transforms through the integration of e-governance forms, then there will inevitably be a recalibration of the relationship between the state, the market, and the citizen. Traditionally the separation of these entities creates arbitration and within a development paradigm there is dynamic, active triangulation. One way we can see this triangulation is through government intervention in markets on behalf of the citizen. There are certain spaces of consumption, for example, such as a cinema where state intervention against discrimination creates a marker for citizenship. That is, because I am able to access a cinema without discrimination, as one of my constitutional rights, this demonstrates my citizenship. However, with the introduction of public- private partnerships, or PPPs, the fact of having multiple stake-holders of political economy allows for the state to disinvest in the production and delivery of certain public services. Satisfying the needs of the citizen for services like sanitation, public education, delivery of power and clean water, maintenance of infrastructure like roads and bridges, can be handed over to corporate entities. The Indian government has enthusiastically embraced PPPs as a way to bring needed capital to the infrastructure demands that accompany their economic growth goals. However, how does this kind of task delegation affect transparency and accountability? If the state decides to stop producing or supplying a good or service, and instead turns this over to a corporation, can the mechanisms for state oversight realistically be trusted to make sure quality and accountability are not adversely affected and rectify the situation if they are? Where does the citizen come into all of this, in terms of what they stand to gain and lose?

The Definition of Citizenship and the UID

As the state and the market enters into new relationships the definition of citizenship changes. If the citizen is seen as the intended beneficiary of state programs, this new relationship between state and market begs the question “Who is subject to (or the subject of) the state?” When the corporate sphere creates micro-financing that helps farmers, they may help the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid manage their debt, but does it necessarily address the problems that created the debt in the first place? How does the market mediate the citizen-state dialogue? As the state and the market enter into new relationships there is a recalibration of the citizen-government relationship. Do market demands for an e-literate consumer put pressure on the state to create one where one did not exist before, and if so, can this not have profound implications for the definition of citizenship?

Part of the movement towards e-governance is signalled by the fact that there has been a shift away from state-sponsored literacy campaigns to e-literacy programs. Does this use of information and communications technology for development (or ITC4D) alienate significant portions of the population? Can such programs in fact widen the digital divide? With the introduction of e-governance the state asks the citizen to participate in governance by creating new avenues for civic participation, such as providing databases of information pertaining to the state that is freely accessible for analysis and manipulation by anyone with the skills to do so. But, if this makes it impossible for some portions of the citizenry to communicate effectively with the state, does this run the risk of making certain, traditional forms of citizenship redundant? How are people with low literacy and little or no access to the necessary technologies supposed to communicate with this new high-tech bureaucracy? Will those who cannot navigate the new systems be inadvertently relegated to second-class status?

This is of particular concern when thinking about the UID project. To properly manage and distribute social services, ID management in some form is crucial. However, when trying to make sure services are properly delivered to the uneducated poor the danger for digital-analogue slippage that is not in their favour increases, and accountability is not necessarily adequately addressed. For example, if I am an illiterate farmer entitled to a certain ration and the person conducting the transaction decides to defraud me, they can easily ask me to authenticate my biometrics, make it appear that they have been simply checking my identity when they have actually fooled me into authenticating the “completed” transaction and simply tell me the computer says, I've already received my share, that I'm only entitled to half of the normal amount, or some other such lie. In this scenario, how would I know this person wasn't telling me the truth? If they lie using a simple ledger, I can take the ledger itself or a copy of it to a literate friend and have them help me navigate the situation. I can seek redress and substantiate my claims more easily if I am not alienated by the technologies being used. Technologies can be empowering or dis-empowering depending on their application. How then, do we balance the demands of the market and the duties of the state against the rights of the citizen? Or rather, how do we apply technology in such a way that the demands of the market and the duties of the state mutually balance each other?

Centralization and Cost-effectiveness of the UID

While ID management is indisputably important, it does not require a centralized database. In the US there are multiple pieces of information, stored in separate databases that can be used to authenticate a transaction. No one can open a bank account with just a social security insurance number. You also need a separate form of ID, often two, that can be used to verify identity. In this way, the SSI number is a bit like a “username” and the other forms of ID, driver's license or passport, function like a corresponding “password”. With the UID project, however, the “username” (the number itself) and the “password” (the number holder's biometrics) are stored in the same place. Thereby, should the database be in some way compromised, all the information needed to verify and complete transactions would be available. If storing this information in a central database is really a good idea, then one must also accept the premise that merging all existing email servers into one monolithic server is also a good idea. Furthermore, centralization is not only more dangerous, it is totally unnecessary. Trillions of dollars worth of trade take place every year using PIN numbers issued by banks and verified without the verifying data being centralized. Having a standard for decentralized ID verification, rather than a centralized database would solve ID problems without creating a database that would be vulnerable to attack.

There are lots of examples of governments implementing costly safety measures that don't actually make anyone safer. Take for example the cameras put up all over London to monitor the movements of people. Unfortunately, something as low-tech as a hooded sweatshirt can thwart these attempts at surveillance. Moreover, if I am a criminal, I am going to make it a priority to know where the cameras are so that I can strategically avoid them. Another example is the millions of dollar the U.S. government spent on putting an armed Federal Air Marshal on every flight, post 9/11. While traditional intelligence gather has thwarted other attempted attacks since 9/11, Air Marshals have not been responsible for stopping any. Simply because the UID project is more technologically advanced does not make it more effective. It seems to greatly increase the risk of fraud that there can be so many separate biometrics machines scattered in different places to verify so many transactions. Having the machines sequestered in private businesses where they will not be constantly monitored or regulated seems to be both costly and easily subject to tampering. It seems to make more sense to have, say, one central, monitored machine per so many people that could be used to settle identity disputes when they arise rather than making the technology a part of every transaction.

Infallibility and Circumvention of the UID

The UID is not infallible and circumvention will certainly be a problem with the project. We find an analogy in the field of digital rights management. If I copy an mp3 without permission or payment, that is illegal. Digital rights management law was introduced to stop this practice, but it was circumvented. This legislation has not stopped the first crime. It has merely created a second, that of circumventing the law. The UID, in so far as it may be used to try to stop the crime of illegally siphoning resources such as, for example, grain intended to go to the poor, cannot stop people from circumventing the system. Circumventing the UID will be a crime. If doing so were truly impossible there would be no need to criminalize it. So, instead of preventing the initial crime of siphoning may not prevent the first crime, while introducing another.

There are basically two possible types of circumvention that are possible, though they might present themselves in various different forms. “Type A” or “the Mission Impossible” kind of fraud might involve fake thumb prints and contact lenses being worn by someone trying to fool the person conducting the biometric authentication. “Type B” occurs when the person operating the biometrics machine is working to defraud the system, most likely with one or many accomplices.

“Type A” involves one dishonest person, who is trying to access someone else's account or a ghost account, and there are various proposed methods to prevent against this type of fraud. To prevent against people using fake thumb prints, the biometrics machines will measure the heat of the thumb as well as the image of the thumb. With the iris scan, there will be a pulse of light to cause contraction in the iris so that a contact lens, which cannot adjust for light, can be detected. All of this will drastically raise the price of the machines in question. It is hard to imagine farmers and labourers defrauding the system with elaborate biometric defrauding devices, so these expensive machines are much more appropriate for monitoring the top of the economic pyramid, who steal in larger sums and have more sophisticated technology at their disposal.

“Type B” involves dishonesty either by the person in control of the biometric authentication, or both that person and others. This seems to be a much more likely and problematic scenario. Right now, bank accounts that are not connected to a name are regularly created so that people can cheat the tax man. Since the bank profits from these accounts, it's in the bank's interest to help people set up such accounts. Ghost ID numbers, and things like bank accounts that are connected to them, can still be produced with biometrics. How is this possible? Well, to make it possible for so many biometric authentications to happen every day, the whole set of ten finger prints won't be sent. That would be way too much data. So, instead of overwhelming the channels, only one thumb print will be sent. Even that many thumb prints would be an information overload, so each thumb print's image will be reduced to a set of 30 data points that will be compared against the original scans. So, where is there a possibility for fraud? When the scan of the finger is taken, and image is rendered. If someone wants to create a ghost ID they only have to manipulate this image, like with a Photoshop filter, and alter the data points. Once I've created a set of biometric markers that doesn't connect to anyone, I can conduct transactions for a ghost. One can easily imagine a market emerging for ghost IDs. People might start trying to pay foreign tourists for their biometric information, which could be sold to a local office. There are certain settings where biometrics works well, for example, at an airport. There, everything is under constant video surveillance. If someone were to tamper with or try to replace the machinery it would be quickly noticed by the cameras. Even if it weren't, different people would routinely be operating the same machine and this would be an added safe guard against fraud. However, at a bank, or any place where the machines used for verification are operated behind closed doors it is quite likely that the technology will be abused. This abuse could easily go unnoticed, because the draft UID bill has proposed strict accountability measures for the Authority, and has conveniently overlooked extending these to collecting and enrolling agencies.

Digital/Analogue Slippage

There is always the possibility of digital/analogue slippage or, more simply put, the computer records not reflecting what actually happened even if no fake identity was used. This happens all the time in IT buildings in the form of tailgating. Four people go out to lunch together and as they re-enter the building they're supposed to each swipe their ID card individually. It is easier and faster for one person to swipe for everyone so, despite signs discouraging this behaviour, this is a common occurrence. If you were to try to analyse the data collected after a day of such comings and goings it would be indecipherable.

I can also authenticate my biometrics, in order to authorize a transaction, without the transaction actually being complete. Let's say I'm a poor farmer entitled to a ration of 10 kilos of grain. The person who is supposed to give me the grain is not an honest person and insists that I authenticate the transaction before he or she gives me my ration. I do what I'm told but only receive 5 kilos. The computer record shows that I have gotten my full ration, so I have no grounds to contest. In this scenario, more complex technology does not necessarily mean greater accountability. Furthermore, even if I am illiterate, if there is a simple ledger that has recorded the transaction, I can physically take the ledger or a copy of it and show it to some literate person willing to help me. If the only record of the transaction is in a database that I can't access or can't understand it will be even more difficult for me to seek help. Moreover, if I don't understand the technology and the shop owner decides not to give me the grain at all they can simply say “Oh, I'm sorry, your account has been denied” or “The computer says you've already been given your ration” and I have little chance of successfully negotiating that situation. Built in to this example is the disadvantage that the illiterate and the computer illiterate face when dealing with this technology but, this is not necessarily always present in cases where digital/analogue slippage causes confusion or complication.

Commonly, things are bought by or registered to one person and used by another. For example, in a small office building, all the phone lines and computers may have been bought in the name of one person. Each office worker will not buy their own computer or equipment, but instead the computers will be bought in the name of the person who runs the organization or an administrator with financial authority. If someone in the office uses their computer to make a bomb or store child pornography, who is accountable? This is the problem when there is digital/analogue slippage. There is the digital record of events and then things as they really are, which are not always identical, and there is no accountability or safeguard against mistake. In the context of the UID, the possibility of such slippage is too high, and will work against the goal of delivering benefits to the poor instead of facilitating it.

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

Govt and BlackBerry firm wait for the other to hang up

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:46:54Z

Sunil Abraham speaks to Archna Shukla on the stand-off between the Government of India and RIM. The news was published in expressindia.com.

What is the current stand-off between the government and RIM all about?

The current logjam is with regards to BlackBerry messenger, email and web traffic. Around two years ago, the government had asked BlackBerry to allow it to monitor the text messages (SMSes) and phone calls exchanged through its platform. The government has since then been monitoring these services with the help of telecom service providers. It, however, still doesn’t have any means to monitor, intercept or decrypt BlackBerry’s messenger, email and web exchanges. The government wants to put in place a surveillance infrastructure to monitor these services and is asking BlackBerry to cooperate.

What is unique about BlackBerry services? Why doesn’t the government have a similar problem with Nokia or Apple?

Companies such as Apple do not provide email and messenger services in India. They only sell their handsets in the country. Nokia recently started providing such services under the Nokia Messaging Services Platform. The service, which includes enterprise solutions, consumer services and Nokia’s own messaging solution Ovi mail, is still in beta format. Nokia’s India spokesperson said the company will set up servers for its various services inside India whenever it kickstarts the functions in a full fledged manner.

Canadian firm Research in Motion (RIM), makers of BlackBerry, on the other hand, provides all these services alongside selling its handsets. It also manages all its data and traffic on its own without giving the access to anybody. The servers for these services are installed outside India. The government is concerned that keeping servers outside the country will give access to foreign authorities to monitor its local traffic and information. In the US, for instance, this kind of monitoring will be possible under the provisions of the Patriot Act.

Is BlackBerry the only one to use strong encryptions?

The use of strong encryption in information technology is prevalent in both the wireless industry and Internet platforms. BlackBerry, however, uses a superior encryption that is highly reliable and secure and it owes its popularity in the world markets to this feature mainly. According to Sunil Abraham, the Executive Director of Bangalore-based advocacy group Centre for Internet and Society, BlackBerry uses strong encryption with 256 bit keys. In comparison, gmail.com and Citibank.co.in use only 128 bit keys.

“If you have encryption on while visiting citibank.com or when using an offline mail client like MS Outlook Express, the government can identify the encrypted service that you are using and the recipient of your encrypted messages. Then they can launch a targeted brute-force attack to intercept and decrypt specific communications,” he says, adding that with the BlackBerry, the government can only see that you are having an encrypted transaction with the BlackBerry servers. They cannot identify the recipients and web services. This makes the brute-force attack difficult as a lot of time is spent decrypting unimportant messages.

What is the problem that RIM is facing in UAE and Saudi Arabia?

In UAE, it is facing the same problem as in India. In Saudi Arabia, BlackBerry will instal computer servers, which would allow the government some access to user’s data.

Can the Indian government and RIM meet half-way?

Unlikely. Though, as per PTI reports,

BlackBerry has made an attempt to break the logjam by offering metadata and relevant information to security agencies which will enable them in lawful interception, it has has failed to enthuse them. At a meeting between government officials and RIM, company’s representatives said that “they can provide the metadata of the message like the Internet Protocol address of BES and PIN and International Mobile Equipment Identity of the BlackBerry mobile”, sources said. Metadata is loosely defined as data about data. It provides information about a certain item’s content like how large the picture is, the colour depth, the image resolution when the image was created, and other data. A text document’s metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is, when the document was written, and a short summary of the document. However, sources said the RIM, which has nearly one million subscribers across India, failed to enthuse the security agencies who want an uninterrupted access to the messaging services on BlackBerry platform. The security agencies apprehend that BlackBerry services in the present format pose a serious security threat.

The government may argue that if surveillance is allowed in some countries, it should have the same access, too.

So far, RIM’s public stand has been that its security architecture was specifically designed to provide corporate customers with the ability to transmit information wirelessly while providing them with the necessary confidence that no one, including RIM, could access their data.

Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society says there is a possibility of a compromise behind the doors and the citizens may never get to know that a surveillance regime and infrastructure have been put in place to monitor their communications.

Click to read the original.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/govt-and-blackberry

Civil Liberties and the amended Information Technology Act, 2000

Malavika Jayaram — 2012-03-21T10:13:53Z

This post examines certain limitations of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (as amended in 2008). Malavika Jayaram points out the fact that when most countries of the world are adopting plain English instead of the conventional legal terminology for better understanding, India seems to be stuck in the old-fashioned method thereby, struggling to maintain a balance between clarity and flexibility in drafting its laws. The present Act, she says, is although an improvement over the old Act and seeks to address and improve on certain areas in the right direction but still comes up short in making necessary changes when it comes to fundamental rights and personal liberties. The new Act retains elements from the previous one making it an abnormal document and this could have been averted if there had been some attention to detail.

After close to a decade of dealing with English statutes, European directives and pan-European regulations, I was struck anew by the antique style of Indian draftsmanship on my return. Much of the world is moving away from stiff legal speech and towards plain English. Even England has converted to a simpler, more concise legal rhetoric. India, however, has a peculiar genius for imprecision and euphemism that makes the purpose and implications of the law hard to understand and apply. While it may seem quaint, to pepper a law with terms like ‘inconvenience’, ‘nuisance’ or ‘annoyance’, the language fails to convey the seriousness of the offences being defined. A reading of the Information Technology Act, 2008, in its new incarnation incorporating the latest amendments and rules (ITA), is a case in point.

Legal draftsmen inevitably wrestle with the age-old dilemma of the generic versus the specific, the potential dangers of a broad definition versus the built-in obsolescence of a narrow spotlight. The crafters of the ITA, in their admittedly admirable attempts to redress some of the gaps and ambiguity in the original law, appear to have struggled in their efforts to strike a balance between clarity and flexibility. While the new avatar is certainly an improvement in some areas, one can’t help but regret the missed opportunity to make necessary changes. Most importantly is the negative impact of the occasionally sloppy and sometimes overly wide drafting on deeply cherished fundamental rights and personal liberties.

Among other things, the ITA has sought to address and improve aspects such as technology neutrality, data protection, phishing and spam, child pornography, the liability of intermediaries and cyber terrorism. While many of these amendments are a step in the right direction, the actual drafting that implements the high level objectives suffers in many respects. For example, the previous emphasis on ‘digital signatures’ has shifted to the technologically neutral ‘electronic signatures’ but the changes have not been carried out thoroughly enough to expunge the old concept entirely. The current law is a bit of an abnormal document in that it contains elements of both concepts, which some attention to detail could easily have averted. Another example is that the provisions meant to combat spam and phishing end up using the dreaded ‘annoyance’ and ‘inconvenience’ terminology with the effect of casting the net of criminality over far more than is appropriate. For example, mail sent with the purpose of causing ‘annoyance’ or ‘inconvenience’ (not exactly the worst offence in the offline world) could put someone behind bars.

An important set of well intentioned but woefully inadequate provisions are those relating to the protection of data. The absence of a specific law on data protection had, in itself, garnered much criticism both within the country as well as in the context of international transactions and outsourcing. The old Act offered the feeble protection of a single provision (section 43) that dealt with unauthorised access and damage to data. In an attempt to meet industry demands and international market standards, the ITA introduced two sections that address civil and criminal sanctions. While this exercise understandably falls far short of a comprehensive law relating to data (being squeezed into an omnibus piece of technology related legislation, rather than one geared up only to deal with data), there was considerable anticipation of its role in papering over the existing cracks and provide a workable, if temporary, data protection regime.

However, the attempt is such a limited one, and so replete with shortcomings that the need for a ‘proper’ data protection law still stands. Given the proposed initiation of the UID scheme, in particular, there is a compelling need for a robust and intelligent law in this regard. Most other countries’ regimes clearly do at least the following:

define and classify types of data (for example, in most European countries, ‘personal data’ is any data that identifies an individual, ‘sensitive personal data’ is data that reveals details of ethnicity, religion, health, sexuality, political opinion, etc.),
fine-tune the nature of protection to the categories of data (i.e., greater standards of care around sensitive personal data),
apply equally to data stored offline and manually as to data stored on computer systems,
distinguish between a data controller (i.e., one who takes decisions as to data) and a data processor (i.e., one who processes data on the instructions of the data controller),
impose clear restrictions on the manner of data collection (for example, must be obtained fairly and lawfully),
give clear guidelines on the purposes for which that data can be put to and by whom (often involving a consent requirement that gives the individual a great degree of control over their data),
require certain standards and technical measures around the collection, storage, access to, protection, retention and destruction of data,
ensure that the use of data is adequate, relevant and not excessive given the purpose for which it was gathered,
cater for opt-in and opt-out type regimes, again to provide individuals with a measure of control over the use of their data even after the stage of initial collection (which has a huge impact on invasive telemarketing or unsolicited written communication)
impose a knowledge requirement and procedures for allowing individuals to seek information on what data is held on them, and
create safeguards and penalties that are well tailored to breaches of any of the above.

Unfortunately, and perhaps understandably, the ITA barely begins to scratch the surface of what a good data protection regime entails. The provisions that it does introduce (sections 43-A and 72-A) have glaring inadequacies. Briefly:

the term ‘sensitive personal data or information’ is used indiscriminately without any definition,
the provisions only cover electronic data and records, not data stored in non-electronic systems or media,
they offer no guidance on most of the principles set out above such as in relation to accuracy, adequacy, consent, purpose, etc.,
in the absence of the controller-processor distinction, liability is imposed on persons, who are not necessarily in a position to control data, even if it is in their possession,
civil liability for data breaches only arises where ‘negligence’ is involved (i.e., failure to have security procedures or failure to implement them correctly will not automatically result in damages unless negligence is proven),
similarly, criminal liability only applies to cases of information obtained in the context of a service contract, and requires an element of ‘wilfulness’, or a disclosure without consent or in breach of a lawful contract – this is a very limited remit aimed largely at preventing disgruntled or unscrupulous employees from dealing in company/customer data.

For these broad reasons, we can see that even the amended ITA disappoints those who expected a greatly improved regime in relation to data. It is widely anticipated that the UID scheme, which poses so many potential data protection issues, will serve as a catalyst for a standalone law that is on par with the more sophisticated regimes that function very well in other countries. One great feature common to most of those regimes is that they are consumer/individual focused. The freedom and privacy of the individual is the central concern of protection. Our ITA seems far more concerned with providing corporates with a stick to beat errant employees with, and with catering to the needs of the outsourcing and IT industries. It remains to be seen whether the UID scheme will merely galvanise some targeted legal action covering UIDs rather than generating a broad based piece of legislation.

In addition to the criticisms levelled at the data protection provisions, the other large subset of concerns has been in relation to the civil liberties implications of the ITA. There has been some horror expressed in various forums and media about the ITA contributing to the growth of a police state, to severe curtailment of the freedom of speech and expression, to the invasion of privacy, and to the disproportionate severity of penalisation for offences that are placed on crimes committed in cyberspace compared to crimes committed in the hear and now. Sadly, this is true to a large extent given the clunky treatment of ‘cyber terrorism’, the intolerable pre-censorship that is enabled by the blocking of websites, the broad approach to the monitoring and collection of data, and the demanding obligations of intermediaries to cooperate with interception, monitoring and decryption of data for poorly defined reasons.

While our Constitution’s fundamental rights chapter, which enshrines certain basic, democratic, and profound rights, might not have the same vocabulary of due process as we see in the US, it nevertheless requires restrictions to be reasonable. Precedents and the wider jurisprudence in the field have further developed the concepts of checks and balances, procedural safeguards and legitimacy of restraints that a functioning democracy like India must accord to its people. It can be argued that several provisions of the ITA cause significant tension with the right to freedom of speech and expression, the right against self-incrimination, the right to equality before the law, and the right to practice a trade or profession. To briefly deal with the worst offenders in the IT Act, I have divided them into some broader topics:

Pre-censorship

Some of the most excessive provisions relate to the free hand with which public access to websites can be blocked. Previously, there was some hope that the rules yet to be formulated in connection with section 69-A would offer some procedural safeguards. The recently notified rules do contain details – in the bureaucratese that we have come to expect – of the process to be followed by the designated functionaries. They also permit the concerned person or intermediary to submit a reply and clarifications to the committee before the decision to block access is taken.

These rules are to a large extent undermined by rule 9 (“Blocking of information in cases of emergency”), which provides that, “…in any case of an emergency nature, for which no delay is acceptable…”, the process will turn into an internal escalation within the department of IT and interim directions relating to blocking access may be issued without giving (him) an opportunity of hearing. There are those who think that, given the events of 26/11, this is wholly justified but the prospect of abuse fills others with dread. The rules may offer detailed time-frames within which orders are made and approved, require reasons to be recorded in writing, provide that emergency orders may be revoked and information unblocked, etc. Regardless, the nature of the process (executive rather than judicial), the ease with which it can be abused, and the fact that the review committee will only meet once in two months to check for compliance, set aside incorrect orders and unblock information, does not offer much comfort. If a site is incorrectly blocked, it could take up to two months for this to be rectified, which could cause a great damage to the owner of the site, and indeed to the wider public that has an interest in uncensored, free speech.

Given that any person can submit a request, it is not unreasonable to anticipate a certain level of frivolous and malicious requests for blocking sites, especially given that the grounds for blocking are very wide (the often repeated set that we are familiar with, namely, in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India; relating to defence of India/ security of State/ friendly relations with foreign states/ public order and for preventing incitement to commission of any cognizable offences). Without a review committee constantly monitoring and policing the unbridled use of the provisions, the backlog of blocking decisions that may need to be reversed can become a mountain very quickly. The dangers of pre-censorship and the curtailment of dialogue, debate and free speech are even greater in a country with an increasingly thin-skinned populace. Faced with a volatile backdrop of great diversity of religion, political opinions, views on sexuality, morality, obscenity and other highly subjective values and beliefs, there is immense extra-legal pressure on free speech. Thus, there is now a need for greater vigilance so that the thought police do not wield the stick of harsh penalties under the ITA without reason and due process.

Privacy and surveillance

This topic pulls together concerns around the blanket monitoring and collecting of traffic data or information, the interception and decryption (under duress) by intermediaries (now a large superset of ISPs, search engines, cyber cafes, online auction sites, online market places, etc.) and the wide definition of ‘cyber terrorism’ (which ludicrously even casts defamation as a terrorist activity).

Some of the broad concerns in relation to interception, monitoring and decryption in (section 69) are that:

there is no provision for a clear nexus between an intermediary and the information or resource sought to be monitored or intercepted,
the usual internationally recognised exception to liability where an intermediary operates purely as a conduit and has no control over data flowing through its network is not clearly spelt out,
the penalties for non-cooperation are extremely harsh, especially given the absence of a) and b) above,
these onerous penalties can be said to be in violation of Article 14 as they seem entirely disproportionate. Similar offences and remedies in the Code of Criminal Procedure or the Indian Penal Code prescribe less severe penalties, by an order of magnitude in fact. When the only difference between the offences is the medium in which information is contained, it seems arbitrary to impose a much harsher punishment on an online intermediary than on a member of the public who, for example, furnishes false information to the police in connection with a trial or enquiry.
the rules made in relation to monitoring, interception and decryption, offer some procedural safeguards, in that they impose a time limit on how long a directive for interception or monitoring can remain in force, a ceiling on how long data can be kept before it is required to be destroyed, etc. However, the effect of these is greatly diluted by exceptions “for functional requirements”, etc. The astonishing irony is that rule 20 requires the intermediary to maintain “…extreme secrecy…” and “…utmost care and precaution…” in the matter of interception, monitoring or decryption of information “…as it affects the privacy of citizens…”!!!!

In a similar vein, there are concerns around the monitoring and collection of traffic data (section 69B) as the section contains an unreasonably long list of grounds for monitoring. These include such extreme excesses as “forecasting of imminent cyber incidents”, “monitoring network application with traffic data or information on computer resource”, “identification and determination of viruses/computer contaminant”, and the catch-all “any other matter relating to cyber security”.

Finally, the main criticism of the ITA approach to ‘cyber terrorism’ is the very wide net that it seeks to cast, looking for a game that has little or nothing to do with the named offence. Amongst the cast of creatures unwittingly caught during this fishing expedition, we find some unlikely victims. In addition to the usual grounds of offence against sovereignty, national security, defence of India, etc., which we have seen in relation to other sections, the ITA considers the following as acts of cyber terrorism – broadly speaking, unauthorised access to information that is likely to cause:

injury to decency,
injury to morality,
injury in relation to contempt of court, and
injury in relation to defamation.

This would almost be laughable if these grounds were not enacted unto law, posing a threat to civil liberties by their very existence. Other countries have some notion of political ideology, religious case, etc. in their view of terrorism. That (a) to (d) above have been shoehorned into a clause that imposes the stiffest penalty within the entire ITA (life imprisonment) gives even more cause for concern.

In closing, I should reiterate that the ITA includes other deficiencies and worthwhile improvements alike, but an article focusing largely on the data protection and civil liberties aspects cannot reference them all.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/information-technology-act

The power of the next click...

nishant — 2012-03-13T10:43:41Z

P2P cameras and microphones hooked up to form a network of people who don't know each other, and probably don't care; a series of people in different states of undress, peering at the each other, hands poised on the 'Next' button to search for something more. Chatroulette, the next big fad on the internet, is here in a grand way, making vouyers out of us all. This post examines the aesthetics, politics and potentials of this wonderful platform beyond the surface hype of penises and pornography that surrounds this platform.

In his futuristic novel 1984, George Orwell conceived of a Big Brother who watches us all the time, tracking every move we make, every step we take, and reminding us that we are being watched. The Internet has often been seen as the embodiment of this fiction. There are many who unplug computers, look over surreptitious shoulders and wear tin-foil hats so that their movements cannot be traced. While this caricatured picture might seem absurd to funny, there is no denying the fact that we are being stalked by technologies. As our world gets more connected and our dependence on digital and internet objects grow, we are giving out more and more of our private and personal information for an easy trade-off with convenience and practicality.

As a reply to the question “Who watches the watchman?” several Internet theorists had suggested as a reply, a model where everybody looking at everybody else so that there is no one person who has exclusive powers of seeing without being seen. In this utopian state, people would be looking at each other (thus keeping a check on actions), looking after each other (forming virtual care networks) and looking for each other (building social networks with familiar strangers). After about 20 years of the first emergence of this discussion vis-à-vis the World Wide Web , comes an internet platform that produces a strange universe of people looking at.for.after each other in a condition of extreme vouyerism, performance, exhibitionism, surveillance and playfulness. It is a website that the Digital Natives are flocking to because it changes the way they look at each other. Literally.

Chatroulette! is a new MMORPG (Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Game) that uses a Peer-2-Peer network to constantly pair random people using their web cams, to look at each other. You start a Game and you begin a series of ‘lookings’ as people look back at you. Connect, cruise, watch, interact, boot – that is the anatomy of a Chatroullete! game. If you like what you see, you can linger a while or begin a conversation, or just ‘boot’ your ‘partner’ and get connected to somebody else in the almost infinite network. In the process you come across the unexpected, unpredictable and the uncanny. In the last one month of betting my time on Chatroullete!, I have seen it all and then some more – masturbating teenagers, strip teasing men and women, animals (including a very handsome tortoise) staring back at me, groups of friends eating dehydrated noodles and giggling, partners in sexual intercourse, graphic images of human gentilia, clever advertisements, pictures, art, musicians performing, dancers dancing, conference delegates staring bemusedly at a screen, ... the list is endless and probably exhausting. A growing community of users now dwell on Chatroulette! to connect in this new way that is part speed dating, part networking, part performance, part voyeurism.

The verdict on the blogosphere is still not in whether this is a new fad or something more long-lasting. Irrespective of its longevity, what Chatroullete! has done is show us a new universe of social interaction that Digital Natives around the world find appealing. The possibilities of cultural exchange, collaborative working, love, longing and learning that emerge around Chatroullete! are astounding. For Digital Natives the appeal of Chatroullete! is in forging viral and temporary networks which defy the Facebook way of creating sustained communities of interaction. This is the defining moment of virtual interaction and online networking –A model that is no longer trying to simulate ‘Real Life’ conditions online by forming permanent networks of ‘people like us’. Chatroulette! marks the beginning of a new way of spreading the message to completely random strangers, enticing them into thought, exchange and mobilisation through the world of gaming. The potentials for drawing in thousands of unexpected people into your own political cause are astounding. It might be all cute cats and sexual performance now, but it is only a matter of time when Digital Natives start exploring the possibility of using Chatroulette! to mobilise resources for dealing with crises in their personal and public environments. The wheel has been spun. We now wait to see where the ball lands.

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

Separating the 'Symbiotic Twins'

Nitya V — 2019-09-18T14:10:06Z

This post tries to undo the comfortable linking that has come to exist in the ‘radical’ figure of the cyber-queer. And this is so not because of a nostalgic sense of the older ways of performing queerness, or the world of the Internet is fake or unreal in comparison to bodily experience, and ‘real’ politics lies elsewhere. This is so as it is a necessary step towards studying the relationship between technology and sexuality.

Here, I would like to deal with ‘openness’ as an idea that seems to structure discussions on the nature of both the Internet and queerness, in different ways. What does it mean to read an object/phenomenon/practice as signalling the acts of opening? What is opening placed in opposition to? The terms that come together to constitute the field of openness, so to speak, are these – transparency, publicness, privacy, safety, freedom, expression, anonymity (not so paradoxically), communication, virtuality on the one hand and opacity on the other, the closet, danger, morality, prohibition, lack of access and real life.

‘Openness’ is seen as the fundamental principle of the Internet. [1] The ramifications of this statement for Internet studies and by extension for studies on the ‘cyber queer’ or on the implications of Internet technology for alternative sexuality practices are then the concern of this post. What does this idea refer itself to in terms of how we live in the world? It refers to:

communication – the idea that with the Internet, communication has broken free of the temporal, spatial, linguistic and national restrictions imposed by earlier technologies;
space – that space is no longer defined in material terms and the binary or inside/outside and public/private, has been radically recast by the entry into our lives of ‘cyberspace’ and of space thought of in virtual terms;
body – dematerialization, disembodiment, terms that imply that on the Internet, you become an entity of the mind and of a desire that does not need the material body. The implications of this then being that the threat to the body, posed by its circulation in ‘real’ space and time, is now reduced, because that body no longer has as much at stake as the mind does, in the world of virtual technology. It also means release from a body that is encumbered by class difference and the various ‘markers’ of social relations;
decentralization – that the Internet adopts the mode of ‘weaving’, which is seen as a refusal of hierarchisation, the kind imposed by the ways in which information is made available, or production and consumption are managed, the ways in which class, race and gender restrict the ways in which individuals ‘participate’. Weaving then refers to a network system in place of a top-down system.

“The evidence of the trend towards openness is all around. Young people are sharing their lives online via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Google, and whatever comes next. Though that mystifies their elders and appalls self-appointed privacy advocates, the transparent generation gains value from its openness. This is how they find each other, share, and socialize.”[2] (Jeff Jarvis, author of What would Google do?). We are henceforth titled the ‘transparent generation’, and we find the same value in the technology that defines our lives – the Internet. Why we are ‘transparent’ when compared to earlier generations? ‘Transparent’, ‘strawberry’, etc., are all terms that have come to describe the present generation of Internet users, the youth, a category born out of an idea of freedom from both moral and political constraint. In this imagination of them, they use technology in order to gain this freedom, in order to give their minds and bodies, which are straining at the leash, the required escape routes, from institutions (family, school and legal systems), from social relations (class and sexuality), and earlier forms of political identification.

The 90s was seen as the decade of openness, both in terms of new media technology and sexual practice. “With liberalisation sweeping the Indian mindset, more and more people are determined to enjoy the secret thrills sex has to offer. While high-profile executives are being seduced by escort services, the middle-class minds are being titillated by 'parties'. Those who are more discreet go for phone sex or MMS.”[3] What comes across is an idea of a new relationship to the temporal and the spatial, the cultural and the social. And sexuality seems to be central to this relationship. “A sexual revolution is sweeping through the small and big towns of India, and to stay immune to it is a big (t)ask.”[4] This article from The Week tells us how the ‘new sexual’ or the ‘newly sexual’ is described in popular discourse. So much so that the violence of the right-wing groups against women and against ‘obscene’ texts are sometimes explained through this very revolution of/in sex. It is read as a backlash, in a moment that is producing this new relationship, with the help of new media technologies such as the mobile phone, the Internet, the web camera and the ‘things’ that enable this openness. And because it is read as a backlash, the practices of the Hindu right are read as wishing to close, to reverse this process of opening out and to keep things as they used to be. Openness is not just a set of practices; it is read as a mindset, a shift from an older era of being bound within certain social structures. “Earlier only newly married women had the right, indeed were expected, to advertise their sexuality before receding into wall-flowers as respectable married women but today all that has changed….Walk into any college or even a school campus across the country and you have young men and women equating liberation and sexuality” (Patricia Uberoi). The linking of sexuality and liberation or freedom is here crucial, because what is particular to this era is the fact that ‘sexual expression’ is seen an indicator of freedom, whether this freedom is placed against moral or political orthodoxies, or on the other hand posited as Westernisation. Popular discourse reveals us as having arrived at the desire for sexual freedom (whether or not sexual freedom itself).

Queerness, a phenomenon of the 90s in the Indian context, is similarly described as an opening out. ‘Queer’ signifies a stepping out of the binary of heterosexuality/homosexuality, which will no longer encumber the body or the mind. It is a conscious move away from identities like lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, in fact identity in itself is rendered fragmented and cannot emerge from a monolithic location.

“There was excitement and apprehension in the early '90s as an endless diversity of images flowed into private and public spaces…. Sexual speech came under special attention as newscasts, talk shows, sitcoms and a variety of TV shows challenged conventional family values and sexual normativity including monogamy, marriage and heterosexuality” (Shohini Ghosh – “The Closet is Ajar”, in Outlook[6]). Queerness is then linked to this rapid spread, this breathless circulation, this new access. Technological change is inextricably tied to this idea of the closet being ajar. “…the rapid spread of satellite TV and new media technologies continue to transform the cultural practices of the urban middle class.” It seems to be an era in which the boundaries of the sexual norm are being forced to redraw themselves, simply by the massive onslaught of ideas, speech and images. Queer identities are then seen as riding the crest of a wave of sexual revolution that has been washing over India over the past two decades.

These two formations, the Internet and the queer (we have not yet established what kind of formations they are), have been brought together in the term ‘cyber queer’ for the purpose of sociological and other analyses. The Levi’s ad for ‘innerwear’ shows a young black man saying, “On my web profile, I am a girl”. You can be a beer-bellied man in real life and turn into a voluptuous woman in second life. The virtual life, the virtual body and the virtual sex – the Internet is often spoken of as performing two functions for someone practicing alternative sexualities:

that it lets them be ‘other’ than they are (or are forced to be in real life);

by doing this, they are allowed to express their ‘real’ sexual desire or gender in a ‘safer’ space than in real life, thereby allowing for a freeing up or an opening (however, secretively it is done). “Cruising in physical spaces of the city has always been an affair which dangles on the edge of unsafety. Arrests and blackmail by policemen loaded with section 377, or extortion for money are often reported within queer circles. The Gay Bombay website has several articles and personal narratives which function as cruising guidelines and warnings. has several articles and personal narratives which function as cruising guidelines and warnings. In this context, Internet portals like guys4men provide forums which can be used to manoeuvre cruising in a different manner, possibly much safer than in moonlit Nehru or Central Parks in Delhi or train-station loos in Bombay.” (Mario d’Penha, gay activist [7])

Again, the notion of ‘space’ as suddenly emerging from the shadowy realms of ambiguity and secrecy, to stand in for freedom, is something that one often encounters in relation to cyber-queerness. And it is not just physical space which is pulled into this discourse of the technological shift, it is desire itself - “Desire is unabashed, playful and complex here”[8]. Desire, personified thus, is then seen as something set free by and through technological innovation.

Though this notion of sudden freedom is contested by researchers and scholars within the field, the result of that contestation has often been to:

affirm, in place of a single figure of the liberated cyber queer, the multiplicity of behaviours, dangers and freedoms that are generated. This is a little like affirming, in place of a single body called the public, several bodies that are termed multiple publics, or subaltern publics. The problem with this approach is that the nature of this public, the public-ness of it, is not then fully interrogated. It is assumed that the multiplicity in itself will be contest enough;
return to the body as existing at the root of queer existence. This return then, in claiming something that has been forgotten, or disavowed (our bodily existence), finds a strange comfort in this body, settling within it as if having found a location from which to speak, about the virtual, about cyberspace. For example, though Jodi O’Brien, in her essay “Changing the Subject”[9] refutes the claim “There are no closets in cyberspace”, she finds it necessary to return to the ‘body’ and not to subjectivity in order to do so – it is as if the materiality of the body is the only concrete thing that will allow this contestation. “The ‘alternative’ experiences that are enacted in ‘alternative’ or queer spaces are based on realities of the flesh: real, embodied experiences and/or fantasies cultivated through exposure to multisensory stimuli.” The body then becomes the explanatory fulcrum, and it is only from here that any kind of relationship to what is seen as virtuality can be understood.

An ancestor to the above problem - “What precisely does the cyber add to the queer identity which it lacked previously?”[10] This question, framed as the most basic one can ask of this figure, makes the following assumptions – that ‘queer’ is a human subject that precedes ‘cyber’, a.k.a non-human technology that the latter adds to this human subject and how it performs in the world, or has transformed it after the fact.

It is remarkably easy to say that in the great saga of sexual practices, technology has been an agent of transformation. Or, more importantly, to place cyberspace and queerness on par with each other, as sharing the same nature, or functioning on the same fundamental principle – of decentering or destabilizing a previously integrated or unified subject. Nina Wakeford asks of the term cyberqueer, “…what is the purpose of creating a hybrid of the two? It is a calculated move which stresses the interdependence of the two concepts, both in the daily practices of the certain and maintenance of a cyberspace which is lesbian, gay, transgendered or queer, and in the research of these arenas.”[11] By this logic, they are interdependent because there is some inherent quality in each that makes it offer itself to the other. “Queer sex is about following the desires of the flesh into an unnamed, uncategorized, uncharted realm, and doing something that neither of you can 'code'.”[12] The value of queerness therefore, derives from this lack of naming, an escape from coding of a particular kind, the zone of ambiguous enactments of desire.[13] “While it is this open transparent character of online existence that lays the Internet vulnerable to surveillance, it is also its self-inscribing character that makes it the playground of possibilities it is at its best. Cyberspace is habitat, playground, university, boulevard and refuge” (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘Net Nomad on a Rough Route: A Despatch from Cyberspace’[14]). It is a zone of enactments of desire, a playground of possibilities, undefined, unbound.

There is then a reading of technology and sexuality as feeding off each other - “The relationship between technology and sexuality is a symbiotic one. As humankind creates new inventions, people find ways of eroticizing new technology. So it is not surprising that with the advent of the information superhighway, more and more folks are discovering the sexual underground within the virtual community in cyberspace” (Daniel Tsang)[15]. The above quote assumes the following:

that humankind existed before technology;
that first a technology is born and then there is the eroticization of this technology. It is only because of these assumptions that technology (in this case the Internet) as such can be seen as fundamentally open. Latour’s critique of the first assumption is that “Without technological detours, the properly human cannot exist.”

At the point of encountering this strange euphoria, we need to pause and consider, with Latour, this very relationship between technology and sexuality. “There has been a persistent silence on matters of sexuality in critical cultural studies of technology, perhaps partially because technology was associated with the instrumental to the exclusion of the representational (Case 1995). The creation of the term ‘cyber queer’ is itself an act of resistance in the face of such suppression” (Nina Wakeford). If the relationship between the two is viewed along representational lines, then the only direction that can be taken is one which will posit the human before the technological, will posit technological as that which enables (or not) representations of this human subject. In this sense, the representational is not far from the instrumental as an explanatory framework.

In all the explanations we have seen above, at one level or another, technology has viewed as the ‘thing’[17], and morality as that which ascribes meaning in a particular way to this thing. For example, the mobile phone is seen as the thing, the technology, with concrete attributes and use value. Morality is what then prescribes how this thing is to be used or not used, or the dangers that follow from its use in the world of social relations. Latour argues against this way of positioning technology and morality, and instead calls them both modes of ‘alterity’, albeit two different modes. Alterity in his definition is being-as-another, technology and morality both then constituting a particular way of being-as-another. Technology is not what you use, it is not a means to an end, it in fact changes the end to which it is the means. It is the curve, the detour. Morality is what questions means and ends and prevents the easy categorization of objects or people as one or another.

We are used to thinking of morality as keeping things static, wanting them unchanged, preventing new ideas or practices from being absorbed into the domains of our existence. Especially when it comes to sexuality, morality is seen as that which blocks, which lives in the past, which ‘ossifies’ – “…morality consists precisely of the willingness/ability to accept and organize one's behaviour in accordance with… ‘ossified’ recipes for interaction. If gender is a primary (read: coded as ‘natural’) institution for organizing social interaction, then boundary transgressions are not only likely to arouse confusion but to elicit moral outrage from the boundary keepers.”[18] Morality here refers to boundary keeping. Latour shifts our understanding of morality in ways that allow us to read beyond the boundary keeping. According to him, morality constantly interrupts the means-to-end process by questioning the use of something/someone as a means towards an end. Morality is then a hindrance to this process, not an ossification of social relations or practices.

This argument disrupts the location of technology as that which signals an opening out of the universe, and morality as signalling a closing off. True, Latour himself reads technology as creating new functions, or as creating new ends but he does not categorise these and the technologies they derive from as ‘open’. For him, technology is opaque, unreadable. Sexuality also then cannot be read as feeding off of technology, as some kind of symbiotic twin to it. The relationship between technological shifts and sexual practices or identities has to be read alternately to this idea of freedom from the shackles of social relations and bodily constraints. Sexuality cannot also then be opposed to morality, as it has often been done.

[1] www.openinternetcoalition.org.

[2] Jarvis, Jeff. “Openness and the Internet”, http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca2009058_754247.htm.

[3] Doval, Nikita. “Bold Bodies”, in The Week, September 7, 2008.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Quoted in Doval, Nikita. "Bold Bodies", in The Week, September 7, 2008, p 50.

[6] http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?227507

[7] Quoted in Katyal, Akhil. “Cyber Cultures/Queer Cultures in Delhi”. See http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html

[8] Katyal, Akhil “Cyber Cultures/Queer Cultures in Delhi”. See http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html

[9] Women and Performance: Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace.

[10] Wakeford, Nina. “Cyberqueer”, in Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge: London, 2000

[11] “Cyberqueer”, in Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader.

[12] O’Brien, Jodi. “Changing the Subject”. In Women and Performance, Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace.

[13] Here I deal with the idea of queerness at an almost commonsensical level, not at the level of the queer theory of Judith Butler or Eve Sedgwick, just as cyberspace is also dealt with at the level of what it seems to be seen as doing.

[14] Quoted in the Sarai discussion.

[15] Tsang, Daniel. “Notes on Queer ‘n’ Asian Virtual Sex”. In Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge: London, 2000.

[16] Latour, Bruno. “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means”. See http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/080-en.html.

[17] I put this in quotes because latour has a very specific definition of ‘thing’ or Ding, which this is not.

[18] O’Brien, Jodi. “Changing the Subject”, in Women and Performance, Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace. See http://web.archive.org/web/20040604123458/www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/art-browning.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/symbiotic-twins

Peeping Toms In Your Inbox

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T11:42:11Z

Nothing’s safe any more—not your mobile number, nor your e-mail—as they’re put on offer for the benefit of telemarketers, writes Namrata Joshi and Neha Bhatt in an article published in the Outlook.

It was Saturday morning and Sneha Gupta wanted to book a table for dinner at a Delhi restaurant called Rodeo. So she called up a telephone directory service and procured the restaurant’s phone number, firmly nixing the operator’s seemingly casual offer to also provide numbers of similar restaurants. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The next day, Sunday brunch with her extended family was interrupted by calls from sundry restaurants enquiring if she’d be interested in hosting parties and events—at a discount.

“Instead of enjoying the food, the company and the conversation, I was busy ticking off these guys. Why were they assuming I wanted to organise a party? How did they get my mobile number to blatantly infringe on my private family time?” asks Sneha. She got no answers from them, but the sequence of events is clear: the telephone directory service sold Sneha’s contact details to marketers who broadly assumed, from her Rodeo outing, that she was a party animal, and decided to bombard her with similar offers.

Something similar happened to media professional Raghav Agarwal. He paid off his bank loan for a car in two-and-a-half years instead of the stipulated five, happy to stop living off credit. But from the next day, he was inundated with calls offering him bigger and better credit for everything—from house to car to education. “It was awfully distracting to deal with this while trying to meet deadlines,” he recounts. The fact that he had paid back the loan ahead of time had, by hook or by crook, reached financial outfits who used the information to serenade what they saw as an attractive catch.

For Kuhu Tanvir, these attentions come laced with a hint of menace. The film student was startled to find herself receiving unsolicited calls from unknown vendors offering to maintain the water purifier installed in the recesses of her kitchen. “It’s scary to think,” she says, “that there are people out there who even know which products you’ve bought for your house.” It was equally unnerving for film producer Gaurang Jalan to have his personal details passed on to data-miners by none other than a prominent Calcutta club (“strangers now call you on your birthday, offering schemes”). All those out there accosted by calls offering car insurance just at the time their policy is up for renewal will know exactly how they felt....

8 Ways In Which You’re Being Intruded Upon

Privacy is being redefined in India, with the lines between the public and the private blurring not just for celebrities but also for ordinary citizens...
Personal details like your phone number, date of birth, credit history, bank loans, insurance policies, white goods purchases, favourite restaurants and nightclubs are bought and sold among cellphone operators, banks, shops, telephone directory services, credit card companies, hospitals, hotels, elite clubs and even your locality’s residents’ welfare association.
Unsolicited telemarketing calls, spam SMSes and e-mails intrude incessantly on your private space, time
Your online purchases and searches, archived e-mails and documents are being tracked for marketing purposes. Social networking groups and search engines stand accused of sharing user information and contact details.
Personal pictures, information about relationships on social networking sites are being misused by online predators and molesters.
Identity theft is fast emerging as a threat.
Surveillance cameras and intrusive frisking have become a way of life, at airports, cinema halls, malls, hospitals, hotels, etc.
TV cameras and sting operations blur the line between individual privacy and public interest.
People encouraged and offered inducements to bare all about their lives on TV. Shows like Emotional Atyachar, Splitsvilla, Truth Love Cash play out individual dating rituals and infidelity games for the masses.

7 Steps You Can Take To Protect Yourself

Give out your mobile number cautiously, if at all; don’t print it on the visiting cards you hand out generously. Give only your landline number if you have to, to avoid being constantly disturbed.
Be wary of filling in random forms at retail stores and restaurants, or the gift voucher you’re offered in return for your friends’ names and phone numbers.
Be alert while shopping with your debit or credit card. The retailer may be also swiping the card on his computer to feed your contact information into it.
Even though the Do Not Call facility has not worked for a majority of users, you lose nothing by registering for it on www.donotcall.gov. You can’t complain about unsolicited calls unless you register.
Online, be cautious of the personal information you reveal, such as your date of birth and photographs, which make you especially vulnerable to identity theft. Use Google dashboard and the new Facebook privacy settings to protect yourself.
Get the latest browser that allows you to delete cookies-as-you-go, delete your browsing history regularly, learn to encrypt your e-mail.
Always read privacy clauses in bank and other forms, and on websites carefully, and remember to tick opt-out boxes if you don’t want to be besieged with new product information.

For celebrities, the lines between the private and the public have always been blurred. But in a transforming India, ordinary people like Sneha, Raghav, Kuhu and Gaurang are finding themselves intruded upon in newer ways—from the trivial to the serious—and across varied platforms, from the mobile phone to the internet, TV to the surveillance camera. And, with citizens like them mostly dimly aware of how to safeguard, renegotiate or fight for their right to privacy—enshrined in the Constitution, but vaguely defined—in a changing world, and no effective laws to rein in those who violate it, the infringements and threats are set to increase.

Take telemarketing, perhaps the most insistent manifestation today of this marauding culture. It started out as an irritant, became a nuisance and is now a virtually unchecked invasion. “In the West, telemarketing is an unobtrusive experience thanks to opt-in services by which users get calls only if they ask for them. Moreover, governments discourage telemarketers through strict regulations. In India, it’s a menace,” says Supreme Court advocate Harsh Pathak, who has litigated against telemarketing calls and the sale of personal data to companies.

Indeed, you can chart an entire day in your life with these intrusions as markers. You get woken up with the SMS: “Hare Krishna. Today is Ekadashi. Fasting from grains and beens (sic). Chant Hare Krishna mahamantra 25 rounds (sic) and be happy. Hari bol.” Through the day, they keep coming, both SMSes and human voices, trying to sell you everything from houses and farmland to hotel deals, sauna belts, equity tips and public speaking skills. And, if you happen to be even an occasional club-hopper, your phone could carry on beeping till two or three am, with SMSes announcing the next gig in town.

It’s clear from this virtually round-the-clock barrage that our personal lives are up for sale in an aggressive marketing-driven environment. Be it telecom companies, banks, shops, credit card firms, DVD rental libraries, insurance, auto dealers, clubs or hotels, they all profit from sharing personal information—phone numbers, credit history, spending patterns, shopping preferences and much else—about their customers. “The irony is that the corporate world has no accountability or transparency in India but the public has turned transparent for them,” says media analyst and columnist Sudheesh Pachauri.

Those often identified as the prime offenders in this game are quick to shrug off blame, or not respond, as Outlook found. ICICI Bank could not “participate in this story”, Airtel declined comment while Vodafone did not respond at all. Rajat Mukarji, chief corporate officer, Idea Cellular, who did respond, said phone companies were unfairly blamed for unsolicited calls. “Such data is available everywhere now, you can buy it off the Net for Rs 150,” he argued. HDFC Bank’s chief information security officer Vishal Salvi also stoutly denies that databases are sold, and when asked why existing customers are deluged with new product and service offers, says: “It only happens on a need-to-know, need-to-do-basis.” That’s the theory, but in practice, many customers find that the “need” seems to be defined by the banks, not their clients.

So where does that leave the consumer? Well, says Bangalore-based freelance writer and photographer Darshan Manakkal, “On a good day, I plead with the telemarketer to never call me again. With the more persistent ones, I try a different approach, like putting them on hold while I go for a bath. On really bad days, I just abuse them.” Others, like Chennai professional P.K. Pradeep, who shared with us pages upon pages of (extremely polite) e-mails to Airtel and Vodafone requesting them to halt unsolicited calls and SMSes, have been more persistent, but have achieved little beyond the robotic response, “We’re looking into it.”

Signing up, along with some 66 million souls, at the National Do Not Call (NDNC) Registry set up in October 2007, provided no protection to Pradeep, nor did changing phone numbers. “I got a new number from Vodafone recently, and would you believe it, the very next day I was bombarded with promotional messages. They had clearly passed on my number,” he says. The NDNC of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) is now widely acknowledged as a failure. There was a brief dip in calls, but they resumed with renewed gusto. You could get lost in the maze of explanations for why NDNC doesn’t work; what’s clear, though, is that it has no capacity to deal with telemarketers who fail to register with it—like all those unknown real estate companies who bombard you with SMSes—and little teeth to deal with those who do. Fines are laughably minuscule—ranging from Rs 500 to Rs 1,000—and the threat of disconnecting a telemarketer’s line is an empty one when it can quickly sign up and assault consumers from another connection. In view of its failure, a Do Call registry has been mooted, on the more consumer-friendly principle that those who want to be called should opt in rather than opt out. Consultations are on but its future shape is still unclear, with telecom companies (no surprise there) opposed to it. “We have gone far with dnc. To now backtrack and try something new doesn’t seem feasible,” says Mukarji.

“The whole problem of unregistered telemarketers will continue and telecom companies will go on blaming them,” S. Saroja, legal coordinator for the Chennai-based Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group, predicts pessimistically. The group has tried, to no avail, to get phone companies to trace bulk SMSes, which she maintains are easily traceable. “Telemarketing is a Rs 50,000-crore industry and growing at 20 per cent every year. Nobody wants to upset it as everybody is making money out of it, including the government,” says Supreme Court advocate Nivedita Sharma, who has fought her own battles against the sale of privacy.

Meanwhile, an expanding online world is throwing up its own challenges. By 2013, according to some estimates, India will have the third-largest internet user base in the world. Already, with 50 million-plus users and growing, it is a magnet for marketers, who as we know—without perhaps fully internalising the fact—avidly follow the telltale digital pugmarks and trails we leave on the Net as we e-mail, search, shop and obsessively communicate with each other on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

These spaces on the Net, and their counterparts on other media, seem to be drawing us into an open, sharing, even confessional, culture, without our being fully aware of our vulnerability. We occasionally get intimations of it—like when our e-mail account is hacked into and bizarre mail sent out on our behalf; our Facebook pictures downloaded and their obscene versions floated on Orkut, as happened to two Delhi airhostesses recently; or vicious, revealing comments on our personal lives posted amid the banter on our favourite chat sites.

However, as media analysts point out, there is little push in the Indian environment to do what Western users of Facebook did recently: forcing it to change privacy policies and settings by protesting against its inadequate privacy controls. Here too, as with telemarketing, the regulatory environment is missing.

“In India, there are no regulatory bodies related to online privacy concerns like in the US and Canada where there are privacy commissions which force corporations to make changes in their privacy policy in the interest of citizens,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director, the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

But individuals are to blame too. Saad Akhtar of naukri.com points out: “We don’t even read the fine print on privacy policies on websites, not realising that a lot of the data we upload even on Indian social networking websites becomes their property, which they can share with advertisers.”

Indeed, Akhila Sivadas of the Centre for Advocacy and Research, says that privacy issues are creating a cultural crisis of sorts, with no understanding of them, leave alone resolution. “Privacy is something that has been negotiated in a personal, intimate, micro universe. We have drawn our individual lakshman rekhas. But we have not debated on privacy norms as a society in a public space, which is very significant in the wake of how the mass media and social networking media is exploding in our country,” she says. It’s leading to an uneasy blend of the very closed and guarded, and the extremely open and no-holds-barred in our society. “There is no robust normative system in place, and corporate entities are exploiting that void,” she says. “The market is primed to take advantage and exploit existing conditions for profit. We are allowing the market to overreach itself,” agrees adman and social commentator Santosh Desai.

So what should be done? Obviously, the R-word—regulation—is critical, and hopefully, the cry for it from the ground will become stronger, as intrusions gather apace. But it would help for consumers to get smarter. Some of the questions to ask ourselves are: should I really be patronising a phone directory service, as Sneha did, that states that it shares information with third-party members and is not responsible for that information being misused by third parties? Should I hand out my visiting card, with my mobile number on it, to all and sundry? Should I reflexively press the “I agree to the terms & conditions” button while signing up for net services without reading the fine print? As Desai puts it, we need to be “mindful, suspicious and careful”. Without, of course, descending into paranoia. The irony, getting sharper and sharper in our lives, is that the very platforms that are used to invade our privacy also enrich our lives in manifold ways.

Read the original article in Outlook

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/peeping-toms-in-inbox

I don't want my fingerprints taken

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T11:41:46Z

Through this article published in Down to Earth, Nishant Shah looks at the role of the state as arbiter of our privacy.

The census, or the collection of citizen data, has been a fundamental aspect of governance for most modern nations. It reminds us that modern governance has been wedded to information, even before it became fashionable to talk of the information age after the digital explosion. Different governments have sought mechanisms to gather and centralize citizen data to effectively administer public services, equity and justice. We have appointed the state as a repository of this data and also the trustee of privacy of this data.

However, lately, in India as well as other countries, there has been a growing anxiety about the role of the state as the arbiter of our privacy.

As public-private-partnerships become a desirable norm for many governments, the citizen data is available to private players who can exploit it for vested interest. In everyday life, this proliferation of citizen data can manifest itself from spam calls by product bearing companies that all of us experience on a regular basis to shattering violence inflicted on selective communities as was seen in Gujarat in the aftermath of the communal conflict in Godhra. While we have, reluctantly, invested our faith in the government in offering our personal data, it comes as a shock that the data has been compromised in the government’s partnerships with the market.

We have always known that even in its physical form, the citizen data often travels through insurance companies, private healthcare systems, financial databases and opens us to invasive surveillance by their operators. But the data is not immediately linked to our bodies. It is possible to deny the data related to our name, sex, occupation and class, or escape it, if necessary. The data resides in large databases, so huge that they fail to make sense to anybody who has to browse through the records.

With the digital data gathering—the kinds that the Unique Identity Project (now known as Aadhar) uses—these safety nets were already weakened. In its digital form, the data suddenly became vulnerable to algorithmic searches and queries that allow for extremely customized and selective data to be made available to operators who are not accountable to us.

Moreover, the digital data can now travel easily across fault lines and previously accepted boundaries to mark citizens in ways that make survival precarious. The anxieties that have surrounded the Aadhar project have been fuelled by the lack of transparent accountability about citizen data usage.

These anxieties around digital data collection get aggravated by the introduction of the biometric protocols into the system. Even with digital data, there was a certain amount of autonomy and agency available to the citizen, to either morph or escape the data production that the system required. Like in earlier times, the relationship of the data was not with the individual citizen’s body but with the citizen as a representative of the larger population. There was no undeniable link that would bind the data on the physiological presence of the citizen.

Biometric system makes the citizen data personal—they tie it up with our inalienable self and body. The data once gathered offers no escape from the information webs, and the possibilities of abuse and violence in such a link between citizen data and the individual citizen’s presence are mind-boggling. We are talking about a dystopian sci-fi vision where each individual has a unique relationship through his/her unique identity with systems of justice, regulation, consumption and production. Everything from what you wear to what you eat to who you are friends with and what you do in your spare time can be tied to your physical body and self. This posits a fundamental threat to the human rights, dignity and security offered by the Constitution.

The census promises the safety of the citizen through anonymity. The biometric data collection violates this safety and suddenly makes us vulnerable to being single, unique and alone in our identity which can be exploited by anybody. The biometric fixity of our identity identifies us, marks us and ties us down to the mass abuse that any information system is always susceptible to. There will be no escape.

Read the article in Down to Earth

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/fingerprints-taken

Rick van Amersfoort to give a public lecture on his work at CIS on May 15

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T04:07:10Z

Rick van Amersfoort, researcher based in Amsterdam will describe his work at Buro Jansen & Janssen, in the Netherlands and Europe.

Reading, digging in archives, procedures under the freedom of Information Act, supporting people for access to their police and intelligence service records, describing mechanisms the state uses to monitor, control and discipline civilians, but also means to overcome eavesdropping, surveillance, arrest or jail is the daily practice of Jansen. Since 25 years it has been active on the edge of legality and illegality. No scientists, nor journalists, but active civilians in a constant battle with the state and its services. Not only the state is evaluated. ‘City of Discipline’ is a project that tries to explain the lack of public outrage against far-reaching laws, although the crime rate is going down and the effectiveness of more security is doubtful.

Buro Jansen & Janssen hosts a variety of websites, some of these are:

The NTRO (National Technical Research Organization) eavesdropping scandal with so-called IMSI-catchers; According to the magazin Outlook the Mata Hari (the Dutch woman Margaretha Geertruida) of India, Madhuri Gupta; Possible police and state operations against protesting farmers in for example Devanahalli and Doddaballapur; Threats from the Indian government towards people and organizations who have contacts with the CPI or other Maoist groups; The 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacker verdict of five death sentences; Destroyed archives on the 1971 war between India and Pakistan are just some news items from the last week that describe the work/research/ activities which Buro Jansen & Janssen is conducting in the Netherlands, Europe and abroad. Van Amersfoort will shed light on the work of Jansen & Janssen in the Netherlands and Europe in relation to the above mentioned news items in India.

About Rick van Amersfoort

The past 10 years Rick van Amersfoort (1964 NL) has been researcher at Buro Janssen & Jansen, an organisation that critically investigates police, justice, secret services and home affairs in Holland and the European Union. Buro Jansen and Janssen publish online the Observant, a bimonthly mailing informing subscribers of the latest governmental infringements and political lobbies within the Netherlands. Other websites include http://www.openheid.nl/ that gives legal advise for public access to people’s records held by police and security services, http://www.preventieffouilleren.nl/, deals with stop and search operations by police and http://www.identificatieplicht.nl that addresses mandatory identification regulation. In 2006 Amersfoort co-authored (Wil van der Schans) Under Pressure, antiterrorism in the Netherlands. Buro Jansen & Janssen regularly appear in the media, local and national newspapers, radio and internet interviews. Current projects include ‘City of Discipline’, a project that tries to explain the lack of public outrage against far-reaching laws, although the crime rate is going down and the effectiveness of more security is doubtful. Van Amersfoort is presently designing a website for public access in connection with the Freedom of Information Act. http://openbaarheid.nl

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/rick-van-amersfoort

Technological Protection Measures in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010

pranesh — 2012-05-17T16:51:38Z

In this post Pranesh Prakash conducts a legal exegesis of section 65A of the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, which deals with the stuff that enables 'Digital Rights/Restrictions Management', i.e., Technological Protection Measures. He notes that while the provision avoids some mistakes of the American law, it still poses grave problems to consumers, and that there are many uncertainties in it still.

Technological Protection Measures are sought to be introduced in India via the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010. This should be quite alarming for consumers for reasons that will be explained in a separate blog post on TPMs that will follow shortly.

In this post, I will restrict myself to a legal exegesis of section 65A of the Bill, which talks of "protection of technological measures". (Section 65B, which talks of Right Management Information will, similarly, be tackled in a later blog post.)

First off, this provision is quite unnecessary. There has been no public demand in India for TPMs to be introduced, and the pressure has come mostly from the United States in the form of the annual "Special 301" report prepared by the United States Trade Representative with input coming (often copied verbatim) from the International Intellectual Property Alliance. India is not a signatory to the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT) which requires technological protection measures be safeguarded by law. That provision, interestingly, was pushed for by the United States in 1996 when even it did not give legal sanctity to TPMs via its copyright law (which was amended in 2000 by citing the need to comply with the WCT).

TPMs have been roundly criticised, have been shown to be harmful for consumers, creators, and publishers, and there is also evidence that TPMs do not really decrease copyright infringement (but instead, quite perversely through unintended consequences, end up increasing it). Why then would India wish to introduce it?

Leaving that question aside for now, what does the proposed law itself say?

65A. Protection of Technological Measures

    (1) Any person who circumvents an effective technological measure applied for the purpose of protecting any of the rights conferred by this Act, with the intention of infringing such rights, shall be punishable with imprisonment which may extend to two years and shall also be liable to fine.

    (2) Nothing in sub-section (1) shall prevent any person from:

        (a) doing anything referred to therein for a purpose not expressly prohibited by this Act:

          Provided that any person facilitating circumvention by another person of a technological measure for such a purpose shall maintain a complete record of such other person including his name, address and all relevant particulars necessary to identify him and the purpose for which he has been facilitated; or

        (b) doing anything necessary to conduct encryption research using a lawfully obtained encrypted copy; or

        (c) conducting any lawful investigation; or

        (d) doing anything necessary for the purpose of testing the security of a computer system or a computer network with the authorisation of its owner; or

        (e) operator; or [sic]

        (f) doing anything necessary to circumvent technological measures intended for identification or surveillance of a user; or

        (g) taking measures necessary in the interest of national security.

Implications: The Good Part

This provision clearly takes care of two of the major problems with the way TPMs have been implemented by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in the United States:

In s.65A(1) it aligns the protection offered by TPMs to that offered by copyright law itself (since it has to be "applied for the purpose of protecting any of the rights conferred by this Act"). Thus, presumably, TPMs could not be used to restrict access, only to restrict copying, communication to the public, and that gamut of rights.
In s.65A(1) and 65A(2) it aligns the exceptions granted by copyright law with the exceptions to the TPM provision. Section 65A(1) states that the act of circumvention has to be done "with the intention of infringing ... rights", and s.52(1) clearly states that those exceptions cannot be regarded as infringement of copyright. And s.65A(2)(a) states that circumventing for "a purpose not expressly prohibited by this Act" will be allowed.

A third important difference from the DMCA is that

It does not criminalise the manufacture and distribution of circumvention tools (including code, devices, etc.). (More on this below.)

Implications: The Bad Part

This provision, despite the seeming fair-handed manner in which it has been drafted, still fails to maintain the balance that copyright seeks to promote:

TPM-placers (presumably, just copyright holders, because of point 1. above) have been given the ability to restrict the activities of consumers, but they have not been given any corresponding duties. Thus, copyright holders do not have to do anything to ensure that the Film & Telivision Institute of India professor who wishes to use a video clip from a Blu-Ray disc can actually do so. Or that the blind student who wishes to circumvent TPMs because she has no other way of making it work with her screen reader is actually enabled to take advantage of the leeway the law seeks to provide her through s.52(1)(a) (s.52(1)(zb) is another matter!). Thus, while there are many such exceptions that the law allows for, the technological locks themselves prevent the use of those exceptions. Another way of putting that would be to say:
The Bill presumes that every one has access to all circumvention technology. This is simply not true. In fact, Spanish law (in Article 161 of their law) expressly requires that copyright holders facilitate access to works protected by TPM to beneficiaries of limitations of copyright. Thus, copyright holders who employ TPMs should be required to:
- tell their customers how they can be contacted if the customer wishes to circumvent the TPM for a legitimate purpose
- upon being contacted, aid their customer in making use of their rights / the exceptions and limitations in copyright law
How seriously can you take a Bill that has been introduced in Parliament that includes a provision that states: "Nothing in sub-section (1) shall prevent any person from operator; or" (as s.65A(2)(e), read in its entirety, does)?

Uncertainties

As mentioned above, the provisions are not all that clear regarding manufacture and distribution of circumvention tools. Thus, the proviso to s.65A(2)(a) deserves a closer reading. What is clear is that there are no penalties mentioned for manufacture or dissemination of TPMs, and that only those who circumvent are penalised in 65A(1), and not those who produce the circumvention devices. However:

On "shall maintain" and penalties

In the proviso to s.65B(2)(a), there is an imperative ("shall maintain") requiring "any person facilitating circumvention" to keep records. It is unclear what the implications of not maintaining such records are.

The obvious one is that the exemption contained in s.65(1)(a) will not apply if one were facilitated without the facilitator keeping records. Thus, under this interpretation, there is no independent legal (albeit penalty-less) obligation on facilitators. This interpretation runs into the problem that if this was the intention, then the drafters would have written "Provided that any person facilitating circumvention ... for such a purpose maintain/maintained a complete record ...". Instead, shall maintain is used, and an independent legal obligation seems, thus, to be implied. But can a proviso create an independent legal obligation? And is there any way a penalty could possibly be attached to violation of this proviso despite it not coming within 65A(1)?

On "facilitating" and remoteness

The next question is who all can be said to "facilitate", and how remote can the connection be? Is the coder who broke the circumvention a facilitator? The distributor/trafficker? The website which provided you the software? Or is it (as is more likely) a more direct "the friend who sat at your computer and installed the circumvention software" / "the technician who unlocked your DVD player for you while installing it in your house"?

While such a record-keeping requirement is observable by people those who very directly help you (the last two examples above), it would be more difficult to do so the further up you get on the chain of remoteness. Importantly, such record-keeping is absolutely not possible in decentralized distribution models (such as those employed by most free/open source software), and could seriously harm fair and legitimate circumvention.

More uncertainties

It is slightly unclear which exception the bypassing of Sony's dangerous "Rootkit" copy protection technology would fall under if I wish to get rid of it simply because it makes my computer vulnerable to malicious attacks (and not to exercise one of the exceptions under s.52(1)). Will such circumvention come under s.65A(2)(a)? Because it does not quite fall under any of the others, including s.65(2)(b) or (f).

On "purpose" as a criterion in 65A(2)(a)

A last point, which is somewhat of an aside is that 65A(2)(a) states:

Nothing in sub-section (1) shall prevent any person from doing anything referred to therein for a purpose not expressly prohibited by this Act.

There's something curious about the wording, since the Copyright Act generally does not prohibit any acts based on purposes (i.e., the prohibitions by ss.14 r/w s.51 are not based on why someone reproduces, etc., but on the act of reproduction). In fact, it allows acts based on purposes (via s.52(1)). The correct way of reading 65A(2)(a) might then be:

Nothing in sub-section (1) shall prevent any person from doing anything referred to therein for a purpose expressly allowed by this Act.

But that might make it slightly redundant as s.65A(1) covers that by having the requirement of the circumvention being done "with the intention of infringing such right" (since the s.52(1) exceptions are clearly stated as not being infringements of the rights granted under the Act).

Conclusion

It would be interesting to note how leading copyright lawyers understand this provision, and we will be tracking such opinions. But it is clear that TPMs, as a private, non-human enforcement of copyright law, are harmful and that we should not introduce them in India. And we should be especially wary of doing so without introducing additional safeguards, such as duties on copyright holder to aid access to TPM'ed works for legitimate purposes, and remove burdensome record-keeping provisions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/tpm-copyright-amendment

The (in)Visible Subject: Power, Privacy and Social Networking

rebecca — 2011-08-18T05:06:52Z

In this entry, I will argue that the interplay between privacy and power on social network sites works ultimately to subject individuals to the gaze of others, or to alternatively render them invisible. Individual choices concerning privacy preferences must, therefore, be informed by the intrinsic relationship which exists between publicness/privateness and subjectivity/obscurity.
The Architecture of Openness

Through a Google search or a quick scan of Facebook, people today are able to gain “knowledge” on others in a way never once possible. The ability to search and collect information on individuals online only continues to improve as online social networks grow and search engines become more comprehensive. Social networks, and the social web more broadly, has worked to fundamentally alter the nature of personal information made available online. Social networking services today enable the average person, with web access, to publish information through a “social profile”. Personal information made available online is now communicative, narrative and biographic. Consequentially, social profiles have become rich containers of personal information that can be searched, indexed and analyzed.

The architecture of the social web further encourages users to enclose volumes of personally identifiable information. Most social network sites embrace the “ethos of openness” as, by default, most have relaxed privacy settings. While most sites give users relative control over the disclosure of personal information, services such as MySpace, Facebook and Live Journal are far ahead of the black and white public/private privacy models of sites such as Bebo and Orkut. Bebo, for example, only allows users to disclose information to “friends” or “everyone”, granting little granularity for diverse privacy preferences. MySpace and Facebook, on the other hand, have made room for “friends of friends”, among other customizable group preferences. All networking sites also consider certain pieces of basic information publicly available, without privacy controls. On most sites, this includes name, photograph, gender and location, and list of friends. Okrut, however, considers far more information to public—leaving the political views and religions of its’ members public. This openness leaves the individual with little knowledge or control over how their information is viewed, and subsequently used.

Search functionality has also increased the visibility of individuals outside their immediate social network. For example, sites such Facebook and LinkedIn index user profiles through Google search. Furthermore, all social network sites index their users, effectively allowing profiles to be searched by other users through basic registration data, such as first and last name or registered email address. While most services allow users to remove their profiles from external search engines, they are often not able to effectively control internal searches. Orkut, for example, does not allow users to disable internal searches according to their first and last names. LinkedIn and MySpace also maintains that users be searchable by their email addresses.

Through this open architecture and search functionality, social network sites have rendered individuals more “visible” vis-à-vis one another. The social web has effectively altered the spatial dimensions of our social lives as grounded, embodied experience becomes ubiquitous and multiply experienced. Privacy, in the online social milieu, assumes greater fluidity and varied meaning—transcending spatially constructed understandings of the notion.

While the architecture of social networking sites encourages users to be more “public”, heightened control, or “more privacy” is generally suggested as the panacea to privacy concerns. However, the public/private binary of privacy talk often fails to capture the complex nexus which exists between privacy and power in the networked ecosystem. Privacy preferences on social networks, and the consequences thereof, are effectively shaped and influenced by structures of power. In this entry, I will argue that the interplay between privacy and power works ultimately to expose individuals to the subjective gaze of others, or to render them invisible. In this respect, individual choices concerning privacy preferences must be informed by the intrinsic relationship between notions of publicness/privateness and subjectivity/obscurity.

Power and Subjectivity

The searchable nature of the social profile allows others to quickly and easily aggregate information on one another. As privacy scholar Daniel Solve notes, social searching may be of genuine intent – individuals use social networking services to locate old friends, and to connect with current colleagues. However, curiosity does not always assume such innocence, as fishing expeditions for personal information may serve the purpose of judging individuals based perception of the social profile. The relatively power of search and open information can be harnessed to weed out potential job applicants, or to rank college applicants. Made possible through the architecture of the web and social constructions of power, individuals may be subjected to the deconstructive gaze of superiors.

The architecture of social networking sites significantly compliments this nexus between privacy and power. As individual behavior and preferences become more transparent, the act of surveillance is masked behind the ubiquity and anonymity of online browsing. Drawing on Foucault’s panopticism, social networks make for the “containerization” of social space –allowing the powerful to subjectively hierarchize and classify individuals in relation to one another [1]. This practice becomes particularly troublesome online, as individuals are often unable to control how they are constructed by others in cyberspace.

Perfect control is difficult to guarantee in an ecosystem where personal information is easily searched, stored, copied, indexed, and shared. In this respect, the privacy controls of social networking sites are greatly illusory. Googling an individual’s name, for example, may not reveal the full social profile of an individual, but may unveil dialogue involving the individual in a public discussion group. The searchable nature of personal information on the web has both complicated and undesirable consequences for privacy of the person for, what I believe, to be two main reasons.

The first point refers to what Daniel J. Solve describes as the “virtue of knowing less”. Individuals may be gaining more “information” on others through the internet, but this information is often insufficient for judging one’s character as it only communicates one dimension of an individual. In her work, Helen Nissenbaum emphasizes the importance contextual integrity holds for personal information. When used outside its intended context, information gathered online may not be useful for accurately assessing an individual. In addition, the virtual gaze is void of the essential components of human interaction necessary to effectively understand and situate each other. As Solve notes, certain information may distort judgment of another person, rather than increasing its accuracy.

Secondly, the act of surveillance through social networks work to undermine privacy and personhood, as individuals seek to situate others as “fixed texts” [2]. Due to the complex nature of the social self, such practice is undesirable. Online social networks are socially constructed spaces, with diverse meanings assigned by varied users. One may utilize a social network service to build and maintain professional relationships, while another may use it as an intimate space to share with close friends and family. James Rachels’ theory of privacy notes that privacy is important, as it allows individuals to selectively disclose information and to engage in behaviors appropriate and necessary for maintaining diverse personal relationships. Drawing on the work of performance theorists such as Judith Butler, we can assert that identity is not fixed or unitary, but is constituted by performances that are directed at different audiences [3]. Sociologist Erving Goffman also notes that we “live our lives as performers… [and] play many different roles and wear many different masks” [4]. Individuals, therefore, are inclined to perform themselves online according to their perceived audiences. It is the audience, or the social graph, which constructs the context that, in turn, informs individual behavior.

Any attempt to situate and categorize the individual becomes particularly problematic in the context of social networks, where information is often not intended for the purpose for which it is being used. Due to the complex nature of human behavior, judgments of character based on online observation only effectively capture one side of the “complicated self”. As Julie Cohen writes, the “law often fails to capture the mutually constitutive interactions between self and culture, the social constructions of systems of knowledge, and the interplay between systems of knowledge and systems of power”. Because the panoptic gaze is decentralized and anonymous in the networked ecosystem, individuals will often bear little knowledge on how their identities are being digitally deconstructed and rewired. Most importantly, much of this judgment will occur without individual consent or knowledge—emphasizing the transparent nature of the digital self.

Power and (in)visibility

In response to the notion that the architecture of the social web may render individuals transparent to the gaze of others, the need for more “control” over privacy on social network sites has captured the public imagination. Facebook’s abrupt privacy changes, for example, have received widespread attention in the blogosphere and even by governments. While popular privacy discourse often continues to fixate on the public/private binary—Facebook’s questionable move towards privacy decontrol has raised important questions of power and privilege.

A recent blog post by danah boyd nicely touches upon the dynamics of power, public-ness, and privilege in the context of online social networking. As she notes, “Public-ness has always been a privilege… but now we've changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public… and seen by millions. However, there are still huge social costs to being public…the privileged don’t have to worry about the powerful observing them online…but most everyone else does –forcing people into the public eye doesn’t dismantle the structures of privilege and power, but only works to reinforce them” (emphasis added).

This point touches upon an important idea —that publicity has value. This nexus between visibility and power is one which unfolds quite clearly in the social media ecosystem. One’s relevance or significance could, arguably, be measured relative to online visibility. Many individuals who are seen as “leaders” within their own professional or social circles often maintain public blogs, maintain a herd of followers on Twitter, and often manage large numbers of connections on social network sites. The more information written by or on an individual online, arguably, the more relevant they appear to in the eyes of their peers and superiors alike.

Power and privilege, however experienced, will be mirrored in the online context. While the participatory and decentralized nature of Web 2.0 arguably works challenge traditional structures of power, systemic hierarchies and are often reinforced online –as Facebook’s privacy blunders clearly illustrates. The privileged need not worry about the subjective gaze of their superiors, as boyd notes. Those who may be compromised due to the lack of privateness, however, do. As boyd goes on to argue, “the privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed… and those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them”. As public exposure may over often equate to power, we must critically challenge the assumption that the move towards more privacy control on social networks will best empower its members.

If publicity can potentially have great value for the individual, the opposite also rings true. Privacy, as polemic to publicness, alternatively works to diminish the presence of the individual, rendering them invisible or irrelevant within hyper-linked networks. With greater personal protectionism online, an individual may go unnoticed or unrecognized, fizzling out dully behind their more public peers. Drawing on social network theory, powerful people can be understood as “supernodes” as they connect more peripheral members of a network. As Lior Strahilevitz notes, supernodes tend to be better informed than the peripherals, and are most likely to be perceived as “leaders”.

As the power of the supernode relates to privacy, Strahilevitz states that that “supernodes maintain their privileged status by continuing to serve as information clearinghouses….and, in certain contexts, become supernodes based in part on their willingness to share previously private information about themselves”. It is within the context of visibility and power that the idea of (in)visibility and powerlessness online unfold. Those who have most at risk by going public, may chose not to do so. Those with in comfortable positions with considerably less to lose by going public may be inclined to “open up”. Heightened privacy controls on social network services, therefore, can work to reinforce the very structures of power they seek to dismantle.

This is not to argue, however, that more privacy is necessarily bad, and that less privacy is good, or that users shouldn’t be selective in their disclosures – to the contrary. As personal information has become ubiquitous and tools for aggregating information improve, maintaining privacy online becomes more pertinent than ever. However, the concept of privacy will only continue to become increasingly complex as digital networks continue to deconstruct and reconfigure the spatial dimensions of the public and private. How are we to effectively understand privacy in a social environment which values openness and publicity? Can the fluid and dynamic self gain visibility online without becoming subject to the gaze of superiors? Will those who selectively choose friends and carefully disclose personal information fizzle out, while the powerful and less inhibited continue to reassert privilege? The interplay between power and privacy on the social web is a multiply constitutive and reinforcing synergy –understanding how to effectively strike balance between the right to privacy and self-determination is the challenge ahead.

1. see “Foucault in Cyberspace” by James Boyle

2. Julie Cohen

3. Cohen citing Butler

4. Solve citing Goffman

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/the-in-visible-subject-power-privacy-and-social-networking

De facebook

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:41:13Z

Facebook used to be our playground but privacy concerns are now souring that fantasy. Why do we trust a clutch of new corporations with such phenomenal amounts of personal data?

The age of privacy is over, Facebook’s fresh-faced founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared a couple of months back. Social norms have shifted. We are now used to living out loud. “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, ‘Why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’” he said.

That paranoid past is behind us, claimed Zuckerberg, justifying Facebook’s controversial new decision to fling open the curtains and make maximum visibility the new normal. “In the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and (there are) just all these different services that have people sharing all this information,” he said.

In other words, get over the stage fright. Everyone else is out there over-sharing, arguing, preening, and generally acting out online.

In June last year, Facebook sneaked in a feature called the Everyone update. This makes it much like Twitter, and also allows it to share with and sell information to search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. “Facebook’s privacy changes are relevant as it tries to compete with real-time search on platforms like Twitter. It does give you an option to work around that though I am certain the whole process of setting privacy preferences could be a lot more intuitive,” says Sidharth Rao, digital industry watcher and CEO of internet marketing firm Webchutney.

On the surface, the new Facebook settings are better and much more malleable, if you can figure out how to work them — you can now choose, per post, what you want different sets of people to see. They have eliminated regional networks which would unwittingly expose you to an entire city sometimes (meaning that not everyone who is on the Delhi network, say, has automatic access to your information if you are in Delhi). But on the other hand, the default setting that Facebook recommends is deeply problematic. You, your profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of are all “publicly available information”. Earlier, you could make sure only your friends saw the rest of your friends — now, that option no longer exists as a setting.

Wasn’t privacy once a Facebook fundamental? Unlike the seedier environments of Orkut or Myspace, Facebook grew out of a small Harvard community, expanded to cover other East Coast schools, then conquered companies and countries. In September 2006, Facebook opened registration to anyone with an email address. But it was extremely cautious about how it engineered interaction. In essence, you were meant to socialise with people you already knew.

“It felt safer. It wasn’t about random people sending you scraps and stalking you, like on Orkut or whatever. Facebook reflected my real world. It kept you loosely, comfortably connected to so many people”, says Nomita Sawhney, a young Delhi-based architect. Unlike the threat of cyberstalking, intimidation, and impersonation that stalk less selective networks, Facebook remained clear of what media scholar Danah Boyd calls ‘stranger danger’. Only two years back, Zuckerberg told tech blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick that privacy “is the vector around which Facebook operates”.

I Like To Watch

Why are these changes such a big deal? Zuckerberg’s claim about privacy rings true for most unself-conscious Facebookers. After all, only recently, bra colour status updates were the big buzz on Facebook, ostensibly in support of breast cancer awareness. Now, it’s doppelganger week, where you tell the world what celebrity you most resemble. You can take dippy quizzes, remember birthdays, discuss the news, giggle over pictures. Grim warnings about corporate avarice and government spying sound faintly ridiculous in this pleasant context.

Social networks and blogs have certainly reconfigured privacy. Anyone who’s spent time on Facebook knows the impulse to meander through the pages and pictures of people in that amorphous category called ‘friends of friends’. In just a few years, we have got used to the thought that our lives are externalised and sprawled out for near-strangers to see.

In fact, Facebook is now the largest photo site in the world. When you join Facebook, under its Terms of Service, you give it a “license” (that is, legal permission) to use your content “on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.” It takes some effort to realise how recent all this is, that it’s still a great unfolding experiment, and that we are granting these companies fabulous power.
In his recent book, The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki describes the digital glasshouse: “Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook. It’s blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn sites, virally spread digital movies of a fat kid pretending to be a Jedi Knight, cell phone photos — posted online — of your drunk friend making out with her ex-boyfriend, and citizen surveillance. Peep is the backbone of Web 2.0 and the engine of corporate and government data mining.”

Web 2.0 was the clunky name for a whole range of liberating personal expression platforms — from Flickr and Youtube to Livejournal and Facebook. These companies provide the space and you bring the party. They encourage you to feel right at home and treat these platforms like your lounge, confessional or salon. Meanwhile, they also collect and refine data about you, and often wield it without your awareness.
In its over-eagerness, Facebook has blundered into several privacy minefields before this—when it first introduced Newsfeed, pushing a steady stream of your friends’ status updates at you, it embarrassed and annoyed many. Boyd compared it to the experience of shouting to be heard at a party, when the music abruptly stops and everyone else can suddenly hear your careless small talk. Of course, it turns out Zuckerberg was right when he told users to “calm down and breathe”, and Newsfeed has been naturalised into the Facebook experience. Another, more scarring experience was Beacon — its attempt to track what users in the US bought on partner sites — and tell on them to their friends. After an avalanche of protests, Facebook backed down and modified the ad platform. It even employs a chief privacy officer to address our fears.

In the early days, Facebook generated awkwardness because it didn’t respect context — the fact that you wear and cast off selves depending on who you’re interacting with, your crazy roommate or your conservative grand-aunt who decided to befriend you online. “It is the problem that arises when worlds collide, when norms get caught in the crossfire between communities, when walls that separate social situations come crashing down,” writes Chris Peterson of the University of Massachusetts, who has studied Facebook’s privacy architecture.

But now you can tweak settings and set up differential access. People have figured out how to work Facebook and not get burnt. “Profile pictures flatter, tagged pictures shatter,” says Priya Singh, a twenty-something law student, with a laugh. “You never know what someone’s going to put up and who’s going to see what. I don’t want everyone to see drunken party pictures, and so I’ve just learnt to place family on a new level of privacy settings.” And that’s the general pattern on Facebook: most people have learnt to adjust to the public glare, after some initial blinking and bemusement.

Privacy from Whom?

You can segment your social world as minutely as you like, but that doesn’t mean your life is any more private. It’s not just the fact that potential employers can scan and dismiss you, or current employers keep tabs — though such stories abound. For instance, MIT’s Gaydar research project discovered that you can identify a person’s sexual preferences by studying who their friends are on Facebook, even if they have avoided sharing that information in their profile.

But perhaps we have been gulled into thinking that the whole privacy fuss is about each other. “It’s very clever of Facebook to foreground this aspect of control. Your other friends, pictures, the games you play — that’s something we regularly give out anyway”, says Nishant Shah, director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. “But Facebook is not a single entity — it is a collection of third party apps (applications) that we have no control over. A simple birthday calendar can harvest all your data, all your online traces and you grant it access without knowing it,” he says. So Facebook makes a big show of protecting you from your acquaintances, even as it sells your information continuously.

This becomes a much bigger possibility when it comes to search engine integration, which allows the open flow on Facebook to be harnessed for perfect reach and recall.

To get a clearer sense of what’s at stake with these influential corporations, take a more powerful example: Google.com. Every day, we confide our trivial confusions, our deep doubts to one willing ear. And these billions of broken questions can add up to an eerily accurate picture of the world. But do you search Google or does Google search you? “Google can track you across applications: email, search, blogs, pictures and books read. That means they can profile you in a very detailed, exhaustive way, and they do,’ says Rahul Matthan. “They never delete information, and they’re getting progressively more intelligent about you, as they make search more relevant with features like Google Suggest.” As technology scholar Siva Vaidyanathan puts it, “we have to realise that we are not Google’s customers. We are its product. We are what Google sells to advertisers.” These behaviourially targeted ads are the most perfect, evolved form of advertising so far and in concept, the least annoying, because they are customised to you. Google has promised that its information is utterly secure and that search logs are anonymised after a certain period.

It provides limited disclosure of outside ads, lets users manage the categories that Google has assigned to them and tinker with it for a more accurate picture and also provides an opt-out option. But Search 2.0 is a scary beast — it can also facilitate social control and surveillance. Your online activities are not scattered across applications any more, Google can hear what you tell Facebook.

While selling us stuff more efficiently is probably a good thing, what happens when this intimate knowledge shades into active surveillance? Even if we live in countries where rights are respected, “we give out enough personal information in an innocuous way to a single repository. They are sitting on top of a very valuable resource, and all this information can easily be reverse-engineered to reveal specifics about you,” says Rahul Matthan, technology lawyer and founder-partner of Trilegal.

In India, we are even more oblivious to such stealthy watching. “Privacy concerns here are lesser than in the West, where they’re so dependent on digital ID. There, if someone impersonates you or overdraws credit limits, it could affect your house, your job,” says Matthan.

Privacy legislation doesn’t really exist in India — the right to keep personal information confidential has only been articulated as protection against state action. “There’s no easy legal recourse to being thoroughly spied on by a company,” says Matthan (Europe has enforced data protection directives since 1984 — you can control what information is gathered about you, and how it is used. While the US has somewhat diluted laws, personal information is still strongly guarded). While it’s tempting to think that you have nothing to hide, you are acceding to a set-up where outliers can be identified and dealt with. Privacy matters, no matter how unexceptionable your own life. So what’s to be done? “Holding Facebook and other companies to account is crucial. We must set up legislations by which people can look back, ask exactly what about their activity is being tracked. They have to treat consumers as peers,” says Shah. “If Facebook can gaze at us, we must be given the right to gaze back at its functioning — it has to be a peer-to-peer relationship.”

So far, Facebook and the Googleverse and Twitter are still our friends and enablers. But as they amass more and more power, it is better to see them as fallible companies rather than confidantes, and to make sure that they account for our information.

For original article on the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/de-facebook

Enforcement of Anti-piracy Laws by the Indian Entertainment Industry

praskrishna — 2011-08-04T04:35:48Z

This brief note by Siddharth Chadha seeks to map out the key actors in enforcement of copyright laws. These bodies not only investigate cases of infringement and piracy relating to the entertainment industry, but tie up with the police and IP law firms to pursue actions against the offenders through raids (many of them illegal) and court cases. Siddharth notes that the discourse on informal networks and circuits of distribution of cultural goods remains hijacked with efforts to contain piracy as the only rhetoric which safeguards the business interests of big, mostly multinational, media corporations.

International Intellectual Property Alliance

The International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) is an international lobby group of US media industries with close ties to the United States Trade Representative. It has in its reports consistently expressed dissatisfaction with Indian efforts to deal with piracy. IIPA works in close cooperation the other US lobby groups like the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and the BSA (Business Software Alliance). The IIPA reports, which place India in a 'danger zone', significantly influence regional and international discourses on piracy. Interestingly, the IIPA in India has been very successful in regionalizing and nationalizing a global discourse. Thus, in the past few years, local industry associations in India in cinema, music and software have independently run highly emotional campaigns against piracy, reminiscent of IIPA's own campaigns.

Motion Pictures Association

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) through its international counterpart, Motion Pictures Association (MPA), has been unofficially operational in India for the last 15 years. Its member companies are Walt Disney, Paramount, Sony Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros. The MPA's work in India was mostly non-obtrusive till 1994 when MPA Asia-Pacific, based in Singapore, started being represented by the high profile legal firm Lall & Sethi Advocates.

They have collectively worked on forming enforcement teams for coordinated raids in Mumbai and Delhi since 1995. Earlier this year, MPA announced its first India office to be set up in Mumbai, called the Motion Picture Distributor's Association India (Pvt.) Limited (MPDA), under the directorship of Rajiv Dalal. Mr. Dalal had previously directed strategic initiatives from the MPAA's Los Angeles office. The MPDA will engage itself in working jointly with local Indian film industries and the Indian government to promote the protection of motion pictures and television rights.

According to the organization's own assertion, in 2006 the MPA's Asia-Pacific operation investigated more than 30,000 cases of piracy and assisted law enforcement officials in conducting nearly 12,400 raids. These activities resulted in the seizure of more than 35 million illegal optical discs, 50 factory optical disc production lines and 4,482 optical disc burners, as well as the initiation of more than 11,000 legal actions.

Indian Music Industry

The world's second-oldest music companies' association, Indian Music Industry (IMI), was first established as Indian Phonographic Industry in 1936. It was re-formed in its present avatar in 1994, as a non-commercial and non-profit organization affiliated to the International Federation of Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and is registered as a society in West Bengal. IMI members includes major record companies like Saregama, HMV, Universal Music (India), Tips, Venus, Sony BMG (India), Crescendo, Virgin Records, Magnasound, Milestone, Times Music and several other prominent national and regional labels that represent over 75 per cent of the output in corporate recordings.

It was one of the first organizations in the country to start the trend of hiring ex-police officers to lead anti-piracy operations. In 1996, IMI hired Julio Ribeiro (a former Commissioner of Police, Mumbai; Director General of Police, Punjab; and Indian Ambassador to Romania) to head its anti-piracy operations. Their anti-piracy work is split into three specific regions, North and North Eastern, Western and Southern and East, each zone headed by a former senior police officer. IMI operates through offices in Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and several other cities and towns across India, focusing on surveillance, law enforcement, and gathering intelligence through an 80 member team hired to tackle piracy. During 2001 to 2004, IMI registered over 5500 cases, seized over 10 lakh music cassettes, and around 25 lakh CDs.

Business Software Alliance

Headquartered in Washington DC, the Business Software Alliance has a regional office in Delhi, and has been instrumental in conducting anti-piracy operations across the country. According to the BSA, India ranks 20 in global software piracy rankings, with a rate of 73 per cent while the Asia Pacific average is 53 per cent. China ranks second with a rate of 92 per cent and annual losses of $3,823 million while Pakistan ranks nine with 83 per cent piracy rate. They have engaged the general public in providing them with information on pirated software through an anti-piracy initiative – The Rewards Programme. Launched in 2005, reward amount up to Rs.50, 000, would be provided for information leading to successful legal action against companies using unlicensed software. The reward program was aimed to encourage people to support the fight against piracy and to report software piracy to the NASSCOM-BSA Anti-Piracy Software Hotline.

In 2006, BSA and NASSCOM got a shot in their arms by winning the largest settlement amount for a copyright case in India, with Netlinx India Pvt. Ltd. The case had emerged after a civil raid was conducted at the premises of Netlinx in December 2000, leading to inspection and impounding of 40 PCs, carrying illegal unlicensed software. The settlement includes damages of US$ 30,000, complete legalization of software used by them, removal of all unlicensed/pirated software and submission to an unannounced audit of computer systems during next 12 months.

Industry Enforcers

Bollywood Film and Music companies, such as T-Series and Yashraj Films, have established anti-piracy arms to combat piracy in specific markets. T-Series has been in the industry for over 15 years, as a brand of Gulshan Kumar founded Super Cassettes Industries Limited, and has often been at the forefront for conducting raids along with police officials to check piracy of its copyrighted content. In its latest announcement earlier this year, T-Series launched an anti-piracy campaign against those stealing digital content. The announcement came after they filed a complaint on June 1 with a police station in Mangalore against Classic Video shop for infringement of its copyright works like Billu, Ghajini, Aap Ka Suroor, Apne, Fashion and Karz that had been illegally downloaded and copied onto multiple discs, card readers and pen-drives.

Yashraj Films, a leading film studio, has long been a part of enforcement activities against piracy, both in the Indian market and internationally. Most recently, it was a key member in the formation of the United Producers and Distributors Forum, which also included chairman Mahesh Bhatt, Ramesh Sippy, Ronnie Screwalla of UTV, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan and Eros International. This organization is now trying to enforce anti-piracy laws by conducting raids across the country with the help of another ex-cop from Mumbai, A.A. Khan. Yashraj Films has also established anti-piracy offices in the United Kingdom and the United States to curb piracy in those markets, as overseas returns of its films, watched by the desi diaspora is one of its largest revenue earning sources. The website of Yashraj Films lists news reports from across US and Europe of instances of crackdown on pirates.

In the context of intellectual property in the creative industries, these anti-piracy agents have successfully created the halo of illegality around the subject of piracy. The discourse on informal networks and circuits of distribution of cultural goods remains hijacked with efforts to contain piracy as the only rhetoric which safeguards the business interests of big media companies and multinational corporations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/piracy-and-enforcement

National workshop on Web Accessibility - Thiruvananthapuram (Report)

radha — 2011-08-17T08:45:16Z

The third National Workshop on Web Accessibility for Web developers was organised by CIS at Thiruvananthapuram in collaboration with SPACE.

(CIS) and Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE) organized a workshop on web accessibility for web developers from the public and private sector on September 25 to 26, 2009. The workshop took place at Christ Nagar International School, Kowdiar, Thiruvananthapuram.

About the Host Organizations

The Centre for Internet and Society
The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a Bangalore based non-profit, bringing together a team of practitioners, theoreticians, researchers and artists to work on the emerging field of Internet and Society in order to critically engage with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and pedagogic practices, with particular emphasis on South-South dialogues and exchange. We focus on areas such as Anonymity/Privacy, Censorship, Surveillance, Free and Open Source Software, Open Standards, Open Access, Family, Sexual practices, Addiction, Intellectual Property Rights and Trade, Piracy, ICT4D, Digital and Participation Divide and Digital Communities and Movements.

Society For Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment
Society For Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE) is a registered society that has members from academia, the IT industry, professional societies such as IEEE and Computer Society of India, and the IT Administration of the Government of Kerala. The vision of SPACE is to promote the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in academics, governance, corporate and individual use, and to support the use FOSS for employment generation in Kerala. The primary thrust are of the intervention are:

Promote the use of FOSS in the public, private, and governmental sectors as well as for personal/home use
Develop a model for FOSS- based employment generation that is appropriate to Kerala's context, by identifying appropriate business opportunities and providing support services including training and micro business incubation
Carry out R & D activities for the development of essential prototypes that bridge existing gaps in software, so as to enable widespread use of FLOSS
Ensure that Kerala is able to develop sufficient numbers of high-quality human resources in the FLOSS domain

Kerala State IT Mission

Kerala State Information Technology Mission (KSITM) is a Society registered under the Travancore Cochin Literary Scientific & Charitable Societies Registration Act. It is an autonomous nodal IT implementation agency for Department of Information Technology, Government of Kerala which provides managerial support to various initiatives of the Department.

About the Resource Persons

Rahul Gonsalves
Rahul has been building accessible websites since 2005 (sample work at http://rahulgonsalves.com/projects/ [1] ). He has been activiely involved in promoting web and accessibility standards. He spoke at the first international accessibility and technology conference in India, Techshare 2008, where he made out a case for accessibility and conducted a workshop on retrofitting accessibility to existing websites, a concern for most large institutions with an existing online presence (slides available at http://www.barrierbreak.com/events-conference/techshare_presentations200... [2])

In September 2008, he presented a paper examining ways in which People with various impairments - both physical and mental - engage with online content, and demonstrated practical ways in which authors can make online content accessible at the National Conference on ICT for Differently Abled People. He is a supporter of the push for having a national policy for governing electronic accessibility in India.

Srinivasu Chakravartula
Srinivasu Chakravarthula - graduated in Computer Science and is certified in 'assistive technologies'. He started his career as Head of the Braille Production Unit at National Association for the Blind, Bangalore. He then moved on and taught Computer Science at the Manik Public School, Bidar and also set up the Computer Training Centre at Hyderabad and Maniknagar, Bidar.

In the year 2005, he began to specialize in accessibility and started working for Net Systems Informatics and its subsidiary - BarrierBreak Technologies, Mumbai. During his stint at Net Systems, he was instrumental in setting up an accessibility process, imparting accessibility training to Corporates, creating awareness about accessibility and assistive technologies. Srinivasu played an innovative role in organizing Techshare India 2008 - India's 1st Accessibility and Assistive Technologies Conference and Exhibition. He was also Program Coordinator for Magazine, a3 that talked about Ability, Accessibility and Adaptability.

Srinivasu is currently working for Yahoo! India as Accessibility Manager and is responsible to lead and evangelize accessibility and its initiatives across Yahoo! India and South East Asia. He is also a member of the core committee for Yahoo! Employee Foundation India (YEFI). Srinivasu is associated with the social sector through the National Association for the Blind, India; Enable India, Shri Manik Prabhu Sikshan Samiti and Success World. His hobbies include blogging, tweeting, listening to classical music, playing chess and swimming.

Schedule of the Workshop

Day I

Introductory Session

Disability - 5 major types
The W3C and the WCAG
How people with disabilities use computers

Group Exercise/Discussion

Split participants into small groups and give them questions/problems to talk about and solve
Example: If your friend is deaf, how do you make sure that she/he understands what a video is about? OR How does someone who can't see or hear answer/check their email? OR X lost his hands in a car accident. How does he do a Google search?

Session 1 - Building an Accessible Website

Laying Accessible Foundations
Table-less layouts
Well-structured markup
Valid Code

Lecture/Demonstration of Accessibility Features under GNU/Linux by Arky

Lecture/Demonstration of NVDA Screen Reader

Lunch

Session 2 - Building an Accessible Website

Removing Barriers
Guideline 1 - Perception
Non-text content
Audio/Visual content
Adaptability
Contrast

Group Exercise: Guideline 1 - Translate a offline newspaper into an online one, and ensure that structure and information are retained when the content is adapted.

Wrap Session - Feedback and Clarifications

Day II

Lecture/Demonstration of ARIA features on selected websites

Session 3 - Guideline 2

Operable
Keyboard Access
Enough Time
Seizures
Navigable

LUNCH

Session 4 - Guideline 3 and 4

Understandable
Natural Language
Predictable
Input Assistance
Robust
Compatible

Session 5 - Accessibility Testing

Automated Testing + Tools
Manual Testing

Wrap Session - Feedback and Clarifications

Participants List

1. Mr. Vibeesh P - Team Leader, Rainconcert

2. Mr. Sunil S - Computer Programmer, ANERT

3. Mr. Vineet Pratap - Parallel Programmer, NIIST

4. Mr. Binsun N T - Software Engineer, Keltron

5. Mr. M.L. Antony - Manager (Software/Web Services), Keltron

6. Mr. Rojilal M. L - Programmer, KSEB

7. Ms. Dhanya Balakrishnan - Graduate Apprentice, Kerala State IT Mission

8. Ms. Indu Reghunath - Developer, SPACE

9. Mr. Jithin Babu B - Web Programmer, Freelance

10. Mr. Hareesh Mohan - Developer, SPACE

11. Mr. Sujith Sureshan - Developer, SPACE

12. Mr. Vinu C R - Web Programmer, IT@School

13. Mr. Cherian P Thomas - Programmer, KSEB

14. Mr. B Vijayakumar - Programmer, KSEB

15. Mr. Sunil Kumar - Governement Employee, Kerala Khadi and Village Industries Board

16. Mr. Anil Kumar - Akshaya, PA-MIS

17. Mr. Shanavas Khan - Programmer, Freelance

18. Ms. Shatti Raj - Scientist 'C', National Informatics Center

19. Ms. Rameena M - Developer, SPACE

20. Ms. Gita Brajesh - PSA, National Informatics Center

21. Ms. Indusekhar M S - System Analyst, National Informatics Center

22. Ms. Somi P Thomas - Scientist 'B', National Informatics Center

23. Ms. Nissy George - System Analyst, National Informatics Center

24. Ms. Susy M - Software Development, National Informatics Center

25. Ms. Jisy V K - Technical Apprentice, Kerala State IT Mission

26. Ms. Sandhya Devi T - Project Associate, IT@School

27. Ms. Saritha D R - Project Associate Executive, IT@School

28. Mr. Shaik Mohamed - System Analyst, National Informatics Center

29. Mr. Shibin Shah K J - Student, RSCS

30. Mr. Aneesh Bhadran - Student. RIT

31. Mr. Thomas K S - Assistant Manager, Camputec

32. Mr. Anil S - Member, SDS

33. Mr. John Panicker - Website Designer

34. Ms. Teenamol L - Information Kerala Mission

35. Mr. Shine A R - Information Kerala Mission

36. Mr. Jayahari K V

37. Mr. Naveen P L

38. Mr. Jijo Mathew

39. Mr. Antony Rodrugues

40. Mr. Satheeh S

41. Mr. Sajeevan C - Student, INSIGHT

Feedback

Session I

Title: Building an Accessible Website

Topics Covered: Laying Accessible Foundations, Table-less layouts, Well-structured markup, Valid Code

Content

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Covered Useful Materials	11	12	0	1
Practical to my needs and interest	9	11	3	1
Well Organized	12	9	1	2
Presented at the right level	14	9	0	1
Use Visual Aids	12	10	0	2

Presentation

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Instructor's Knowledge	20	3	0	1
Instructor's Presentation Style	16	7	0	1
Instructor Covered Materials Clearly	12	11	0	1
Instructor Responded Well to questions	18	5	0	1

Title: Lecture/Demonstration of Accessibility Features under GNU/Linux by Arky

Content

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Covered Useful Materials	12	8	1	3
Practical to my needs and interest	7	13	2	2
Well Organized	12	10	0	2
Presented at the right level	11	11	0	2
Use Visual Aids	9	11	1	3

Presentation

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Instructor's Knowledge	13	10	0	1
Instructor's Presentation Style	9	14	0	1
Instructor Covered Materials Clearly	9	14	0	1
Instructor Responded Well to questions	13	10	0	1

Title : Lecture/Demonstration of NVDA Screen Reader

Content

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Covered Useful Materials	7	14	1	2
Practical to my needs and interest	7	10	3	4
Well Organized	8	11	2	3
Presented at the right level	8	10	3	3
Use Visual Aids	7	12	3	2

Presentation

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Instructor's Knowledge	10	12	0	2
Instructor's Presentation Style	9	11	1	3
Instructor Covered Materials Clearly	7	14	1	2
Instructor Responded Well to questions	11	10	0	3

Session II

Title : Building an Accessible Website

Topics Covered : Removing Barriers, Guideline 1 - Perception, Non-text content, Audio/Visual content, Adaptability, Contrast

Content

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Covered Useful Materials	12	10	1	1
Practical to my needs and interest	11	11	1	1
Well Organized	12	9	2	1
Presented at the right level	15	8	0	1
Use Visual Aids	12	10	1	1

Presentation

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Instructor's Knowledge	15	7	0	2
Instructor's Presentation Style	11	11	0	2
Instructor Covered Materials Clearly	11	11	0	2
Instructor Responded Well to questions	13	9	0	2

Session III

Title :Guideline 2

Topics Covered: Operable, Keyboard Access, Enough Time, Seizures, Navigable

Content

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Covered Useful Materials	11	10	0	3
Practical to my needs and interest	10	11	0	3
Well Organized	9	12	0	3
Presented at the right level	8	12	1	3
Use Visual Aids	9	11	1	3

Presentation

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Instructor's Knowledge	12	9	0	3
Instructor's Presentation Style	10	11	0	3
Instructor Covered Materials Clearly	9	11	1	3
Instructor Responded Well to questions	11	10	0	3

Session IV

Title : Guideline 3 and 4

Topics Covered : Understandable, Natural Language, Predictable, Input Assistance, Robust, Compatible

Content

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Covered Useful Materials	10	11	2	1
Practical to my needs and interest	9	13	0	2
Well Organized	12	11	0	1
Presented at the right level	14	8	0	2
Use Visual Aids	12	10	1	1

Presentation

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Instructor's Knowledge	13	8	0	3
Instructor's Presentation Style	11	10	0	3
Instructor Covered Materials Clearly	12	9	0	3
Instructor Responded Well to questions	13	8	0	3

Session V

Title :Accessibility Testing

Topics Covered: Automated Testing + Tools, Manual Testing

Content

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Covered Useful Materials	15	9	0	0
Practical to my needs and interest	14	9	1	0
Well Organized	13	11	0	0
Presented at the right level	13	11	0	0
Use Visual Aids	14	9	1	0

Presentation

	Excellent	Good	Need Improvement	Not Applicable
Instructor's Knowledge	17	7	0	3
Instructor's Presentation Style	14	10	0	3
Instructor Covered Materials Clearly	14	9	0	1
Instructor Responded Well to questions	16	7	1	3

Workshop Organizers

Ms Nirmita Narsimhan (Programme Manager)
The Centre for Internet and Society
No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers
14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore,
Karnataka 560052,
India

Phone: (+91)-080-4092-6283‎
Fax: (+91)-080-4114-8130
Email: nirmita@cis-india.org

Mr. Thomas Abraham (Training Coordinator)
Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment
C-11, Elankom Gardens,
Vellayambalam, Thiruvananthapuram
Kerala, India

Mobile: +91 94964 13317 Office Phone: +91 47123 18997
Email: tomuhs@gmail.com, contact@space-kerala.org

Consolidated Expenses of Web Accessibility Workshop, Trivandrum

Budget Head		Amount (Rs.)

Rent of lab and set up		15200
Accomodation		4963
Stationery		10285
Communication		507
Food		7535
Travel		6235
Coordination		10000
Total		54725

Please click here for the complete report.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/workshop-thiruvananthapuram-report

Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report

radha — 2012-03-13T10:43:09Z

Youth are often seen as potential agents of change for reshaping their own societies. By 2010, the global youth population is expected reach almost 1.2 billion of which 85% reside in developing countries. Unleashing the potential of even a part of this group in developing countries promises a substantially impact on societies. Especially now when youths thriving on digital technologies flood universities, work forces, and governments and could facilitate radical restructuring of the world we live in. So, it’s time we start listening to them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/dnrep.pdf

National Conference on ICTs for the differently- abled/under privileged communities in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship 2009 - (NCIDEEE 2009)

radha — 2011-08-31T10:48:22Z

A national level conference on the use of Information and Communication Technology for the differently abled / under privileged community in education, employment and entrepreneurship.

The management, staff and students of Loyola College and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore (in association with department of IT, Government of India and pioneers in educating differently abled and professional bodies like NASSCOM, CSI-Chennai chapter), are proud to announce that we will be hosting a national level conference on the use of Information and Communication Technology for the differently abled / under privileged community in education, employment and entrepreneurship. This conference which will be a momentous occasion will be held from the 1^st to the 3^rd of December and will be attended by individuals from all walks of life including representatives of the differently abled and under privileged community, government officials, educationalists, researchers, program managers, representatives of international business missions, NGOs and students etc.

The main aim of this conference is to devise a successful formula through which the lesser privileged people of our society can be provided the opportunity to use the Information and Communication Technology to grow on par with the modernized world. The program will be a three day event ending on the 3^rd which happens to be e-accessibility day and the World Disability Day and hence in addition to the specific topics with the opinions, ideas and criticisms of each and every individual which will be heard, discussed and analyzed carefully, we will also be recognizing the many individuals who have contributed their tireless efforts in making Information and Communication technology accessible to all.

Some of the main aims and themes of this conference would be the Institutional and national responses to technological change, the intersections of Political economy and educational technology. The architecture of learning, Pedagogy in the evolving tech environment, Informal and formal adult education, Multi-grade education, Instructional design and delivery, evaluation and assessment, Strategies and tools for teaching and learning, simulations and gaming, Effects on training institutions and industry, Impacts on educational institutions: effects on faculty, staff, administration, and students; curriculum and program development Intellectual property, Building communities of teachers/educators, e-governance and leadership and so on.

The focus would be on the various problems faced by the differently abled and the under privileged people in our society especially with respect to education and the use of Information and Communication Technology for their development and tools for language learning especially English, Tamil and Hindi. During the conference, discussions would be made on the ways to implement data mining in such a way that it includes multimedia facilities such as voice over, Globalization and ICT in the labour market, ICT applications and systems contributing to desirable goals, learning, knowledge growth and career patterns in ICT, leadership roles, human needs, skills and competencies needed for proper growth and its effects, etc. These problems and solutions would be discussed on every possible front including the political, the educational the financial level with its usefulness and effects on the under privileged in mind.

We would also strive with our utmost effort to reach our desired goals such as humanization, bridging the digital gap, freedom of expression, peace, sustainability, human welfare and quality of life. The most important of them all will be the devising of important decisions and strategies that could be implemented in order to help the differently abled people use Information and Communication Technology for their employment by means of introduction of newly devised hardware and software that could benefit them and enable them to develop further.

It is hoped that this conference will be a memorable experience for both the participants as well as the hosts resulting in decisions that are aimed at making life better and easier for all the differently abled and under privileged throughout the country.

Registration

About Loyola College:

Loyola College, Chennai is one of the leading colleges not only in the state of Tamilnadu alone but also in India. It has been rated A+ by the NAAC for several years in a row and is also one among the top ten colleges in the country. All this is proof enough that the college takes utmost interest in the development of students. The main aim of the college is not to provide the highest quantity of education but the highest quality of education to its students. To carry out its aim, the college arranges for several conferences, seminars, educational tours, Industrial visits etc. in order to make sure that the knowledge of the students is not limited within the classroom alone. Hence the great support that the college provides to the staff and students of the various departments is quite evident in the many successful conferences, seminars and other such programs that have been conducted in the past and this is sure to continue in the future.

Organizers

RCDA: The Resource centre for differently abled (RCDA) started in the year 2006 as one of the Centers of Excellence at Loyola College has successfully carried out the task of making education and learning an accessible tool for the less privileged members of our society. As a joint venture with some of the departments of the College, the resource center has decided to organize the National Conference on ICTs for the differently- abled/ under privileged communities in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship 2009 (NCIDEEE 2009).

http://www.loyolacollege.edu/rcda.html

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a Bangalore based non-profit organization, bringing together a team of practitioners, theoreticians, researchers and artists to work on the emerging field of Internet and Society in order to critically engage with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and pedagogic practices, with particular emphasis on South-South dialogues and exchange.

We focus on areas such as Anonymity/Privacy, Censorship, Surveillance, Free and Open Source Software, Open Standards, Open Access, Family, Sexual practices, Addiction, Intellectual Property Rights and Trade, Piracy, ICT4D, Digital and Participation Divide and
Digital Communities and Movements.

Website: www.cis-india.org

Program

The conference will be divided into four tracks which will be running simaltaneously ,, except for the main session and the concluding session on the first and last days which are to be common for all participants. The tentative schedule for the different tracks is as follows:

Track 1:

Day 1. Presentations of papers

Day 2. OCR Round Table- Deployment of OCR technologies in Indian languages: present state and road ahead

Day 3. TTS Round Table: Assessing the state of TTS in Indian languages: current position and future road map.

Track 2

Workshop on Web Accessibility for web developers- Web developers and designers from various sectors will be initiated into the need for and the techniques of compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 formulated by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The tentative schedule for this track is given below:

WCAG Training Session Plan (2 Day)

Day 1
14:00-15:30 - Introductory Session

Disability - 5 major types
The W3C and the WCAG
How people with disabilities use computers (could use a movie here)

Group Exercise/Discussion

Split participants into small groups and give them questions/problems to talk about and solve
Example: If your friend is deaf, how do you make sure that s/he understands what a video is about? OR How does someone who can't see or hear answer/check their email? OR X lost his hands in a car accident. How does he do a Google search?

15:30-16:00- coffee/tea break
16:00-17:30

Session 1 - Building an Accessible Website

Laying Accessible Foundations
Table-less layouts
Well-structured markup
Valid Code

Day 2

09:30-11:00 Group Exercise
11:00-11:30- tea/coffee break
11:30-13:00

Session 2 - Building an Accessible Website

Removing Barriers
Guideline 1 - Perception
Non-text content
Audio/Visual content
Adaptability
Contrast

13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:30 Group Exercise
15:30-16:00-tea/coffee break
16:00-17:30

Session 3 - Guideline 2

Operable
Keyboard Access
Enough Time
Seizures
Navigable

Wrap Session - Feedback and Clarifications

Day 3

09:30-11:00 - Session 4 - Guideline 3 and 4

Understandable
Natural Language
Predictable
Input Assistance
Robust
Compatible

11:00-11:30- tea/coffee break
11:30-13:00

Session 5 - Accessibility Testing

Automated Testing + Tools
Manual Testing

13:00-14:00 Lunch break
14:00-15:30 Concluding session- feedback, clarification and action points of participants
15:30-16:00 tea/coffee break

Track 3

Capacity building for persons with visual impairments

This track is designed to equip students with visual impairments with skills and information required to face the employment world. It has courses such as goal orientation, soft skills and etiquettes and managing challenges in the work environment. It informs the students on what to expect when they go out to look for jobs and how to deal with potential logistic and attitudinal barriers. This is a very popular module which is currently being offered by Enable India Solutions,Bangalore and is being replicated in two days for the benefit of college students in Chennai.

The tentative sessionwise schedule for this track is given below:

Sessions

14:00-15:30- Why/How to be a finished product
15:30-16:00- Tea/coffee
16:00-17:30- Awareness on different jobs

Day 2

09:30-11:00- Goal orientation session
11:00-11:30- Tea/coffee break
13:30-13:00Employability awareness session 1 – Case studies of jobs and skills

Employability awareness session 2 – Computer skills (efficiency / quality)

13:00-14:00- Lunch
14:00-15:30- Employability awareness session 3 – Understand the real world perspective (& sighted point of view)
15:30-16:00- Tea/coffee break
16:00-17:30- Employability awareness session 4 - Importance of mobility
16:00-17:30- Employability awareness session 5 – Case studies on problem solving, workplace solutions, employed visually impaired

Day 3

Equipping for the employment world: Sessions

09:30-11:00
Soft skills including Social skills and etiquettes
Independent living skills
Emerging technologies - GPS, Mobile based OCr etc

11:00-11:30- tea/coffee break
11:30-13:00 Working in the corporate world- Managing challenges in work environment

Track 4

Capacity building for NGOs

This track is designed for general capacity building and information dissemination. It will cover topics like legal challenges, special needs for different disabilities, setting up resource centres, experimenting with new pedagogic techniques and using ICTs to impart education, presentation of case studies and so on.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/ncideee-2009

Centre for Internet and Society

UID Project in India - Some Possible Ramifications

The UID and Shifts in the Citizen-State Relationship

The Definition of Citizenship and the UID

Centralization and Cost-effectiveness of the UID

Infallibility and Circumvention of the UID

Digital/Analogue Slippage

Govt and BlackBerry firm wait for the other to hang up

Civil Liberties and the amended Information Technology Act, 2000

The power of the next click...

Separating the 'Symbiotic Twins'

Peeping Toms In Your Inbox

8 Ways In Which You’re Being Intruded Upon

7 Steps You Can Take To Protect Yourself

I don't want my fingerprints taken

Rick van Amersfoort to give a public lecture on his work at CIS on May 15

About Rick van Amersfoort

Technological Protection Measures in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010

Implications: The Good Part

Implications: The Bad Part

Uncertainties

On "shall maintain" and penalties

On "facilitating" and remoteness

More uncertainties

On "purpose" as a criterion in 65A(2)(a)

Conclusion

The (in)Visible Subject: Power, Privacy and Social Networking

Bookmark & Share:

Document Actions

De facebook

I Like To Watch

Privacy from Whom?

Enforcement of Anti-piracy Laws by the Indian Entertainment Industry

International Intellectual Property Alliance

Motion Pictures Association

Indian Music Industry

Business Software Alliance

Industry Enforcers

National workshop on Web Accessibility - Thiruvananthapuram (Report)

About the Host Organizations

About the Resource Persons

Schedule of the Workshop

Day I

Day II

Participants List

Feedback

Session I

Session II

Session III

Session IV

Session V

Workshop Organizers

Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report

National Conference on ICTs for the differently- abled/under privileged communities in Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship 2009 - (NCIDEEE 2009)

About Loyola College:

Organizers

Program

Track 1:

Track 2

Track 3

Track 4