Centre for Internet and Society

Expect anti-net censorship echo in house

praskrishna — 2012-04-25T11:07:43Z

For the anti-Internet censorship movement in the country, hope is now in sight. Their fight against the intermediary provisions (section 79) of the IT laws, according to which, an intermediary (website, domain owner) would have to take off content that a third party (or complainant) finds ‘objectionable,’ without any room for appeal, has now garnered the attention of the government itself. What is at stake is our fundamental rights, warns CPM Member of Parliament P Rajeeve, who was perhaps the first at the government level to realise that there was a gaping hole in the provision, and took up the matter in the Rajya Sabha.

This blog post by Arpan Daniel Varghese was published in IBN Live on April 25, 2012

“A discussion on the annulment of the IT Act 2011 itself is likely to figure in the budget session of the Parliament on April 24. I am trying to mobilise other MPs. We have decided to convene a meeting of organizations, representatives of political parties and MPs to discuss this issue in detail,” says MP Rajeeve.

Noted Twitteratti and former Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor too is concerned, particularly about the onus this places on Internet Service Providers.

“If a newspaper publishes something, you go after the newspaper, not the delivery boy. Yes, you can ask the delivery boy to stop delivering the newspaper, but that is such an extreme step that few democracies would contemplate. But what we are trying to do seems to go unacceptably far in this direction and needs further reconsideration,” Tharoor says, adding that he too is planning to raise the issue in the Lok Sabha.

Both Alok Dixit from ‘Save Your Voice’ and Sunil Abraham, the executive director of the Centre for Internet And Society (CIS), say they are speaking to MPs and others in the government and trying to initiate an motion in the Rajya Sabha against the intermediary provisions. And support has been pouring in from all quarters, be it cyber space or through the pan-India protests, including the recent one at the Marina Beach in Chennai that ‘Save Your Voice’ has been holding.

Alok, Sunil and scores of activists across the country are now pinning their hopes on the annulment motion introduced by MP Rajeeve, which is likely to be taken up during the second half of the Parliament session on Tuesday.
The main hassle, however, is ignorance. “People don’t even know about the laws. They are not aware of their rights. So, the kind of support we are getting is quite less,” says Alok.

The legal fraternity and the administration too face the same roadblock, agrees Kerala High Court advocate Jacob. “This is a new area and people are just learning the theoretical side of it. There are not many cases. Trained professionals are not there to train the legal fraternity itself,” he rues.

The fundamental question is, according to Sunil, “why should freedom of speech and expression be any different on the Internet?”
“Remember, this is the same Internet which brought out Kolaveri and structured the Anna movement. So, it affects you,” Alok signs off.

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/anti-net-censorship-echo-in-house

Campaign against curbs on websites gathers steam

praskrishna — 2012-04-25T11:19:29Z

For political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi and his blogger-cum-journalist friend Alok Dixit, who both ran a website against corruption, a tryst with the blind side of law triggered their mission against “gagging” of the new-age Indian Internet user.

The blog post by Arpan Daniel Varghese was published by IBN Live on April 23, 2012.

It all started when they were in Mumbai, taking part in the first public protest seeking a strong Lokpal led by social activist Anna Hazare. “During the course of the protest, we got word that our website had been taken off,” recalls Alok.

The Mumbai Police had banned the website without any prior notice, apparently after a complaint was filed by a Congress leader that some content on the site, CartoonsAgainstCorruption, was objectionable, he says.

“We then contacted Bigrocks, the domain provider, but they did not divulge the exact procedure to restore our website,” he adds.

Kerala High Court lawyer P Jacob, who has a masters in cyber law and is a researcher in the field, clarifies. “Let’s say that you are a website, blog or domain owner... As per the intermediary rules incorporated into the IT laws, introduced through an amendment in 2011, if a third person sends a complaint, be it a frivolous one, to you (the intermediary ) about some objectionable content, you will have to take off the said content within 36 hours.”

This could happen to any one and could be quite dangerous, points out Sunil Abraham, the executive director of The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS-India).� “If a company wants to target your organization’s social media network, they can keep sending fraudulent emails to you and you will have to keep deleting it unless you are ready to face litigation or government action. And then there is no penalty for abusing the provision. There is no transparency, the people who comment will not be told,” says Sunil.

It was this realization that drove Alok, who then quit his job as a reporter, and Aseem Trivedi to start a movement against such blind curbs. ‘Save Your Voice’ was thus born.

A research conducted by the CIS gave further credence to their fears that it was very “easy to ban any website in India.”

“We call it a policy sting operation,” details Sunil. “We sent out fraudulent take- down notices (or complaints) to seven of the largest intermediaries in India. They gladly over-complied and promptly took off the material in question. You can try this. You could look at a legitimate comment and complain that this is blasphemous, offensive or plain annoying. And without questioning your locus standi, the intermediary sites will have to take it off.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/campaign-against-curbs-on-websites

Indian Porn Ban is Partially Lifted But Sites Remain Blocked

pranesh — 2015-09-13T09:00:03Z

The Indian government made a quick about-face on its order to block hundreds of pornography websites on Tuesday, partially lifting the ban after political backlash against the moral policing.

The article was published in Wall Street Journal on August 5, 2015. Pranesh Prakash gave his inputs.

But the websites remained blocked because Internet service providers were afraid of legal trouble.

The new order from the Department of Telecommunications said that Internet service providers could unblock any of the 857 websites, so long as they don’t contain child pornography. However, the websites remain blocked because service providers say they have no way of knowing whether they contain child porn, and no control over whether they will in the future.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, the IT minister, said Tuesday night that the government would trim down the list of banned sites, to focus only on those that contain child porn.

“A new notification will be issued shortly. The ban will be partially withdrawn. Sites that do not promote child porn will be unbanned,” said Mr. Prasad on the TV news channel India Today.

The wording of the new order created confusion, because it appears to put the responsibility for policing the Internet for child pornography on service providers.

“How can we go ahead? What if something comes up tomorrow [on one of these sites], which has child porn, or something else?,” said an executive at an Indian service provider who asked not to be named.

“The onus cannot be put on the service providers. What the government is doing is inherently unfair, it is not what the law requires,” said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based civil liberties advocacy group. It is the government’s job to determine what violates the law, not private companies, Mr. Prakash said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-wall-street-journal-august-5-2015-sean-mclain-indian-porn-ban-is-partially-lifted-but-sites-remain-blocked

India partially lifts Porn Ban?

praskrishna — 2015-09-20T06:30:34Z

India is said to have partially removed the porn ban. But many internet service providers have refused to restore access, due to a 'vague' government order.

The blog post by Nazhat Khan was published in DESI blitz on August 7, 2015.

India has partially lifted the ban of online pornography, just days after blocking user access to 857 adult websites.

The Indian government enforced the ban on July 30, 2015, only to reverse its decision on August 4, 2015. Ravi Shankar Prasad, the Communications and IT Minister, clarifies the ban only targets websites promoting child pornography.

He says: “A new notification will be issued shortly. The ban will be partially withdrawn. Sites that do not promote child porn will be unbanned.” Under the new order, internet service providers (ISPs) in India are allowed to unblock these 857 websites – except for those that contain child pornography.

This has caused another outrage. ISPs complain it is not within their capability and responsibility to do so. Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) explains: “ISPs have no way or mechanism to filter out child pornography from URLs, and the further unlimited sub-links.

“Hence, we request your good self to advise us immediately on the future course of action in this regard.

“Till your further directive, the ISPs are keeping the said 857 URLs disabled.”

An executive at an Indian ISP tells the Wall Street Journal: “How can we go ahead? What if something comes up tomorrow [on one of these sites], which has child porn, or something else?”

Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, points out it is not right for the government to pass the ball over to private companies.

He says: “The onus cannot be put on the service providers. What the government is doing is inherently unfair, it is not what the law requires.” In effect, porn sites in India are still blocked. The Supreme Court and senior officials are yet to provide clearer directives for ISPs.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/desi-blitz-august-7-2015-nazhat-khan-india-partially-lifts-porn-ban

Indian net service providers too play censorship tricks

praskrishna — 2013-02-13T04:20:53Z

The study by a Canadian university has found that some major Indian ISPs have deployed web-censorship and filtering technology.

The article by T Ramachandran was published in the Hindu on February 9, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Your internet service provider (ISP) could be blocking some content. A study conducted by a Canadian university has found that some major Indian ISPs have deployed web-censorship and filtering technology widely used in China and some West Asian countries.

The findings, published on January 15, were the result of a search for censorship software and hardware on public networks like those operated by ISPs.

A research team at Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, found a software-hardware combo package called PacketShaper being used in many parts of the world, including India.

The study identified the presence of four PacketShaper installations on the networks of three major ISPs in India during the period of study in late 2012. These ISPs had been earlier “implicated in filtering to some degree,” the report said.

The deployment of such traffic management technologies by ISPs could threaten privacy, freedom of expression and competition, said Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of the Bangalore-based NGO, Centre for Internet and Society.

He said tools like PacketShaper could be used by ISPs for two types of censorship —“to block entire websites or choke traffic on certain services or destinations in a highly granular fashion.”

The U.S.-based producers of the technology, Blue Coat Systems, are quite open about the product features on the company’s website. They say it could be used to control and weed out undesirable content. It could also be used to slow down or speed up the operation of programmes and content flow to achieve the goals set by the operators of the networks.

Transparency is the key

Technology experts said such products could be used to exercise legitimate control over the internet traffic and prioritise the use of bandwidth and resources, if used ethically.

“If done in a transparent manner that does not discriminate against different actors within a class it does benefit the collective interest of the ISP’s clients. However, it could also be used to engage in hidden censorship against legitimate speech and also for anti-competitive behaviour,” said Mr. Abraham.

The study focussed on countries where concerns exist over “compliance with international human rights law, legal due process, freedom of speech, surveillance, and censorship.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-feb-9-2013-t-ramachandran-indian-net-service-providers-too-play-censorship-tricks

Hate speech: ban or ignore?

praskrishna — 2013-02-13T09:40:37Z

The Social Network discusses the hate speeches: whether they should be banned or ignored. Why does the state take action against some and not against some others. This on a day when Togadia and Owaisi were simultaneously trending on the social media.

This discussion was aired on NDTV on February 5, 2013

Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director, Centre for Internet and Society, and Shivam Vij of Kafila.com joined NDTV in the studio while actor and standup comic Sanjay Rajoura joined via webcam.

Pranesh said that the talk of banning these videos is foolish. He added, I don't think that is a solution. But the issue is one of criminal prosecution – whether that should happen or not, and with regard to the interesting dichotomy that Shivam pointed out some people are calling for somethings to be banned but not others. I think that kind of hypocrisy should be pointed out. I am happy that these small incidents of hate mongering are actually being blown out of proportion on social media because it actually gets people to react...to say wait a second...that is not right I might have a certain leanings towards Hindutva but that kind of speech is not what I support, or I might have a certain leanings towards what is called "pseudo-secularism" but that kind of speech is not what I support. So getting out that discussion out is important.

If we were on one hand a society where we had communal peace and then social media were focusing on these small kinds of incidents and blowing it out of proportion then that would be a problem.

Watch the full discussion aired on NDTV

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ndtv-video-the-social-network-feb-5-2013-hate-speech-ban-or-ignore

Internet Rights and Wrongs

pranesh — 2016-09-22T23:36:14Z

With a rise in PIL's for unwarranted censorship, do we need to step back and inspect if it's about time unreasonable trends are checked?

The article was published in India Today on September 1, 2016. The original piece can be read here.

Over the last few weeks, there have been a number of cases of egregious censorship of websites in India. Many people started seeing notices that (incorrectly) gave an impression that they may end up in jail if they visited certain websites. However, these notices weren't an isolated phenomenon, nor one that is new. Worryingly, the higher judiciary has been drawn into these questionable moves to block websites as well.

Since 2011, numerous torrent search engines and communities have been blocked by Indian internet service providers (ISPs). Torrent search engines provide the same functionality for torrents that Google provides for websites. Are copyright infringing materials indexed and made searchable by Google? Yes. Do we shut down Google for this reason? No. However, that is precisely what private entertainment companies have done over the past five years in India. Companies hired by the producers of Tamil movies Singham and 3 managed to get video-sharing websites like Vimeo, Dailymotion and numerous torrent search engines blocked even before the movies released, without showing even a single case of copyright infringement existed on any of them. During the FIFA World Cup, Sony even managed to get Google Docs blocked. In some cases, these entertainment companies have abused 'John Doe' orders (generic orders that allow copyright enforcement against unnamed persons) and have asked ISPs to block websites. The ISPs, instead of ignoring such requests as instances of private censorship, have also complied. In other cases (like Sony's FIFA World Cup case), courts have ordered ISPs to block hundreds of websites without any copyright infringement proven against them. High court judges haven't even developed a coherent theory on whether or how Indian law allows them to block websites for alleged copyright infringement. Still they have gone ahead and blocked.

In 2012, hackers got into Reliance Communications servers and released a list of websites blocked by them. The list contained multiple links that sought to connect Satish Seth-a group MD in Reliance ADA Group-to the 2G scam: a clear case of secretive private censorship by RCom. Further, visiting some of the YouTube links which pertained to Satish Seth showed that they had been removed by YouTube due to dubious copyright infringement complaints filed by Reliance BIG Entertainment. Did the department of telecom, whose licences forbid ISPs from engaging in private censorship, take any action against RCom? No. Earlier this year, Tata Sky filed a complaint against YouTube in the Delhi High Court, noting that there were videos on it that taught people how to tweak their set-top boxes to get around the technological locks that Tata Sky had placed. The Delhi HC ordered YouTube "not to host content that violates any law for the time being in force", presuming that the videos in question did in fact violate Indian law. They cite two sections: Section 65A of the Copyright Act and Section 66 of the Information Technology Act. The first explicitly allows a user to break technological locks of the kind that Tata Sky has placed for dozens of reasons (and allows a person to teach others how to engage in such breaking), whereas the second requires finding of "dishonesty" or "fraud" along with "damage to a computer system, etc", and an intention to violate the law-none of which were found. The court effectively blocked videos on YouTube without any finding of illegality, thus once again siding with censorial corporations.

In 2013, Indore-based lawyer Kamlesh Vaswani filed a PIL in the Supreme Court calling for the government to undertake proactive blocking of all online pornography. Normally, a PIL is only admittable under Article 32 of the Constitution, on the basis of a violation of a fundamental right (which are listed in Part III of our Constitution). Vaswani's petition-which I have had the misfortune of having read carefully-does not at any point complain that the state is violating a fundamental right by not blocking pornography. Yet the petition wants to curb the fundamental right to freedom of expression, since the government is by no means in a position to determine what constitutes illegal pornography and what doesn't.

The larger problem extends to the now-discredited censor board (headed by the notorious Pahlaj Nihalani), as also the self-censorship practised on TV by the private Indian Broadcasters Federation (which even bleeps out words and phrases like 'Jesus', 'period', 'breast cancer' and 'beef'). 'Swachh Bharat' should not mean sanitising all media to be unobjectionable to the person with the lowest outrage threshold. So who will file a PIL against excessive censorship?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/india-today-september-1-2016-pranesh-prakash-internet-rights-and-wrongs

Twitter users find several accounts suspended for unknown reasons

praskrishna — 2014-12-07T01:27:05Z

Twitter users woke up on Saturday to find several accounts suspended for unknown reasons, triggering conspiracy theories that only the accounts of right-wing supporters had been targeted.

The article by Vasudha Venugopal was published in the Economic Times on November 2, 2014. Pranesh Prakash gave his inputs.

While it was said to have resulted from a technical glitch that suspended random accounts, several tweeters said there was a pattern to the suspension because 'suspended users' were asked to change their behaviour to be able to continue using the micro-blogging site. But by afternoon it was clear that many accounts, irrespective of their posts, had been suspended for a few hours. All suspended accounts were restored by afternoon.

A message sent out to a tweeter whose account was suspended read, "Twitter has automated systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk.

Unfortunately, your account got caught in one of these spam groups by mistake." Twitter also apologised for the inconvenience but added, "It is possible your account posted an update that appeared to be spam, so please be careful what you tweet... You will need to change your behaviour to continue using Twitter. Repeat violations of the Twitter rules may result in the permanent suspension of your account."

This triggered outrage among the Twitteratti who called it internet policing. There was humour too, with a tweeter posting, "In the Twitter canteen you never get chicken wings in pairs because the right wing is blocked."

Twitter officials said there was no deliberate blocking of accounts and that the incident was an accident as part of spam cleaning process. Pranesh Prakash, policy director, Centre for Internet and Society, said though there have been instances of 'privatisation of censorship' in the recent past, this incident did not look like one such attempt. "It doesn't look deliberate especially because even accounts such as eBay India were suspended."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-economic-times-vasudha-venugopal-november-2-2014-twitter-users-find-several-accounts-suspended-for-unknown-reasons

Overview of the Constitutional Challenges to the IT Act

pranesh — 2014-12-19T09:01:50Z

There are currently ten cases before the Supreme Court challenging various provisions of the Information Technology Act, the rules made under that, and other laws, that are being heard jointly. Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan who's arguing Anoop M.K. v. Union of India has put together this chart that helps you track what's being challenged in each case.

PENDING MATTERS	CASE NUMBER	PROVISIONS CHALLENGED
Shreya Singhal v. Union of India	W.P.(CRL.) NO. 167/2012	66A
Common Cause & Anr. v. Union of India	W.P.(C) NO. 21/2013	66A, 69A & 80
Rajeev Chandrasekhar v. Union of India & Anr.	W.P.(C) NO. 23/2013	66A & Rules 3(2), 3(3), 3(4) & 3(7) of the Intermediaries Rules 2011
Dilip Kumar Tulsidas Shah v. Union of India & Anr.	W.P.(C) NO. 97/2013	66A
Peoples Union for Civil Liberties v. Union of India & Ors.	W.P.(CRL.) NO. 199/2013	66A, 69A, Intermediaries Rules 2011 (s.79(2) Rules) & Blocking of Access of Information by Public Rules 2009 (s.69A Rules)
Mouthshut.Com (India) Pvt. Ltd. & Anr. v. Union of India & Ors.	W.P.(C) NO. 217/2013	66A & Intermediaries Rules 2011
Taslima Nasrin v. State of U.P & Ors.	W.P.(CRL.) NO. 222/2013	66A
Manoj Oswal v. Union of India & Anr.	W.P.(CRL.) NO. 225/2013	66A & 499/500 Indian Penal Code
Internet and Mobile Ass'n of India & Anr. v. Union of India & Anr.	W.P.(C) NO. 758/2014	79(3) & Intermediaries Rules 2011
Anoop M.K. v. Union of India & Ors.	W.P.(CRL.) NO. 196/2014	66A, 69A, 80 & S.118(d) of the Kerala Police Act, 2011

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/overview-constitutional-challenges-on-itact

NGOs, individuals urge state CMs to curb Internet shutdown

praskrishna — 2017-04-07T02:43:39Z

Amid rising instances of Internet curbs, a group of individuals and organisations have urged the chief ministers of 12 states to only restrict specific online content rather than resort to complete shutdown.

The article was published in the Times of India on April 4, 2017.

SFLC.in, a Delhi-based not-for-profit organisation, along with various Internet-related firms have sent letters in this regard to the chief ministers of these states impacted by Internet shutdowns.

The letters have been written to the chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Maharashtra, J&K, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat and Haryana.

"The Internet shutdowns are imposed using state power under Section 144 by these specific states and not by the Union Government. The central government is bound to follow the process under Section 69 IT act.

"These letters to the chief ministers of all 12 states, which have been affected by Internet shutdowns till date, are an effort by us to address the source of the problem," SFLC.in President and Legal Director Mishi Choudhary told .

As per Internet Shutdown tracker of SFLC, there have been 28 incidents of Internet closure in Jammu & Kashmir, 9 cases each in Gujarat and Haryana, 8 in Rajasthan, 3 Nagaland, 2 cases each in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Manipur and 1 incident each in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh since 2012.

As per the tracker, far India has experienced a record number of 66 such incidents since 2012, with the number increasing more than two-fold from 14 in 2015 to 31 in 2016.

The letters sent to the chief ministers urge them to "take requisite action that would prohibit the issuance of orders that make Internet services entirely inaccessible for a particular area, and rather recommend that Section 69A and the procedure established by the rules therein be applied to limit the restriction to certain specific online content."

The signatories of the letters include the Centre for Internet and Society, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Internet Democracy Project, IT for Change and Society for Knowledge Commons, individuals like Anivar Aravind (Executive Director, Indic Project), IIT Bombay professor Kannan Moudgalya and others.

"We are hopeful that our efforts will make the government take in account the enormous effects of Internet shutdowns on the social-economic condition of our citizens and understand their plight," Choudhary said. PRS MKJ

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-april-4-2017-ngos-individuals-urge-state-cms-to-curb-internet-shutdown

Fake News, Rumors & Online Content Regulation

praskrishna — 2017-02-28T02:46:13Z

Medianama and Mint organized #NAMApolicy open house on 'Fake News, Rumors & Online Content Regulation' on February 22, 2017 at the India Habitat Centre. Japreet Grewal and Amber Sinha attended the event.

The discussions broadly covered the impact of Fake News on democratic processes, Legal status of online content regulation in India & administrative challenges with Fake News, Responsibility and accountability of online platforms, while addressing challenges of identification of sources of Fake News, Potential legal and non-legal ways of addressing Fake News, etc.

Agenda

06:30 to 07:00 pm - Registration
07:00 to 07:10 pm - Introductory note
07:10 to 09:00 pm - Round-table discussion moderated by Nikhil Pahwa
09:00 pm onwards - Networking dinner

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/fake-news-rumors-online-content-regulation

Kashmir: Telecom firms struggle to block 22 banned social media sites

praskrishna — 2017-05-04T02:29:04Z

A BSNL official says engineers are still working on shutting down the 22 social media sites but so far had been unable to do so without freezing the Internet across Kashmir.

The article by Aijaz Hussain was published in Livemint on May 4, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

The government has banned 22 social media sites in an effort to calm tensions in parts of the disputed region of Kashmir, after several viral videos depicting the alleged abuse of Kashmiris by Indian law enforcement fuelled protests. But the sites remained online Thursday morning as the local telecom company struggled to block them.

The government said on Wednesday that the restrictions, to be in effect for one month, were necessary for public safety. “It’s being felt that continued misuse of social networking sites and instant messaging services is likely to be detrimental to the interests of peace and tranquillity in the state,” the public order reads.

Pranesh Prakash, policy director for the Indian advocacy group the Centre for Internet and Society, called the ban a “blow to freedom of speech” and “legally unprecedented in India.”

An official with Kashmir’s state-owned telecom company, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), said engineers were still working on shutting down the 22 sites, including Facebook and Twitter, but so far had been unable to do so without freezing the internet across the Himalayan region. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, because he was not authorized to give technical details of the effort to the media.

Meanwhile, 3G and 4G cellphone service has been suspended for more than a week, but the slower 2G service was still running.

Residents in Srinagar, the region’s main city, were busily downloading documents, software and applications onto their smartphones, which would likely be able to circumvent the social media block once it goes into effect. Many expressed relief to still have internet access Thursday morning.

“It was a welcome surprise,” said Tariq Ahmed, a 24-year-old university student. “It appears they’ve hit a technical glitch to block social media en mass.”

While the government has halted internet service in Kashmir in previous attempts to prevent anti-India demonstrations, this is the first time they have done so in response to the circulation of videos and photos showing alleged military abuse.

Others mocked the government. One Facebook post by Kashmiri writer Arif Ayaz Parrey said that the ban showed “the Indian government has decided to take on the collective subversive wisdom of cyberspace humanity.”

Kashmiris have been uploading videos and photos of alleged abuse for some years, but several recently posted clips, captured in the days surrounding a violence-plagued local election 9 April, have proven to be especially powerful and have helped to intensify anti-India protests.

One video shows a stone-throwing teenage boy being shot by a soldier from a few metres (yards) away. Another shows soldiers making a group of young men, held inside an armoured vehicle, shout profanities against Pakistan while a soldier kicks and slaps them with a stick. The video pans to a young boy’s bleeding face as he cries. Yet another clip shows three soldiers holding a teenage boy down with their boots and beating him on his back.

The video that drew the most outrage was of young shawl weaver Farooq Ahmed Dar tied to the hood of an army jeep as it patrolled villages on voting day. A soldier can be heard saying in Hindi over a loudspeaker, “Stone throwers will meet a similar fate,” as residents look on aghast.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-may-4-2017-aijaz-hussain-kashmir-telecom-firms-struggle-to-block-22-banned-social-media-sites

Investigating TLS blocking in India

Simone Basso, Gurshabad Grover and Kushagra Singh — 2020-07-09T01:23:43Z

A study into Transport Layer Security (TLS)-based blocking by three popular Indian ISPs: ACT Fibernet, Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio.

Gurshabad Grover and Kushgra Singh collaborated with Simone Basso (OONI) to investigate TLS-based blocking in India. The research report was published on OONI's blog. It was edited and reviewed by Maria Xynou and Arturo Filastò.

Summary

This report investigates Transport Layer Security (TLS)-based blocking in India. Previous research by the Centre for Internet & Society, India (CIS) has already exposed TLS blocking based on the value of the SNI field. OONI has also implemented and started testing SNI-based TLS blocking measurements.

Recently, the Magma Project documented cases where CIS India and OONI’s methodologies could be improved. They specifically found that blocking sometimes appears to depend not only on the value of the SNI field but also on the address of the web server being used. These findings were later confirmed by OONI measurements in Spain and Iran through the use of an extended measurement methodology.

We were therefore curious to see whether such an extended methodology would discover further cases of TLS blocking in India. To answer this research question we ran experiments on the networks of three popular Indian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) (ACT Fibernet, Bharti Airtel, and Reliance Jio) which account for over 70% of the internet subscribers in India.

We recorded SNI-based blocking on both Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio. We also discovered that Reliance Jio blocks TLS traffic not just based on the SNI value, but also on the web server involved with the TLS handshake. Moreover, we noticed that ACT Fibernet’s DNS resolver directs users towards servers owned by ACT Fibernet itself. Such servers caused the TLS handshake to fail, but the root cause of censorship was the DNS.

We also document that one of the endpoints we tested, collegehumor.com:443, does not allow establishing TCP connection from several vantage points and control measurements. Yet, in Reliance Jio, we see cases where the connections to such endpoints complete successfully and a timeout occurs during the TLS handshake. We believe this is caused by some kind of proxy that terminates the TCP connection and performs the TLS handshake.

Read the full research report on OONI's blog.

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

Blocking Twitter: How Internet Service Providers & telcos were caught between tweets and tall egos

praskrishna — 2012-08-25T07:36:04Z

Long derided as 'dumb pipes' to the Web, Internet service providers (ISPs) are discovering these days that insult is being increasingly followed up by injury.

Joji Thomas Philip and Harsimran Julka's article was published in the Times of India on August 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

In the fight between netizens who spare no effort at lampooning the powers that be and alarmingly frequent government flashes of rage at comments that can range from the mildly disrespectful to downright defamatory, telcos and ISPs find themselves much like the grass in the age-old Swahili saying "When two elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers".

The latest reminder of the hard place they find themselves in came earlier this week when news first broke that the government had asked for some accounts on social media site Twitter to also be part of websites and Internet pages it wanted blocked by ISPs. The news triggered a wave of outrage across cyberspace, with many users venting their rage at the first entity they associate the web with - their ISP, which in many cases is also their telecom operator.

"We acted immediately to the government's orders, but ended up being targetted and criticised wrongly only because we acted first," explained one official, who sought anonymity for himself and the company to avoid offending bureaucrats.

It's a common feeling. Telcos and ISPs are increasingly finding themselves in a 'Damned if you do, Damned if you don't' predicament these days, having to walk a tightrope between government orders and a restive netizenry.

And government orders can range from the super-urgent to arbitrary to sometimes ill-conceived. Very often, its 'one ban fits all' makes little allowance for differences between social networking sites and regular websites.

Executives in telecom companies recounted the instance when the government on August 18 ordered a ban on bulk SMSes and restricted text messages to five per day as part of efforts to combat the large-scale migration of people of north-eastern origins from other states to their home provinces fearing reprisal attacks.

"Within an hour of the directive, we started getting calls seeking compliance," said a top executive with a leading telco. But as the Centre was demanding compliance reports, operators were busy trying to decipher its notification, which read: "(a) Block bulk SMS (more than 5) for the next 15 days in the entire country across all states/UTs (b) Block bulk MMS (more than 5) and all MMS with attachment more than 25 KB for the next 15 days in the entire country across all states/UTs."

Shoot first, talk later

Telecom operators were nonplussed by the notification. Did it apply only to senders of bulk text messages who use this facility for commercial purposes? Or, did it mean customers could not send SMSes to more than five people simultaneously?

"When we sought clarification, the explanation was completely different and took a new dimension. It was five text messages per day per customer," said the regulatory head of a GSM operator, requesting anonymity as he did not want to offend the government.

Mobile phone companies then approached the department of telecom explaining that they did not have any technology with which they could impose a five SMSes a day limit for postpaid users. "The home and telecom ministries had not even realised that a facility did not exist before issuing the directive," said the marketing head of a leading telco.

In this case, the government accepted the operator's arguments and relented, but still told the companies not to highlight the limitation. "This time around, our arguments were accepted. Going by past instances, some operators had feared that the government would slap a hefty penalty for non-compliance without considering what we had to say," the marketing head said.

Industry officials say the tendency of 'shoot first, talk later' among bureaucrats and ministers long used to having their orders followed, especially when it came to the world of social networking which very few of them had any idea about, meant that it was safer to obey first and correct later.

"We don't even do any application of mind to the government's notices on requests. We wholesale block them. We can't even question the government's requests. A notice is a law in effect. Violation means a potential penalty which can go up to the cancellation of my licence and thus end to my business," said the head of a Delhi-based ISP that serves business users.

Executives with several ISPs and telcos say most often, court orders, government notifications and directives are not in public domain, and these result in angry consumers assuming that their service provider is up to some mischief.

ISPs say public clarifications by the government would go a long way in addressing the issue. "There has to be transparency. The government should have proactively disclosed the names of the websites it wanted blocked. The persons and intermediaries hosting the content should have been notified and provided with 48 hours to respond as required by the IT Act," said Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society, a research organisation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-aug-25-2012-blocking-twitter

Twitter handles: How and why govt erred and what it can do to be smarter & more effective

praskrishna — 2012-09-07T09:22:47Z

Here's a weekend reading recommendation for the mandarins who run the Government of India: it's a freely downloadable, a 145-page long document called "After the Riots". It is a report by the Riot Communities and Victims Panel, set up by the British prime minister to study reasons for the cause, spread and the damage wreaked by the riots that occurred in towns and cities in England in early August 2011.

TV Mahalingam and Shantanu Nandan Sharma's article was published in the Economic Times on August 26, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

During the riots, many British politicians had blamed social media for the quick spreading of lawlessness. "Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media," British Prime Minister David Cameron had told the British parliament. Others called for social networking sites to be "switched off". That is perhaps why the word Twitter features four times in the report, Facebook twice, BBM once and the phrase 'social media' appears 39 times.

So, what did the report have to say about the role of social media in the riots that tore through England? "Although social media was used to mobilise rioters, it has also been acknowledged that a number of forces used social media extensively to engage with their communities and provide reassurance during the riots," reads the report.

The report also highlights that by using social media to provide and receive intelligence, social media "can become a crime fighting tool". It shot down the idea that social media be switched off during times of widespread and serious disorder. The panel also recommended that every neighbourhood policing team should acquire social media capability by the end of 2013.

Bangalore Falling

Bangalore's deputy commissioner of police Vincent S D'Souza has had a harrowing 10 days. He had been asking most of his friends to post his mobile number on all social media networks. D'Souza's message: if anyone from the Northeast feels insecure in any part of the city, contact him directly.

But by then, the damage was already done. In the three days beginning August 15, as many as 37,000 people belonging to India's Northeastern region fled the city after SMS threats spread like a wildfire among the closely-knit Northeastern communities living in the city.

"A lot of the damage happened through social media. The images of victims of Tibet earthquakes and Gujarat riots were morphed and passed on as those of Assam riots. We busted a module in Bangalore. Seized computers and mobiles have given us enough leads," says D'Souza, who is in charge of intelligence.

Nitin Pai, founder of Takshashila Institution, a think tank, believes that the current crisis unfolded in two phases. The first phase, says Pai, was the events (the riots and mobilised violence) that occurred in Assam before August 15. The second phase, starting August 15, was the flight of Northeastern people from various parts of India after rumours of attacks began to flow. "To be fair, what happened between August 15 and August 18 was unprecedented in India," says Pai.

"Perhaps, for the first time, the Indian government had legitimate reasons to censor speech," says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, adding that even international human rights treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), of which India is a signatory, provide for restrictions in free speech for the protection of public order.

However, what most people who have closely followed the events of the last fortnight, will disagree with is the way in which the government has gone about playing censor. "The government got in too late and went about too bluntly," says Pai.

Subtle as a Sledgehammer

"Given that SMS-based mobilisation isn't new in India (stone-pelting incidents in Kashmir led to a ban on SMSes since 2010), the government has had almost 2-3 years to put in place the strategy and ability to counter the problem. The arrests of miscreants spreading rumours through SMSes should have happened sooner," says Pai.

On August 17, two days after the trains from Bangalore began to fill up, an advisory signed by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (ICERT) chief Gulshan Rai cautioned intermediaries that "publishing and hosting of hateful and inflammatory content is an offence" under Section 69A and 79-3(b) of Information Technology Act, 2000. The advisory, which lacked specific details such as the names of the offenders and details of such content, asked all intermediaries to disable inflammatory and hateful content hosted on their website on "a priority basis". ICERT falls under the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

"That essentially made intermediaries like ISPs the judges of what was inflammatory or hate speech and what wasn't," says Abraham. In the following days, more orders would come, this time from the Ministry of IT and Department of Telecommunications and they would worsen things even more. These orders were a lot more specific: they had URLs of websites, Twitter posts and Facebook pages that were ordered to be blocked.

However, like a Centre for Internet and Society posting revealed: the list wasn't compiled with enough care. Some items did not exist, others were not even web addresses and in some case, thanks to overzealous ISPs, whole websites were blocked instead of a page on the site. One webpage that actually busted doctored riot pictures was blocked.

What gave teeth to the rumours that the government was using the events of August 15 to go after its critics was its crackdown on Twitter accounts. First, the government asked for a list of accounts parodying the PMO's account to be blocked, on charges of impersonation (which Twitter eventually did on Friday).

On late Wednesday, several other people, including journalists, a tech entrepreneur, discovered that their accounts had been blocked by some ISPs. Even as speculation raged if this was the case of yet another trigger-happy ISP, the government maintained a stony silence, The Economic Times broke the story that it was a notification issued by Ministry of IT and Department of Telecommunications that resulted in these blocks. The blocked account holders meanwhile continued to tweet, thanks to the ISP-level blocks, making the whole affair shambolic.

Big, Bad Government?

For its part, heavyweights from the government like Sushil Kumar Shinde and Kapil Sibal have maintained that this was just an effort to censor hate speech and not free speech. That's a line many are increasingly finding tough to believe, especially what this government tried to do late last year. In December 2011, Sibal had called a meeting of social networking companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google and asked them to remove offensive content.

A New York Times report had said that Sibal had showed the companies a page that maligned Congress president Sonia Gandhi and told them that this was "unacceptable". After heavy criticism followed Sibal's call to "pre-screen" content, the government backed off. So, is this government's second attempt to muzzle voices that it doesn't want heard?

"Perhaps not. It's just government being itself: gauche, clumsy, big-brother like and swinging a club when it needs to be using a surgeon's knife," says a cyber security consultant who has worked with the government in the past. "But, it would be a good idea to keep track if any more blocks or bans come our way. That would be crucial," he adds.

As for the companies themselves, Facebook and Google have "co-operated" in removing the "objectionable pages", while Twitter, after taking its time, knocked off the PMO "impersonators".
Rules of Engagement

Social media is posing challenges and opportunities for governments and law enforcement agencies across the world. In the developed world, police departments like the New York Police Department (@nypd) or London's Metropolitan Police department (metpoliceuk) use Twitter to engage with citizens. They upload mugs and profiles of suspects, give advisories and ask for retweets of missing persons' pictures. It's a game Indian authorities have just begun to play.

"At best, cyber monitoring is a reactive intervention. So the strategy must be how best to live with social media and counter it [misinformation] from within," says GK Pillai, former Union home secretary. He suggests that the government must create a separate department to exclusively tackle issues arising out of social media and messages.

"If social media is used for any propaganda, the government should use the same platform to counter it. If one hate message appears, there should be a thousand to counter it. We can't ban social media the way China has done it. We have to live with it," he adds.

Social media is a challenge to existing legal frameworks like never before, even in countries where free speech is protected a lot more than ours. Last week, the New York Police Department went to court to get Twitter to reveal details of a person who had tweeted: "people had gonna die like Aurora" at a Broadway theatre. Initially, Twitter had refused to share details but eventually relented (after lots of criticism) and the matter was resolved 'without an arrest'.

Things get even more complex, say government officials, because Twitter is a US-based company and claims that it is beyond India's jurisdiction. "Social media and disputes associated with it are relatively new areas [for India]. The US is already engaged in court battles with social media sites. We are a bit slow on this matter," admits Mohan Parasaran, additional solicitor general of India.

Centre for Internet and Society's Abraham believes that the government needs to put in a process which is transparent when it comes to censoring hate speech. "Even in Saudi Arabia, when you go to a blocked site, reasons are given why the site is being blocked along with addresses of the offices where redressal can be sought," says Abraham.

For now, observers say the Indian government needs to learn to engage and communicate better on social media. "There is a lot of hyperbole out there because the Indian government doesn't communicate — what it does and how it does things — very well. There is a lot of second-hand information and as a result a lot of speculation," says Pai. "Basically, the government is trying to use industrial age policies [like blocking] to solve information age issues," he adds.

A first step, perhaps, is fine-tuning the guidelines for social media use for its departments published by the government last week. It will be a big challenge — a change of mindset — for the Indian government which is used more to monitoring and posturing than engaging.

When the law & social media worlds intersect, the results can be not so pleasant. Here are a few examples:

1) An anonymous tweet that people were going to "die like Aurora" at Broadway show had the New York police department worried. So, the police approached Twitter for details about the account, which Twitter turned down. After some criticism, Twitter shared the details. The matter was resolved "without an arrest".

2) In Early 2010, Paul Chambers was stranded at Robin Hood Airport, south Yorkshire, thanks to cancellation of flights due to heavy snowfall. "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high," he tweeted. He was charged, asked to pay a fine and lost his job. However, two appeals later, Chambers conviction was overturned.

3) When footballer Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the field after suffering a heart attack, 21-year-old Liam Stacey posted a vile, racist remark on Twitter about Muamba. When others questioned him, Stacey was combative and a case was registered against him. Even though Stacey admitted that he was drunk and that he was sorry, a court sentenced him to a 56-day imprisonment.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/economic-times-aug-26-2012-twitter-handles