Centre for Internet and Society

Technology, Power, and Revolutions in the Arab Spring

praskrishna — 2013-07-01T08:36:57Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore cordially invites you to a talk by Prof. Ramesh Srinivasan on technology, power and revolutions in the Arab Spring. The talk will be held in CIS office on July 2, 2013 from 6.00 p.m. onwards.

Ramesh Srinivasan

Ramesh Srinivasan, Associate Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote an op/ed at the Washington Post explaining the complex nature of social media in revolutions and riots, such as those in Egypt and in London, and also a column for the Post’s Sunday Outlook section on the 5 Myths of Social Media. Additionally, he has written multiple front page articles for the Huffington Post, including a piece on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post. He has had his work featured on the front page of the UCLA and USC websites.

Recent public outreach has built on his response in the New Yorker (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers, pragmatically studying their strengths and limitations, who were involved in recent revolutions in Egypt and Kyrgyzstan, as discussed in a recent NPR interview. He has also collaborated with non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. His work has impacted contemporary understandings of media studies, anthropology and sociology, design, and economic and political development studies. He has given several major invited talks, including recently at LIFT in 2009 (http://vimeo.com/5520100). He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

See Prof. Ramesh Srinivasan's blog page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/technology-power-and-revolutions-in-arab-spring

Interest of State

praskrishna — 2013-07-01T09:27:01Z

Interest of State

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/Interest.png

Biometrics or bust? India's Identity Crisis

praskrishna — 2013-07-01T09:49:48Z

Malavika Jayaram is speaking at an event organized by the Oxford Internet Institute on July 2, 2013. The talk will be held at Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, 1 St Giles Oxford OX1 3JS.

This info was published on the Oxford Internet Institute website.

India's mammoth biometric ID project, which has registered around 270 million people and is yet to be fully realized, is already the worldís largest such endeavor. It is marketed as a potential game-changer both domestically (where it is touted as a silver bullet to solve most problems) and internationally (where countries wait and watch this experiment before importing it into their own jurisdictions). Alongside all the hype about the scale of the scheme, its potential for transforming the delivery of services and the scope for private participation in traditionally state-controlled functions, there are fears of function creep, of subversion to create new types of fraud and corruption, of increased profiling and targeting, and of a citizenry becoming transparent to its government in an unprecedented way, all in the name of ambiguous benefits and the rhetoric of inclusion.

The government praises the ease and efficiency of centralized databases, the promise of technology (including the myth of biometrics uniquely and unambiguously identifying people in a foolproof way) and the construction of the identified self. However, there is growing awareness of the dangers of joined-up databases resulting in exclusion rather than inclusion, and persecution rather than democratization.

The scheme is technically voluntary, but with the provision of benefits, goods and services being increasingly linked to the scheme, it will soon become impossible to function in India without a biometric ID. If every facet of everyday life is linked to this single number, it renders all claims of voluntariness meaningless. The lack of information self-determination in a biometrically mediated universe has important ramifications for anonymity, free speech and the maintenance of an essential private sphere.

In this talk, Malavika will provide an overview of the scheme as well as the debate around privacy and autonomy that it has triggered, framed against the backdrop of a larger civil liberties crisis. She will also describe Indiaís efforts to craft new privacy and data protection legislation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/biometrics-or-bust-indias-identity-crisis

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Coverage in Prajavani)

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T07:05:25Z

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted a workshop in Hasan on June 4, 2013. Prajavani carried a report on June 5, 2013.


A Kannada Wikipedia workshop was conducted in Hasan by Dr. U.B. Pavanaja on June 4, 2013. Above is the report published by Prajavani in Kannada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/prajavani-june-5-2013-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-coverage

Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Coverage in Samyukta Karnataka)

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T07:16:11Z

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted a workshop in Hasan on June 4, 2013. Samyukta Karnataka published a report of the workshop on June 5, 2013.


Above is the report in Kannada of the workshop conducted in Hasan on June 4, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/samyukta-karnataka-june-5-2013-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-coverage

Internet firms deny existence of PRISM

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T07:47:27Z

Nothing is private anymore. According to a leak in the US, which revealed the wide reach of a mass surveillance programme by intelligence agencies, messages, posts, chats on your computer or phone are all vulnerable to interception, thanks to direct access to servers of major tech companies.

The article by Javed Anwer and Ishan Srivastava was published in the Times of India on June 8, 2013. Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash are quoted.

The existence of the programme, called Prism, was first reported by the Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper after they received a tip-off from a whistleblower in National Security Agency in the US. The whistleblower claimed that NSA has direct access to all the data that flows through the servers of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Sykpe, Youtube, AOL and Paltalk.

Later, the NSA reportedly acknowledged the existence of the programme but said that it collected data only from foreign nationals. While it may come as a relief to the US citizens, it underscores the fact that people not residing in the US, including Indians, are fair game. What is even more alarming is the fact that US authorities are using the technology companies headquartered in the country to spy on the rest of the world.

All companies named in the leaks have denied the existence of Prism. A Yahoo spokesperson said on Friday, ""Yahoo! takes users' privacy very seriously. We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network."

Privacy International, a privacy watchdog organisation, said it is possible that companies would not be aware of the government tapping into their servers. "Until we know whether this information was obtained through filters, interception, or some another method, it is difficult to know how the breadth of access the NSA has."

However, Indian users would seem to have no way to defend themselves if the US government wants to access their data. Pavan Duggal, a specialist in cyber law, said, "Indian users don't have any protection against the US authorities seeking their data from the US companies."

Technology companies said they comply with local laws while dealing with issues related to personal data of a user. In response to queries from TOI, both Google and Facebook said that they used "mutual legal assistance treaty" to handle international requests for data.

Mutual legal assistance treaty is understood to have governed by actual treaties that two nations may have between them for sharing of user data. A Facebook official said that if a US agency wanted to access the data belonging to an Indian citizen, the sleuths would have to follow the diplomatic channels and get the data only when Indian authorities have approved it.

Google too talked "mutual legal assistance treaty" but it didn't clarify how it worked. Google officials pointed out the company guidelines which noted that any non-US government agency would have to use mutual legal assistance treaty to access user data. But the company public guidelines don't make any mention of the procedure followed in the cases where a US agency requests data on non-US users.

Microsoft directed TOI to its official statement denying the existence of Prism. It refused to discuss how it handled the requests from US authorities seeking data of foreigners.

Pranesh Prakash, a policy director with Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), said that it was high time the Indian government stood up for its citizens.

"Indian government needs to come with a strong and clear law to protect the privacy of Indian users. The law has to make it clear to companies operating in India that they need to respect the privacy of Indian users, even when they are dealing with the governments outside India," he said.

However, providing direct access to servers to an agency like NSA may not necessarily be a breach of agreement between the users of websites like Google and Facebook and its owners. Sunil Abraham, executive director at CIS said, "I have not studied end-user agreements carefully, but usually they have provisions for communication interception and data access in accordance with legal procedure."

"But more importantly, this is a violation of US data access and interception law. The US government has been going around the world preaching Internet freedom to authoritarian regimes. And now it turns out that their practices are worse that many of the regimes they have been criticizing. That is why it is a complete scandal," Abraham said.

Besides, the surveillance may run contrary to a whole range of international legal instruments. For example, the ICCPR, ratified by the USA, says that "no one shall be subject to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his private life, family, home or correspondence," said Joe McNamee, executive director of European Digital Rights, a privacy watchdog based in Europe.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-javed-anwer-ishan-srivastava-june-8-2013-internet-firms-deny-existence-of-prism

‘Hacking’ sparks row over exam evaluation

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T08:58:17Z

Over the past two days, Cornell University student Debarghya Das’ blog post on ‘Hacking the Indian Education System’ has kicked off a debate across the country over the security of data published online and the practice of moderation of marks obtained by school students in board examinations.

The article by Vasudha Venugopal and Karthik Subramanian was published in the Hindu on June 7, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The 20-year-old Cornell student extracted large amounts of class X and XII student results from a website that hosted the ICSE results using an automated program. Over 1,760 schools are affiliated to the ICSE and more than 1.2 lakh students took the board exams. Based on interpretation of the data sets, he raised allegations of large-scale “tampering” of marks by the authorities, ostensibly to maintain a healthy graph on the results.

Information Security experts said what the student did could not be viewed as a major security breach as much as it was exploiting a loophole. “Anyone with basic programming skills will be able to pull it off,” said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society. “There are add-ons available on popular internet browers that allow users to read the embedded codes on a website and run programs to mine data.”

Government websites are most susceptible to loopholes because too many people use them, says Nitesh Betala, Chennai coordinator of Null, a community of programmers that meets regularly to explore these loopholes in public domain websites. “We inform the system administrators directly hoping that they would plug loopholes before others exploit them.”

Debarghya too explained on his blog (deedy.quora.com) on Thursday that what he did was not illegal. “I did not illegally access any database system. All I did was access information that was available to any person who entered a number into the website could access. I simply mined the data.”

The ICSE council, on its part, said it does not publish the examination results in an online manner on its website. Instead, hard copies of results are despatched to schools. But the results are disseminated to third parties such as media organisations.

Krupakar Manukonda, who runs a blog on education for the not-for-profit organisation Takshashila, said: “The online results of all the boards have serious privacy problems. I think the respective boards should issue a passcode along with a hall ticket or entering Date of Birth, First name and Last name should be made mandatory to access marks.”

Das deduced after much data crunching and statistical analysis that the “marks had been tampered with”. His claim is supported by graphs purporting to show that nearly 33 scores, such as 91, 92, 86 and so on, were never awarded to any student.

However, teachers deny the allegation. “The word tampering is wrong. There is moderation that happens across education boards,” explained a teacher, who has worked with ICSE schools in Hyderabad and Chennai. “After the first round of corrections, raw data is given to officials and head examiners who analyse how students have performed. They try to ensure the bell curve of the results does not look awkward. If it does, the implication is that the checking has been either too liberal or very strict.”

After the first moderation, there is a final moderation which is often done by a different set of teachers. “There are some instructions given to us earlier, and some changes made later, depending on analysis by the board,” said a teacher. Teachers are not told about moderation methods in both CBSE and ICSE boards.

The ICSE council says that it does follow the practice of moderation. “In keeping with the practice followed by examination conducting bodies, a process of standardisation is applied to the results, so as to take into account the variations in difficulty level of questions over the years (which may occur despite applying various norms and yardsticks), as well as the marginal variations in evaluation of answer scripts by hundreds of examiners (inter-examiner variability), for each subject.”

Some teachers are however puzzled by the findings. “It is understandable that there are many 35s because a student on the verge of passing, is often pushed to the mark. But I don’t understand why there are no 85, 87, 89, 91 and 93. And, with cut throat competition for every single mark in colleges, teachers are very careful, especially with top scoring papers,” said another senior teacher.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-june-7-2013-vasudha-venugopal-karthik-subramanian-hacking-sparks-row-over-exam-evaluation

Indian Government Quietly Brings In Its 'Central Monitoring System': Total Surveillance Of All Telecommunications

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T09:12:49Z

There's a worrying trend around the world for governments to extend online surveillance capabilities to encompass all citizens -- often justified with the usual excuse of combatting terrorism and/or child pornography.

The blog post was published in tech dirt on June 8, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The latest to join this unhappy club is India, which has put in place what sounds like a massively intrusive system, as this article from The Times of India makes clear:

The government last month quietly began rolling out a project that gives it access to everything that happens over India's telecommunications network -- online activities, phone calls, text messages and even social media conversations. Called the Central Monitoring System, it will be the single window from where government arms such as the National Investigation Agency or the tax authorities will be able to monitor every byte of communication.

This project has been under development for two years, but in almost total secrecy:

"In the absence of a strong privacy law that promotes transparency about surveillance and thus allows us to judge the utility of the surveillance, this kind of development is very worrisome," warned Pranesh Prakash, director of policy at the Centre for Internet and Society. "Further, this has been done with neither public nor parliamentary dialogue, making the government unaccountable to its citizens."

That combination of total surveillance and zero transparency is a dangerous one, providing the perfect tool for monitoring and controlling political and social dissent. If India wishes to maintain its claim to be "the world's largest democracy", its government would do well to introduce some safeguards against abuse of the new system, such as strong privacy laws, as well as engaging the Indian public in an open debate about what exactly such extraordinary surveillance powers might be used for.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/tech-dirt-june-8-2013-indian-govt-quietly-brings-central-monitoring-system

‘Miracle at Marrakesh’ to help visually impaired read

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T10:07:28Z

The treaty will make access to books for the visually impaired, blind and print disabled easier.

The article by Ramya Kannan was published in the Hindu on June 30, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

On Friday, in the same city that established the World Trade Organisation nearly two decades ago, another significant treaty was born. In Marrakesh, Morocco, international negotiators signed a treaty that will make access to books for the visually impaired, blind and print disabled easier.

After a week of intense debate among the negotiators (facilitated by the World Intellectual Property Organisation), the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or otherwise Print Disabled emerged.

It will address the ‘book famine’ for the visually impaired by “requiring its contracting parties to adopt national law provisions that permit the reproduction, distribution and making available of published works in accessible formats through limitations and exceptions to the rights of copyright right holders.” Very simply, it allows the waiver of copyright restrictions in order for books to be available in formats such as formats such as Braille, large print text and audio books.

Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society, in his closing remarks said: “It is historic that today WIPO and its members have collectively recognised in a treaty that copyright isn't just an ‘engine of free expression’ but can pose a significant barrier to access to knowledge.”

To recognise that copyright should not frustrate access for some groups of people and thereby to free books from that ‘constraint’ is of immeasurable significance for people otherwise unable to access books in the conventional format.

The treaty also provides assurances to authors and publishers that that system will not expose their published works to misuse or distribution to anyone other than the intended beneficiaries. “There are no winners and no losers, this is a treaty for everyone,” said Moroccan Minister of Communications Mustapha Khalfi, going on to describe it as the “Miracle in Marrakesh.”

There are an estimated 285 million blind and partially-sighted people in the world, of which the largest percentage lives in India. Only 1 to 7 per cent of all books published are available in formats accessible to them. India’s key campaigner for the treaty, the late Rahul Cherian of Inclusive Planet was full of beans when he spoke to The Hindu in December last year, anticipating the possibility of a treaty half a year later.

“It is a breakthrough!” he said excitedly as he broke the news, “The Extraordinary General Assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organisation has referred the Treaty for Visually Impaired Persons to a diplomatic conference in June of 2013.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-ramya-kannan-june-30-2013-miracle-at-marrakesh-to-help-visually-impaired-read

Issue of duplication of identities of users under control: Nilekani

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T10:13:10Z

Nandan Nilekani says UIDAI system almost completely accurate, duplication of identities virtually negligible.

The article by Anirban Sen was published in Livemint on June 29, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) chief Nandan Nilekani said the government agency was in preliminary discussions with some embassies to use the Aadhaar project to simplify visa application procedures and that the issue of duplication of identities of users was well under control.

In March, a UIDAI spokesperson told Mint that it had detected 34,015 cases where one person had been issued two Aadhaar numbers. The figures represented a little over 0.01% of the 290 million people who had been enrolled at the time.

Nilekani, who was delivering a keynote address at a three-day conference on the success and failures of information technology (IT) in the public and private sector at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, said the UIDAI system was almost completely accurate and duplication of identities was virtually negligible.

“Knowing what we know now, we believe we have accuracy of upto 99.99%,” said Nilekani, chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

Nilekani, on Saturday, assured that the project was completely secure and user data and biometrics were safe in the hands of the agencies it works with and brushed aside any concerns on security of user data that have been widely raised by Internet security groups and activists.

“We’re not giving any access to data, except when it is resident authorized. It is shared only when a resident participates in a transaction and authorizes the data which is shared,” said Nilekani, who was one of the seven co-founders of India’s second largest software exporter Infosys Ltd. He served as CEO of Infosys from 2002 to 2007.

“The system is also not open to the internet—the system has rings of authentications of service agencies. There are lots of concentric rings of security,” he added. “The biometric data is not used except for enrolment, re-duplication and authentication.”

Internet rights groups and activists such as Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a research thinktank that focuses on issues of Internet governance, have often raised concerns over UID’s overtly broad scope and privacy issues in the project.

“We don’t need Aadhaar because we already have a much more robust identity management and authentication system based on digital signatures that has a proven track record of working at a “billions-of-users” scale on the Internet with reasonable security. The Unique Identification (UID) project based on the so-called “infallibility of biometrics” is deeply flawed in design. These design disasters waiting to happen cannot be permanently thwarted by band-aid policies,” Abraham wrote in a blog post on the CIS website last year.

Nilekani also acknowledged that the department had faced several challenges, due to the sheer scale of the project that aims to cover the country’s entire population of 1.2 billion.

“We have had lots of challenges on this project—we have backlogs of enrolment because we have more packets than we can process, we backlogs of letter deliveries because we cannot handle so many letters…but fundamentally notwithstanding those challenges, we believe we are on the right track,” said Nilekani.

Both UIDAI and the census department under the National Population Register project are recording biometric data, which includes fingerprint and iris data. Even though both the agencies reached a truce after a cabinet decision in January 2012 and were allowed to co-exist, there have been several reports of duplication between the two agencies in biometric collection.

UIDAI is not just being used as the main platform for rolling out the government’s direct cash transfer scheme, but is also being regarded as an important authentication scheme for financial transactions and other security measures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/livemint-anirban-sen-june-29-2013-issue-of-duplication-of-identities-of-users-under-control

Facebook, Google deny spying access

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T10:18:48Z

The CEOs of Facebook and Google on Saturday categorically denied that the US National Security Agency had "direct access" to their company servers for snooping on Gmail and Facebook users. But both acknowledged that the companies complied with the 'lawful' requests made by the US government and shared user data with sleuths.

The article by Javed Anwer was published in the Times of India on June 9, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

In a post titled "What the ...?" Google's official blog, CEO Larry Page wrote, "We have not joined any program that would give the US governmentâ€”or any other governmentâ€”direct access to our servers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday."

A few hours later, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded. "Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the US or any other government direct access to our servers... We hadn't even heard of PRISM before yesterday," he wrote on his page at the social media site.

According to a few PowerPoint slides allegedly leaked by an NSA official, nine technology companies - Google, AOL, Apple, Yahoo, Microsoft, Skype, Facebook, YouTube and PalTalk - are providing the US government easy access to user data. While all companies have denied being part anything called PRISM, Facebook and Google have been most vocal about it.

A few hours after Facebook and Google statements, the New York Times said in a report that technology companies had "opened discussions with national security officials about developing technical methods to more efficiently and securely share the personal data of foreign users".

"In some cases, they (companies) changed their computer systems to do so," noted the NYT report.

The statements by the CEOs have done little to allay privacy fears. "The denials from the companies look highly coordinated, including similar phrases in all their responses. I don't think they are lying outright, though the NYT report suggests that they are telling a half-truth. They may not provide the US government 'direct access' to all their servers, but may be providing indirect access, or may just be responding to very broad FISA orders," said Pranesh Prakash, a policy director with Centre for Internet and Society in India.

On Friday US president Barack Obama had tacitly acknowledged NSA surveillance programmes aimed at non-US citizens. "You can't have a hundred per cent security and also then have a hundred per cent privacy and zero inconvenience. You know, we're going to have to make some choices as a society," he told reporters in the US.

Page and Zuckerberg also called on the governments to be more open about surveillance programmes. "The level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish," wrote Page.

Added Zuckerberg, "We strongly encourage all governments to be much more transparent about all programs aimed at keeping the public safe. It's the only way to protect everyone's civil liberties and create the safe and free society we all want over the long term."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-javed-anwer-june-9-2013-facebook-google-deny-spying-access

Sunil

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T16:01:33Z

Sunil

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images/Sunil.png

कैसे होती है इंटरनेट पर आपकी जासूसी

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T16:06:48Z

भारत में बैठे आप कब, कहां, क्या लिख रहे हैं, किससे फोन पर क्या बात कर रहे हैं, अमेरिका में बैठे अधिकारी सब देख-सुन रहे हैं. कभी सोचा है कि कैसे हो रहा है यह सब? क्या आपकी कंप्यूटर स्क्रीन उनके कंप्यूटर पर भी खुली है?

This article was published in DW on June 15, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

अमेरिकी खुफिया एजेंसियों के बड़ी इंटरनेट कंपनियों के जरिए जासूसी करने के मामले ने दुनिया भर में हलचल मचा दी है. भारत में भी नागरिक इस बात से चिंतित हैं कि ना सिर्फ अमेरिकी नागरिकों पर बल्कि भारत में रहने वाले लोगों के हर पल की खबर भी अमेरिका के हाथों में है. कैसे हो सकता है यह सब, क्या यह किसी डाक की तरह है जिसे शक होने पर अधिकारी कभी भी हाथ से खोल सकते हैं? जी नहीं, उससे भी ज्यादा.

(आपका फोन कोई और तो नहीं सुन रहा)

कैसे होती है इंटरनेट जासूसी

भारत में सेंटर फॉर इंटरनेट एंड सोसाइटी के कार्यकारी निदेशक सुनील अब्राहम ने डॉयचे वेले को बताया कि फेसबुक, गूगल और माइक्रोसॉफ्ट जैसी बड़ी कंपनियों के पास आपकी अलग अलग जानकारी होती है. समूची जानकारी को कंपनी का हर सदस्य नहीं देख सकता है. उनके पास आपकी नियमित जानकारी ही है. वे आपके मेसेज नहीं खोल सकते हैं. लेकिन जब खुफिया एजेंसी के पास आपके कंप्यूटर पर चल रहे माइक्रोसॉफ्ट प्रोसेसर से लेकर आपके गूगल, फेसबुक और दूसरे अहम अकाउंट की जानकारी होती है तो उनके पास सब कुछ होता है. वे जब चाहें आपके कंप्यूटर से खुद अपने कंप्यूटर को जोड़ कर आपकी हर हरकत का पता कर सकते हैं.

हालांकि अमेरिकी कांग्रेस द्वारा पारित कानून के अनुसार केवल जिस व्यक्ति पर शक है, उसके अकाउंट से जुड़ी जानकारी के लिए खुफिया एजेंसी को पहले अदालत से अनुमति लेनी होती है जिसके आधार पर उन्हें इंटरनेट कंपनियां सर्वर तक की पहुंच देती हैं. लेकिन अब्राहम ने बताया कि एजेंसी ने ऐसा करने के बजाए कंपनियों के साथ मिलकर एक पीछे का रास्ता निकाला है जिसके तहत उनके पास सभी के अकाउंट का ब्योरा आ गया.

भारतीयों पर भी जासूसी

अब्राहम ने बताया कि भारत में इस्तेमाल हो रहे सभी बड़े सॉफ्टवेयर और फेसबुक और गूगल जैसी सोशल नेटवर्किंग साइटें अमेरिका में रजिस्टर्ड हैं. यानि यहां जो कुछ भी हो रहा है वह सब अमेरिकी सर्वर

	से हो कर गुजर रहा है. ऐसे में उनके लिए भारत में बैठे किसी व्यक्ति के अकाउंट को खोलना और पढ़ना जरा भी मुश्किल नहीं है. जबकि भारत अमेरिकी नागरिकों के साथ ऐसा नहीं कर सकता है. इस तरह कोई भी भारतीय अकाउंट अमेरिका की नजर से छुपा नहीं है. भारत सरकार के लिए जरूरी यह भी है कि उसके बड़े अधिकारियों, सैन्य अधिकारियों और सरकारी विभागों की जानकारी के साथ ऐसा कुछ ना हो सके. भारत के विदेश मंत्रालय ने इस मामले पर आपत्ति जताते हुए अमेरिका को ऐसा करने से रोकने का दावा किया है. यह अमेरिका के हाथों भारतीयों की निजता का हनन है. अब्राहम कहते हैं कि इस बारे में दोनों सरकारों के बीच बातचीत के बाद ही नतीजे सामने आएंगे. हालांकि भारत सरकार ऐसा पूरी तरह रोक पाएगी इस पर संदेह ही है.

से हो कर गुजर रहा है. ऐसे में उनके लिए भारत में बैठे किसी व्यक्ति के अकाउंट को खोलना और पढ़ना जरा भी मुश्किल नहीं है. जबकि भारत अमेरिकी नागरिकों के साथ ऐसा नहीं कर सकता है. इस तरह कोई भी भारतीय अकाउंट अमेरिका की नजर से छुपा नहीं है.

भारत सरकार के लिए जरूरी यह भी है कि उसके बड़े अधिकारियों, सैन्य अधिकारियों और सरकारी विभागों की जानकारी के साथ ऐसा कुछ ना हो सके. भारत के विदेश मंत्रालय ने इस मामले पर आपत्ति जताते हुए अमेरिका को ऐसा करने से रोकने का दावा किया है. यह अमेरिका के हाथों भारतीयों की निजता का हनन है. अब्राहम कहते हैं कि इस बारे में दोनों सरकारों के बीच बातचीत के बाद ही नतीजे सामने आएंगे. हालांकि भारत सरकार ऐसा पूरी तरह रोक पाएगी इस पर संदेह ही है.

(किसने खोला राज)

सभी देश कर रहे हैं जासूसी

सुनील अब्राहम ने बताया कि थोड़ी बहुत इंटरनेट जासूसी सभी देशों की सरकार करती है. यह देश की सुरक्षा के लिए अहम भी है. लेकिन यह कम से कम स्तर तक ही होनी चाहिए. उनका मानना है कि वर्तमान हालात के दौरान हर देश ज्यादा से ज्यादा जानकारी का भूखा होता जा रहा है. ऐसे में निजता का क्या अर्थ है वह भी मिटता जा रहा है. लेकिन ऐसे में भी अमेरिका का भारतीयों पर जासूसी करना सही नहीं है.

इसके लिए जरूरी यह है कि भारत सरकार अपने नागरिकों को इंटरनेट पर अपनी निजता बनाए रखने के तरीकों से अवगत कराए. लेकिन यह इसलिए संभव नहीं हो सकता है, क्योंकि फिर लोगों के बारे में जरूरत पड़ने पर खुद भारत सरकार जासूसी नहीं कर पाएगी.

अब्राहम ने बताया कि ऐसी स्थिति में आईक्लाउड और एयर एंड्रॉयड जैसे सॉफ्टवेयर का इस्तेमाल भी सुरक्षित नहीं है. वह और उनके जैसे दूसरे इंटरनेट एक्सपर्ट और कार्यकर्ता लोगों से अपील करते आए हैं कि वे इन सॉफ्टवेयर का इस्तेमाल अपनी निजी जानकारी को संचित करने के लिए ना करें.

सुनील अब्राहम ने कहा कि यह तो बस शुरुआत है. ऐसा नहीं है कि ये मामले यहीं थम जाएंगे. आगे आने वाले समय में हम इस तरह की जासूसी और जानकारी लीक हो जाने की और बातें सुनें तो हैरान नहीं होना चाहिए. हमारे पास अभी तक ऐसा सिस्टम नहीं है जो निजता को पूरी तरह सुरक्षित रखने के लिए आश्वस्त कर सके.

रिपोर्ट: समरा फातिमा
संपादन: महेश झा

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/dw-june-15-report-on-internet-surveillance

Wiki Rahasya: Panel Discussion on Suvarna News

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T16:36:11Z

Dr. U.B.Pavanaja participated in a panel discussion around Wikipedia in general and about Kannada Wikipedia in specific. This was telecast by Suvarna News 24x7 (Kannada) TV channel on June 13, 2013.

Videos

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/suvarna-news-june-13-2013-wiki-rahasya-panel-discussion

Opportunities for TV White Spaces in India Workshop

praskrishna — 2013-09-18T04:51:11Z

Shyam Ponappa, a fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society is participating in a workshop on TV White Space. The workshop is being organized by the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay and sponsored by the Ford Foundation at the Royal Hotel Plaza in New Delhi on June 21, 2013.

See the original published by the Indian Institute of Technology website here

About the Workshop

This workshop will discuss the regulatory aspects of TV white space with a focus on Indian requirements. We believe that making the most efficient use of the TV white space spectrum will offer tremendous benefits to the low-income broadband users in India. It will also provide opportunities to the academia and indigenous industries for research and development, thereby creating intellectual property related to methods feasible for TV white space spectrum usage and access in India.

The workshop is intended for researchers, policy makers, and industry professionals working in the area of TV white spaces. The discussions will provide exposure to the TV white space applications and regulations across the world. The regulatory framework for TV white space present elsewhere in the world will be in focus, and we will provide suggestions for the same in India. This workshop may sow the seeds of developing a regulatory framework for TV white space operation in India.

The program consists of an overview of the TV white space regulations and standards from different countries around the world, and a discussion on the TV white space regulations necessary for the Indian context.

Time	Details
09:30 10:00	Inauguration and Introduction
10:00 10:30	WhiteSpace Applications, Regulations and Technologies, Dr. Apurva Mody, White Space Alliance
10:30 11:00	Tea Break
11:00 11:30	Geo-location Database – U.S. TV White Spaces and Beyond John Malyar, iConnective
11:30 12:00	TV White Space Detection and Spectrum Characterization in India, Prof. Vinay Ribeiro (IIT Delhi) and Prof. Animesh Kumar (IIT Bombay). Based on collective work done at IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay
12:00 12:30	White Space Opportunities in South India Prof. Zafar Ali Khan, IIT Hyderabad
12:30 14:00	Lunch
14:00 14:30	Enabling the Global Spectrum Village, Jeffery Yan, Microsoft
14:30 15:00	TI solutions for TV white space Jose Frangline, Texas Instruments
15:00 16:00	Panel Discussion
16:00 16:30	Tea Break
16:30 17:00	Regulations of Ofcom, Dr. Reza Karimi, Technical Policy Director, Ofcom
17:00 17:30	Regualtions of FCC, Dr. Julius Knapp, Chief, Office of Engineering and Technology, FCC

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/iitb-june-21-2013-opportunities-for-tv-white-spaces-in-india-workshop