Centre for Internet and Society

India faces Twitter backlash over Internet clampdown

praskrishna — 2012-08-28T09:56:11Z

The government faced an angry backlash from Twitter users on Thursday after ordering Internet service providers to block about 20 accounts that officials said had spread scare-mongering material that threatened national security.

Post published in INDOlink, Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The backlash came as New Delhi turned up the heat on Twitter, threatening "appropriate and suitable action" if it failed to remove the accounts as soon as possible. Several newspapers said this could mean a total ban on access to Twitter in India but government officials would not confirm to Reuters that such a drastic step was being considered.

There was no immediate response from Twitter, which does not have an office in India. There are about 16 million Twitter users in the country.

The government has found itself on the defensive this week over what critics see as a clumsy clampdown on social media websites - including Google, YouTube and Facebook - that has raised questions about freedom of information in the world's largest democracy.

"Dear GOI (Government of India), Keep your Hands Off My Internet. Else face protest" tweeted one user, @Old_Monk60.

India blocked access to more than 300 Web pages after threatening mobile phone text messages and doctored website images fuelled rumours that Muslims, a large minority in the predominantly Hindu country, were planning revenge attacks for violence in Assam, where 80 people have been killed and 300,000 have been displaced since July.

Fearing for their lives, tens of thousands of migrants fled Mumbai, Bangalore and other cities last week. The exodus highlighted underlying tensions in a country with a history of ethnic and religious violence.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, the government has targeted Indian journalists, Britain's Daily Telegraph, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera television in its clampdown on Internet postings it says could inflame communal tensions.

The directives to Internet service providers listed dozens of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter pages. A random sampling of the YouTube postings revealed genuine news footage spliced together with fear-mongering propaganda.

INDIAN JOURNALISTS TARGETED

The government says Google and Facebook have largely cooperated while Twitter has been much slower to respond.

"Every company, whether it's an entertainment company, or a construction company, or a social media company, has to operate within the laws of the given country," said Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the Ministry of Communications.

Twitter has been instructed to remove 28 pages containing "objectionable content", an interior ministry official said.

"If they do not remove the pages, the Indian government will take appropriate and suitable action," he added.

The government has ordered Internet service providers to block the Twitter accounts of veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta and television anchor Shiv Aroor. Some appeared to have begun complying with the order on Thursday as Twitter users reported difficulties in accessing their pages.

"It is a political decision, because of my criticism of the government," said Gupta, who was an official in the previous government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The government's actions triggered a storm of criticism from Twitter users, with the hashtags #Emergency2012 and #GOIBlocks among the top trending topics on Twitter in India on Thursday. Some compared the situation with the state of emergency imposed by the government in 1975, when some journalists were jailed.

The Centre for Internet and Society, which analysed the 300 banning orders, found that they contained "numerous mistakes and inconsistencies". Some of the banned websites belonged to people trying to debunk the rumours, for example, it said.

"This isn't about political censorship. This is about the government not knowing how to do online regulation properly," said CIS programme manager Pranesh Prakash.

The parliament last year passed a law that obliges Internet companies to remove a range of objectionable content when requested to do so, a move criticised at the time by rights groups and social media companies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-indolink-com-india-faces-twitter-backlash

Social media, SMS are not why NE students left Bangalore

nishant — 2012-08-28T10:48:06Z

I woke up one morning to find that I was living in a city of crisis. Bangalore, where the largest public preoccupations to date have been about bad roads, stray dogs, and occasionally, the lack of night-life, the city was suddenly a space that people wanted to flee and occupy simultaneously.

Nishant Shah's article on North East exodus was published in FirstPost on August 20, 2012.

Through technology mediated gossip mill that produced rumours faster than the speed of a digital click, imagination of terror, of danger and of material harm found currency and we found thousands of people suddenly leaving the city to go back to their imagined homelands.

The media spectacle of this exodus around questions of religion, ethnicity and regionalism only emphasised the fact that there is a new wave of connectedness that we live in – the social web, or what have you – that can no longer be controlled, contained or corrected by official authorities and their voices.

Despite a barrage of messages from the law enforcement and security authorities, on email, on large screens on the roads, and on the comfort of our cell-phones, there was a growing anxiety and a spiralling information mill that was producing an imaginary situation of precariousness and bodily harm.

Much has been said about the eruption of this irrationality that pokes holes in the mantle of cosmopolitanism that Bangalore (and other such ‘global cities’) is enveloped in, in its quest to represent the India that is supposed to shine. It has been heartening to see how communities that were supposed to be in conflict have worked so hard in the last few days, at building human contacts and providing assurances of safety and inclusion, which are far more effective than the official word.

There has been a rich discourse on what this means for India’s modernity, especially when such an event marks the so-called neo-liberal cities, showing the darker undercurrents of discrimination and suspicion that seem to lie just beneath the surface of networked neighbourhoods.

While there is much to be unpacked about the political motivations and the ecologies of fear that our immigrant lives are enshrined in, I want to focus on two aspects of this phenomenon which need more attention.

The first is the fierce localisation of our global technologies. There is an imagination, especially in cities like Bangalore, of digital technologies as necessarily plugging us in larger networks of global information consumption. The idea that technology plugs us into the transnational circuits is so huge that it only tunes us towards an idea of connectedness that is always outward looking, expanding the scope of nation, community and body.

However, the ways in which information was circulating during this phenomenon reminds us that digital networks are also embedded in local practices of living and survival. Most of the times, these networks are so naturalised and such an integral part of our crucial mechanics of urban life that they appear as habits, without any presence or visibility, In times of crises – perceived or otherwise – these networks make themselves visible, to show that they are also inward looking.

The visibility of the networks, when they suddenly crop up for public viewing, for those of us who are outside of that network, it signals that something has gone wrong. There is a glitch in the matrix and we need to start unpacking the local, the specific and the particular that signals the separation of these networks from our habits of living.

The second point I want to make is about the need to look at the ellipsis that occurs in this spectacular emergence of the network and the apparatus that is set into place to control and regiment it. The hyper-visibility of the information and technology network destabilises the ways in which we think of our everyday, thus emerging not only as a sign of the crisis but a crisis unto itself.

These ellipses of the crisis – replacing the crisis with the network – as well as the collusion between the crisis and the network are the easy solution that state authorities pick up on.

This is a problem about the nation-wide building of mega-cities filled with immigrant bodies that are not allowed their differences because they all have to be cosmopolitan and mobile bodies. The solution, however, is offered at the level of technology.

Instead of addressing the larger issues of conservative parochialism, an increasing back-lash by conservative governments and a growing hostility that emerges from these cities which nobody possesses and nobody belongs to, the efforts are being made to blame technology as the site where the problem is located and the object that needs to be controlled.

So what we have is redundant regulation that controls the number of text messages we are able to send, or policing of internet for those spreading rumours. The entire focus has been on information management, as if the reason for mass exodus of people from the North East Indian states and the sense of fragility that the city has suddenly been immersed in, is all due to the pervasive and ubiquitous information gadgets and their ability to proliferate in peer-2-peer environments outside of the control of the government.

Digital Technologies have become the de facto scapegoats of many problems in our past. It invites more regulation, containment and censorship of the freedom that digital technologies allow you – from the infamous Delhi Public School MMS Scandal in the early 2000s to the recent attempts at filtering the social web – we have seen the repeated futility of such measures of technology control, and yet it appears as a constant trope in the State’s solution to the problems of the contemporary.

This obsession with governance of technology to resolve a much more nuanced problem is akin to fabulous stories of mad monarchs banishing spinning wheels from their kingdoms or sentencing hammers to imprisonment for the potential and possibility of crime.

And these solutions are always going to fail, because they fail to recognise either the intimate penetration of digital technologies in our everyday life, or the ways in which our local structures are constructed through the presence of ubiquitous technologies and gadgets and screens and networks.

These ellipses of the crisis – replacing the crisis with the network – as well as the collusion between the crisis and the network are the easy solution that state authorities pick up on.

Digital Technologies have become the de facto scapegoats of many problems in our past. It invites more regulation, containment and censorship of the freedom that digital technologies allow you – from the infamous Delhi Public School MMS Scandal in the early 2000s to the recent attempts at filtering the social web – we have seen the repeated futility of such measures of technology control, and yet it appears as a constant trope n the State’s solution to the problems of the contemporary.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-first-post-com-aug-25-2012-nishant-shah-social-media-sms-are-not-why-ne-students-left-bangalore

Facebook's Delicate Dance With Delhi On Censorship

praskrishna — 2012-09-03T04:39:45Z

At the end of last week, a hashtag briskly rose across India: #Emergency2012. It was a reference to the 21-month stint, beginning in the summer of 1975, when then PM Indira Gandhi determined democracy an inconvenience.

Contributed by Mark Bergen, the post was published in Forbes on August 29, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

This time around, the government launched a jumbled attempt, following ethnic violence in the northeast, to stem rumors behind a panicked exodus. They blocked over 300 sites and axed at least 16 Twitter accounts, including those of political opponents and journalists. Many of us found our cell phone texts suddenly, with no announcement, cut off after five missives.

It was hardly the Emergency of 1975. The government’s actions were far less draconian than three decades ago. But, back then, there were no foreign internet companies to complicate matters—and, it seems, absolve the government.

In response to the recent charges, Delhi claimed that there was “no censorship at all.” As the communications minister, Kapil Sibal, put it, “Facebook and Google are cooperating with us.”

Under the circumstances, shutting down the incendiary hate speech online was warranted, explained Sunil Abraham, the director of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore. The process was just incredibly inept. “There were so many things they did wrong,” he told me when I asked about the government’s response. And the reaction can be tacked onto a very recent history of Delhi issuing sweeping, usually empty, threats of censoring U.S. internet companies.

“Perhaps the Indian government has wasted, frittered a way goodwill,” Abraham continued. “It has cried ‘wolf’ so many times that this time the internet intermediaries are not taking them as seriously as they should.”

His group analyzed the sites shut down last week, pointing out the “numerous mistakes and inconsistencies that make blocking pointless and ineffectual.” It’s clear that the censorship was also opportunistic—used to stamp out political parody Twitter accounts—and counterproductive. Among the sites blocked was a Pakistani blog debunking the rumors behind the whole exodus episode.

Abraham criticized the government for coming to the intermediaries with broad demands first, rather than directly to Twitter, Facebook and Google. That approach, coupled with earlier censorship demands, may strain the trust between the ruling coalition and the web giants.

Still, Facebook has every reason to keep Delhi happy. This year, the number of users in India hit 32 million—a 85 percent jump from the last. The total is expected to nearly double next year, leap-frogging Indonesia for the title of second largest market. An overwhelming chunk of that growth will come from mobile users. As this solid report from Forbes India shows, the company is still struggling here, as it is in the U.S., to turn those new users into ad revenue:

Indian businesses spent Rs 2,850 crore on digital advertising as of March 2012, a number that’s expected to grow to Rs 4,391 crore next year, according to a report by the Internet Mobile Association of India/Indian Market Research Bureau (IAMAI/IMRB).

…But Facebook has not been able to capture much of this share. Mahesh Murthy reckons that businesses spent about Rs 150 crore on Facebook marketing, but only a third went to Facebook’s own kitties in the form of ad revenues. The rest went to social media marketing firms which handle Facebook accounts.

That’s not to say that the company will discontinue its aggressive efforts. It likely will not be deterred by policies that attack free speech—Zuckerberg’s empire has long been accused of complacency with censorship. It’s India’sinfamously unpredictable tax policies toward foreign entities that would conceivably slow the company’s expansion.

There’s little reason to suspect, then, that Facebook, Google and the western web behemoths will not continue to cooperate with Delhi moving forward. And much of that cooperation should come not as blatant censorship but covert surveillance. According to the Google Transparency Report, India has made over 2,000 data requests and 100 removal requests, third only to the States and Brazil. As the mobile revolution soars, that number will surely rise.

On Monday evening, Christopher Soghoian, a D.C.-based privacy analyst, spoke at the CIS before a crowd of young Indian law students and activists. Despite the shoddy security default of internet firms, he said, they can impose limits on government surveillance. “When these companies receive requests from where they don’t have an office,” he claimed, “they refuse.” Two years ago, Facebook India opened its first office in Hyderabad.

Soghoian advised his audience to push for privacy and transparency standards in India. He shared the story of the long-fought battle for encryption protection with Facebook in the U.S. Yet, he admitted that security provisions can falter when a government is bent on policing the internet—and a company is bent on cooperation. “If you can force companies to hand over the keys,” he said, “then encryption is useless.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-forbes-com-mark-bergen-aug-29-2012-facebooks-delicate-dance-with-delhi-on-censorship

The state. And the rage of the cyber demon

praskrishna — 2012-09-03T11:03:53Z

The Internet might be a Pandora’s box. But should the government be wasting time regulating the cacophony?

Shougat Dasgupta's article was published in Tehelka, Vol 9, Issue 36, Dated September 8, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

SOME YEARS ago a cartoon was doing the rounds that caught in a few sharp strokes the selfimportance and self-righteousness of the Internet warrior. A man sits hunched at his computer, the keyboard lit with his fervour. Not looking away from the screen, he has a terse, impatient exchange with his partner off-panel: ‘Are you coming to bed?’ ‘I can’t. This is important.’ ‘What?’ ‘Someone is wrong on the Internet.’ It is the anonymous exchange that gives cyber debates their peculiar animus; that anonymity coupled with the low stakes, as is famously said of academic politics, is what makes the sniping so bitter and vicious. The complaints about social media like Twitter or the comment sections on blogs have mostly centred on the incivility of the discourse, on ‘trolls’ too eager to throw rotting vegetables at journalists, politicians, celebrities unused to such irreverence. But action taken by the government in the last fortnight to block content from over 300 websites and a dozen Twitter accounts imputes a far more vitiating effect on society than the mere puncturing of already overinflated egos.

Kapil Sibal, Minister for Communications & Information Technology, has said in interviews that the government’s intent was to “protect the victims” from these “mischievous acts happening through these sites and blogs”. There is, by now, little doubt that the threats and fake pictures of slain Muslims spread through mobile phones and social media, “disseminating misinformation” in the minister’s phrase, helped exacerbate tensions and fears. There is equally little doubt that what action the government took was both late and clumsy: blocking blogs that debunked the rumours and morphed images that the government held responsible for causing panic; blocking web pages of international news organisations such as The Telegraph and Al-Jazeera; blocking Twitter accounts of journalists, the government’s political opponents, accounts parodying the prime minister, even people who tweeted mostly about information technology and cricket. Like a giant in clown shoes chasing a sprite, the government has looked lumbering and foolish, led a merry dance by light-footed ‘netizens’, while the rest of us pointed and laughed.

Can the government’s actions be at all justified? Appearing on NDTV’s ‘We the People’, R Chandrashekhar, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, argued that “once a law enforcement agency has made an assessment you act first and then make corrections as you go along”. In essence, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, which along with concern for ‘national security’ is trotted out by every democratic government accused of ignoring civil liberties. Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari, on the same programme, claimed that the “mandate of section 69a of the Information Technology Act and the rules with regard to safeguards and blocking is fairly clear and rule 9 allows the government, if it thinks that there’s an expedient situation in order to protect the sovereignty of the State or public order, to go ahead with this blocking on an interim basis”.

We will discuss the section being referred to and the 2011 guidelines for intermediaries later but for now let’s accept the government’s argument that it acted in the face of a clear and present danger, to borrow from Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous 19th-century US Supreme Court Justice. Kharan Thapar, citing another of Holmes’s shopworn phrases, wrote that “[ j]ust as it’s not acceptable to shout fire in a crowded cinema hall for the fun of it, it cannot be permitted to deliberately frighten helpless innocent people who, for whatever reason, believe you and panic”. Thapar is making the point that free speech is not without its responsibilities. He does so, however, using a long discredited cliché and compounds this error with condescension, refusing to grant people (“helpless”, “innocent”, like babies) their full agency. Besides, the government only acted from 18 August to limit text messaging, already months after initial images of supposed Burmese atrocities against Muslims had been widely circulated to stir anger. It also chose to block webpages and Twitter handles, some for spurious, even mystifying reasons. The result has been embarrassment. Acting arbitrarily in the name of communal harmony to prevent damage after terrible damage has already been done, does little to convince the people you are supposedly protecting that you have the situation in hand.

The government has left itself open to being serially lectured about free speech by the US government, by journalists (particularly Kanchan Gupta, whose apparently blocked Twitter account has made him a patron saint of free speech), by hysterical twitterers (ok, ‘tweeple’) drawing an entirely ridiculous parallel to the Emergency, and most egregiously by Narendra Modi. Presumably, Modi, by blackening his display picture was not commenting on the black irony of a man who bans books mourning constraints on freedom of speech. Pranesh Prakash of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a trenchant critic of the government’s recent blocks (social media not coal) and the “horrendously drafted” legislation that permits the leeway for such indiscriminate action, says that “people [were] losing a sense of reality”.

	He points to the criticism of the government’s blocking of parodies of the prime minister’s Twitter account. “An underreported part of this whole controversy,” he says,“is Twitter’s own terms of service and one parody account in particular violates those terms.” He confesses to “having to look quite closely” to tell the PMO account from PMO, which substitutes a zero for the letter ‘o’. Also, according to sources, a letter sent last year by the government to the likes of Google and Facebook asking them to screen for offensive content specifically excepted parody and satire. If accurate, this underscores that the Prime Minister’s Office did not have a problem with parody but a genuine, if peculiar, fear of misinformation stemming from the six accounts it asked Twitter to remove.

He points to the criticism of the government’s blocking of parodies of the prime minister’s Twitter account. “An underreported part of this whole controversy,” he says,“is Twitter’s own terms of service and one parody account in particular violates those terms.” He confesses to “having to look quite closely” to tell the PMO account from PMO, which substitutes a zero for the letter ‘o’. Also, according to sources, a letter sent last year by the government to the likes of Google and Facebook asking them to screen for offensive content specifically excepted parody and satire. If accurate, this underscores that the Prime Minister’s Office did not have a problem with parody but a genuine, if peculiar, fear of misinformation stemming from the six accounts it asked Twitter to remove.

NONE OF this is to say that the government, in its haste, acted with reason. Certainly, it has since last year been working assiduously to exert at least some control over online content. The rules from April last year updating sections of the Information Technology Act, 2000, requires “due diligence” from companies like Twitter, or Facebook, to not “host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit, update or share any information that… is grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, libellous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically objectionable, disparaging, relating or encouraging money laundering or gambling, or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatever…” Disparaging? Encouraging gambling? Well, gambling, at least in casinos, is lawful in Goa and Sikkim. No wonder Kapil Sibal felt he was on firm legal ground when he complained in December about “derogatory pictures” of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh that the government had culled from Facebook accounts.

Prakash, of the CIS, describes the Information Technology Act, particularly sections 69a and 66 as “having issues and being badly worded”. The powers it gives the government are too intrusive and that the prison sentences for offenders “are greater than those for death by negligence”. What he finds most troubling is how little transparency exists around issues of censorship; how, for instance, there is no easily accessible central list of banned books. “How,” he asks, “are people even supposed to know if their website or Twitter account is blocked if the government won’t issue proper notices and lists?” Our democratically elected government appears fond of the aristocratic maxim to never contradict, never explain, never apologise, as if hauteur and bluster are adequate substitutes for communication and we are subjects rather than citizens.

Seen in isolation, the blocking of websites and rationing of text messages is just a comical bungle by an unwieldy, Luddite administration. In the context of the last 12 months though, the government’s recent actions are a logical extension of its drive to bring the Internet to heel. The unregulated nature of the Internet is a particular bugbear of this government. It had already made a proposal to the United Nations in October last year, at the 66th session of the General Assembly, for the institution of a Committee for Internet- Related Policies. This 50-nation body would be tasked not to control the Internet, “or allow Governments to have the last word in regulating the Internet, but to make sure that the Internet is governed not unilaterally, but in an open, democratic, inclusive and participatory manner, with the participation of all stakeholders”. For all the incompetence the government has displayed, both most recently and in previous attempts to censor Internet content, it asks an important question about the future of Internet regulation, about the need for multilateral debate and international consensus.

TEHELKA, as cyber chatter about the blocked sites grew increasingly frenzied, asked its online readers to define the forum provided by social media. Most agreed that Twitter, for instance, was a public space, a place to give vent to private thoughts publicly with, if wanted or needed, the comfort of anonymity. The metaphor used is often that of a public square or town hall. I’ve always thought of Twitter as a carnival — a space, as defined by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, where the existing social order is overturned, where social pieties are profaned. Twitter, like carnival, appeared to me an exhilarating space. This is utterly naïve. The fact is that Twitter is not a public space, it is privately owned and its investors are in the business of revenue generation and profit. This means Twitter’s terms of service are subject to change, as is its cooperation with governments over the private information it controls and owns.

Rahul Bose, the actor, told me in a conversation about social media that he thinks individual freedom is increasingly an “illusion”, that the very idea has become “laughable”. We live our lives, particularly our online lives, under the unblinking gaze of government: “You don’t need a close circuit camera at Flora Fountain to know you’re being watched, that every piece of information is on a file somewhere.” (This is probably not quite true of our dozy government.) It is indisputable that private entities such as Facebook and Twitter hold enormous amounts of information about individuals. In that light, surely, the Indian government is correct about the need for multilateral oversight of a system currently beholden in significant ways to the United States. ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, for instance, still makes only a token gesture at global participation and any question of greater United Nations involvement is generally met with US suspicion.

Arguably, the Indian government doesn’t go far enough in its call for greater inclusivity in the governance of the Internet. The academic Jeremy Malcolm, an influential figure in discussions about Internet governance, has written that the World Summit on the Information Society has “established at the level of principle that governance of the Internet should be a transparent, democratic and multilateral process, with the participation of governments, private sector, civil society and international organisations, in their respective roles”. More immediate, perhaps, is the question of how a democratic country, committed to free speech, should regard social media.

This is not a discussion confined to India. During the August 2012 London riots, David Cameron threatened to ban people suspected of planning criminal activity from using Facebook, Twitter, and Blackberry Messenger. In words similar to those used by Sibal, Cameron spoke about reminding these companies of their responsibilities. In an interview with TEHELKA, Congress General Secretary Digvijaya Singh held close to the party line, insisting that “anything that incites violence is problematic, as is anything that is factually incorrect, and must be removed”. He envisages a future where online exchanges are governed by the same rules as public life, governed by similar cultural codes and basic civility. This is, it has to be said, an optimistic view of public life.

There are, as discussed earlier, as many different ways to see online exchanges as there are Internet users. The Internet’s shapelessness, its Moby Dick-like vast blankness, makes it impossible to apply the same standards to conversation on Twitter or Facebook, even if it is in print and in public, as you might apply to a magazine article. Pranesh Prakash points out that “while some people may see Twitter as akin to friends talking in the pub, others use the service as a bulletin board”. When I propose to Prakash the idea of an ombudsman to monitor online dialogue in the same way an independent press commission might monitor newspaper reports, he makes a cogent rebuttal: “There is no ombudsman for regular speech, or to outline what you can or cannot say from a podium. Besides, there are laws that deal with defamation, slander and unless there is a requirement for an extra-legal authority I cannot see the need for an ombudsman.”

Much of the debate over the last couple of weeks has devolved, as so much debate in all our media, mainstream or online, does, into grandstanding — in this instance about ‘freedom of speech’ versus the national security imperative. This is to miss the woods for the trees. For all its heavy-handedness, the Indian government is correct to be concerned about oversight of the Internet and correct that not enough stakeholders are currently involved in its governance. Cant about freedom of speech cannot change the fact that the government is also correct that in a precariously held together democracy comprising various, widely different cultures and religions, certain standards of respectful speech are necessary. Of course, we can and should argue those standards and there needs to be a national conversation about the strictures of Internet legislation in India. Still, let us not pretend that the mob mentality of political discourse on the Internet is not a cause for worry and is not, as are all mobs, subject to manipulation.

With inputs from Ajachi Chakrabarti.
Shougat Dasgupta is an Assistant Editor with Tehelka.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-tehelka-com-vol-9-issue-36-sep-8-2012-shougat-dasgupta-the-state-and-the-rage-of-the-cyber-demon

Government to hold talks with stakeholders on Internet censorship

praskrishna — 2012-09-04T03:39:32Z

In an unprecedented move, the government, through the Department of Telecommunications and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, has agreed to initiate dialogue on Internet censorship with mega Internet companies, social media giants such as Google and Facebook, members of civil society, technical community, media, ISPs and legal experts.

This article by Shalini Singh was published in the Hindu on September 4, 2012. Pranesh Prakash's analysis is quoted.

The triggers for the discussion, which will be held on Wednesday, are the riots in Assam, Mumbai and Uttar Pradesh, as well as the mass exodus of north-east Indians from Bangalore, which resulted in bringing the government, civil society organisations and the media to a flashpoint.

Two of India’s seniormost officers in the area of Internet censorship, DoT Secretary R. Chandrashekhar and Director General, CERT-IN, Gulshan Rai will engage with a range of stakeholders in a two-hour meeting titled ‘Legitimate Restrictions on Freedom of Online Speech: The need for balance – from Deadlock to Dialogue.’

Other panellists include representatives from Google and Facebook; Pranesh Prakash from the Centre for Internet and Society (a civil society group); Prabir Purkayasta, Delhi Science Forum (technical community); Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, president, Foundation for Media Professionals; Rajesh Chharia, president, Internet Service Providers Association of India; and Apar Gupta, an advocate dealing with cyber issues.

One analysis by the CIS has shown that 309 specific items, including URLs, Twitter accounts, IMG tags, blog posts and blogs were blocked. Complaints arose when blocking a page resulted in the blocking of an entire website — which has scores or hundreds of web pages. The government maintained that this was necessary as there was a sense of crisis. Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde insisted that the government was “taking strict action only against those accounts or people which are causing damage or spreading rumours.” However, the collateral damage of the move was the Twitter accounts of several people, including journalists like Kanchan Gupta, being blocked.

“Mass censorship is like killing a fly with a sledgehammer. Rather than blocking the sites, the government should have used the same media, Facebook, Twitter and Google to counter terrorism and hate speech. I am glad that they are now open to dialogue,” says Mr. Thakurta.

“It is an extremely productive move as it will generate awareness among content providers, government and users. In the absence of any dialogue, everyone was just sticking to their own positions without listening to the other stakeholders’ point of view,” says Mr. Chharia.

The meeting is to bring several stakeholders in dialogue on a single platform.

Nearly 50 other experts from industry, mobile service providers, Internet companies, intermediaries, academia and some international organisations as well as multilaterals are expected to join the conference, which will be held at 2.30 p.m. on September 4 at FICCI.

While this is seen as a brave attempt by some, there are an equal number of sceptics who believe that the discussion may not yield the desired result given the national security objectives governing law enforcement agencies on the one hand and the desire of users, media and civil society to preserve free speech on the other. Clearly, ISPs, Internet companies and social media are in a tough spot since they face legal obligations on legitimate orders for blocking on one hand while needing to protect their user privacy and rights to unhindered access to information.

If successful, it is possible that this dialogue will ensure that legitimate restrictions do not slide into illegitimate censorship.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-the-hindu-com-shalini-singh-sep-4-2012-govt-to-hold-talks-with-stakeholders-on-internet-censorship

Government asks Twitter to block fake 'PMO India' accounts; site fails to respond

praskrishna — 2012-09-04T12:24:52Z

A standoff between the government and microblogging service Twitter, that has got India's online community up in arms, continues, as Twitter is still to act on India's requests to block some of the fake 'PMO India' accounts.

This article was published in the Economic Times on August 23, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

India's Minister for Communications and Information Technology Kapil Sibal said, "Twitter has not responded to our requests in a satisfactory manner. The fake accounts are still there. The government of India is contemplating what action should be taken against Twitter and this will be announced as soon as we have finalised our response," he said.

Sibal further added that the government received a response from the US Department of Justice, which also agreed that the content on the sites India sought to ban was inappropriate.

Twitter's operating code allows for parody accounts to be allowed as long as such accounts clearly identify as parody. The accounts in question - including @Indian_pm, @PMOIndiaa, @dryumyumsingh, @PM0India- do so.

Unlike other popular parody accounts of world leaders, though, some of these accounts make no attempt to 'spoof' tweets from the Prime Minister. The user of the @PM0India handle, with over 11 thousand followers, has changed their handle to @thehinduexpress, and tweeted "When I've to parody PM, I'll use the other a/c and RT that. For countering media and Congress, this ID will be used. To hell with censorship."

An email by ET to Twitter Inc, received no response at the time of going to press. However, news agency PTI quoted sources saying that Twitter has communicated to the PMO that it would be locating the "unlawful content". "India is important to us and we would like to have clearer communication in these matters in future," PTI quoted Twitter as saying. Official spokesperson for Indian Prime Minister's Office Pankaj Pachauri confirmed that Twitter is looking into the matter.

Over the past few days, the government has blocked around 300 websites which it blames for spreading rumours that triggered the exodus of people from the North East from several cities. Google and Facebook on Tuesday told ET they were working with India in removing content which can incite violence.

"There is clear evidence that these social networks have caused harm and disruption. However, they need to be clearer about the way they go about blocking sites and other links. The block order contained around 20 accounts and over 80 Youtube videos.

It also had several mainstream media reports and a few Pakistani sites," Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society said. Analysts do not rule out the possibility that Twitter itself will be blocked in India if it does not act.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/articles-economictimes-indiatimes-com-govt-asks-twitter-to-block-fake-pmo-india-accounts-site-fails-to-respond

Content takedown and users' rights

Torsha Sarkar, Gurshabad Grover — 2020-02-17T05:18:25Z

After Shreya Singhal v Union of India, commentators have continued to question the constitutionality of the content takedown regime under Section 69A of the IT Act (and the Blocking Rules issued under it). There has also been considerable debate around how the judgement has changed this regime: specifically about (i) whether originators of content are entitled to a hearing, (ii) whether Rule 16 of the Blocking Rules, which mandates confidentiality of content takedown requests received by intermediaries from the Government, continues to be operative, and (iii) the effect of Rule 16 on the rights of the originator and the public to challenge executive action. In this opinion piece, we attempt to answer some of these questions.

This article was first published at the Leaflet. It has subsequently been republished by Scroll.in, Kashmir Observer and the CyberBRICS blog.

Introduction

Last year, several Jio users from different states reported that sites like Indian Kanoon, Reddit and Telegram were inaccessible through their connections. While attempting to access the website, the users were presented with a notice that the websites were blocked on orders from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT). When contacted by the founder of Indian Kanoon, Reliance Jio stated that the website had been blocked on orders of the government, and that the order had been rescinded the same evening. However, in response to a Right to Information (RTI) request, the DoT said they had no information about orders relating to the blocking of Indian Kanoon.

Alternatively, consider that the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) expressed concern last year that the Indian government was forcing Twitter to suspend accounts or remove content relating to Kashmir. They reported that over the last two years, the Indian government suppressed a substantial amount of information coming from the area, and prevented Indians from accessing more than five thousand tweets.

These instances are symptomatic of a larger problem of opaque and arbitrary content takedown in India, enabled by the legal framework under the Information Technology (IT) Act. The Government derives its powers to order intermediaries (entities storing or transmitting information on behalf of others, a definition which includes internet service providers and social media platforms alike) to block online resources through section 69A of the IT Act and the rules [“the blocking rules”] notified thereunder. Apart from this, section 79 of the IT Act and its allied rules also prescribe a procedure for content removal. Conversations with one popular intermediary revealed that the government usually prefers to use its powers under section 69A, possibly because of the opaque nature of the procedure that we highlight below.

Under section 69A, a content removal request can be sent by authorised personnel in the Central Government not below the rank of a Joint Secretary. The grounds for issuance of blocking orders under section 69A are: “the interest of the sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence relating to the above.” Specifically, the blocking rules envisage the process of blocking to be largely executive-driven, and require strict confidentiality to be maintained around the issuance of blocking orders. This shrouds content takedown orders in a cloak of secrecy, and makes it impossible for users and content creators to ascertain the legitimacy or legality of the government action in any instance of blocking.

Issues

The Supreme Court had been called to determine the constitutional validity of section 69A and the allied rules in Shreya Singhal v Union of India. The petitioners had contended that as per the procedure laid down by these rules, there was no guarantee of pre-decisional hearing afforded to the originator of the information. Additionally, the petitioners pointed out that the safeguards built into section 95 and 96 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), which allow state governments to ban publications and persons to initiate legal challenges to those actions respectively, were absent from the blocking procedures. Lastly, the petitioners assailed rule 16 of the blocking rules, which mandated confidentiality of blocking procedures, on the grounds that it was affecting their fundamental rights.

The Court, however, found little merit in these arguments. Specifically, the Court found that section 69A was narrowly drawn and had sufficient procedural safeguards, which included the grounds of issuance of a blocking order being specifically drawn, and mandating that the reasons of the website blocking be in writing, thus making it amenable to judicial review. Further, the Court also found that the provision of setting up of a review committee saved the law from being constitutional infirmity. In the Court’s opinion, the mere absence of additional safeguards, as the ones built into the CrPC, did not mean that the law was unconstitutional.

But do the ground realities align with the Court’s envisaged implementation of these principles? Apar Gupta, a counsel for the petitioners, pointed out that there was no recorded instance of pre-decisional hearing being granted to show that this safeguard contained in the rules was actually being implemented. However, Gautam Bhatia read Shreya Singhal to make an important advance: that the right of hearing be mandatorily extended to the ‘originator’, i.e. the content creator.

Additionally, Bhatia also noted that the Court, while upholding the constitutionality of the procedure under section 69A, held that the “reasons have to be recorded in writing in such blocking order so that they may be assailed in a writ petition under Article 226 of the Constitution.”

There are two important takeaways from this. Firstly, he argued that the broad contours of the judgment invoke an established constitutional doctrine — that the fundamental right under Article 19(1)(a) does not merely include the right of expression, but also the right of access to information. Accordingly, the right of challenging a blocking order was not only vested in the originator or the concerned intermediary, but may rest with the general public as well. And secondly, by the doctrine of necessary implication, it followed that for the general public to challenge any blocking order under Article 226, the blocking orders must be made public. While Bhatia concedes that public availability of blocking orders may be an over-optimistic reading of the judgment, recent events suggest that even the commonly-expected result, i.e. that the content creators having the right to a hearing, has not been implemented by the Government.

Consider the blocking of the satirical website DowryCalculator.com in September 2019 on orders from the government. The website displayed a calculator that suggests a ‘dowry’ depending on the salary and education of a prospective groom: even if someone misses the satire, the contents of the website are not immediately relatable to any grounds of removal listed under section 69A of the IT Act.

Tanul Thakur, the creator of the website, was not granted a hearing despite the fact that he had publicly claimed the ownership of the website at various times and that the website had been covered widely by the press. The information associated with the domain name also publicly lists Thakur’s name and contact information. Clearly, the government made no effort to contact Thakur when passing the order. Perhaps even more worryingly, when he tried to access a copy of the blocking order by filing a RTI, the MeitY cited the confidentiality rule to deny him the information.

This incident documents a fundamental problem plaguing the rules: the confidentiality clause is still being used to deny disclosure of key information on content takedown orders. The government has also used the provision to deny citizens a list of blocked websites , as responses to RTI requests have proven time and again.

Clearly, the Supreme Court’s rationale in considering Section 69A and the blocking rules as constitutional is not one that is implemented in reality. The confidentiality clause is preventing legal challenges to content blocking in totality: content creators are unable access the orders, and hence are unable to understand the executive’s reasoning in ordering their content to be blocked from public access.

As we noted earlier, the grounds of issuing a blocking order under section 69A pertain to certain reasonable restrictions on expression permitted by Article 19(2), which are couched in broad terms. The government’s implementation of section 69A and the rules make it impossible for any judicial review or accountability on the conformity of blocking orders with the mentioned grounds under the rules, or any reasonable restriction at all.

The Way Forward

From the opacity of proceedings under the law, to the lack of information regarding the same on public domain, the Indian content takedown regime leaves a lot to be desired from both the government and intermediaries at play.

First, we believe the Supreme Court’s decision in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India casts an obligation on the government to attempt to contact the content creator if they are passing a content takedown order to an intermediary. Second, even if the content creator is unavailable for a hearing at that instance, the confidentiality clause should not be used to prevent future disclosure of information to the content creator, so that affected citizens can access and challenge these orders.

While we wait for legal reform, intermediaries can also step up to ensure the rights of users online are upheld. On receiving formal orders, intermediaries should assess the legality of the received request. This should involve ensuring that only authorised agencies and personnel have sent the content removal orders, that the order specifically mentions what provision the government is exercising the power under, and that the content removal requests relate to the grounds of removal that are permissible under section 69A. For instance, intermediaries should refuse to entertain content removal requests under section 69A of the IT Act if they relate to obscenity, a ground not covered by the provision.

The representatives of the intermediary should also push for the committee to grant a hearing to the content creator. Here, the intermediary can act as a liaison between the uploader and the governmental authorities.

The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India offers a glimmer of hope for user rights online. While the case primarily challenged the orders imposing section 144 of the CrPC and a communication blockade in Jammu and Kashmir, the final decision does affirm the fundamental principle that government-imposed restrictions on the freedom of expression and assembly must be made available to the public and affected parties to enable challenges in a court of law.

The judiciary has yet another opportunity to consider the provision and the rules: late last year, Tanul Thakur approached the Delhi High Court to challenge the orders passed by the government to ISPs to block his website. One hopes that the future holds robust reforms to the content takedown regime.

We live in an era where the ebb and flow of societal discourse is increasingly channeled through intermediaries on the internet. In the absence of a mature, balanced and robust framework that enshrines the rule of law, we risk arbitrary modulation of the marketplace of ideas by the executive.

Torsha Sakar and Gurshabad Grover are researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society.

Disclosure: The Centre for Internet and Society is a recipient of research grants from Facebook and Google.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/content-takedown-and-users-rights-1

Internet Shutdown Stories

ambika — 2019-09-03T09:57:40Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) has published a collection of stories of the impact of internet shutdowns on people's lives in the country. This book seeks to give a glimpse into the lives of those directly affected by these internet shutdown experiments. When seen in a larger context, we hope that the stories in this book also demonstrate that access to the internet and freedom of speech is not just about an individual’s rights, but are also required for the collective good. This is a project funded by Facebook and MacArthur Foundation, and the stories were provided by 101 Reporters. Case studies from the states of Jammu & Kashmir, Haryana, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Telangana, West Bengal, Tripura, Manipur, Nagaland, and Uttar Pradesh have been highlighted in this compilation.

Read the report here: Download (PDF)

The report is shared under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

Edited by Debasmita Haldar, Ambika Tandon, and Swaraj Barooah

Print Design by Saumyaa Naidu

Advisor: Nikhil Pahwa, Founder and Editor at MediaNama

Foreword

Aside from the waves of innovation that the digital revolution brought with it, the ever increasing pervasiveness of the internet has had a tremendous impact on empowerment and freedoms in society. We are seeing unprecedented levels of access to information, along with a democratization of the means of creation, production and dissemination of information to anyone with an internet connection. This in turn has greatly amplified, and in many cases even created the ability, particularly for those traditionally left in the margins, to more meaningfully participate in their global as well as local societies. Recognising the significance of the internet to the freedom of expression as well as for the development and exercising of human rights more broadly, the United Nations Human Rights Council unanimously passed a resolution confirming internet access being a fundamental human right.

Simultaneously however, we are seeing Indian states discover and experiment with their power to clamp down on these new modes of communication for a variety of reasons, ranging from the ill-intentioned to the ill-informed. An internet shutdown tracker maintained by the Software Freedom Law Centre, shows that the number of shutdowns in India is increasing every year, with 70 shutdowns reported in 2017,and 45 shutdowns already reported from 1st Jan, 2018 to 4th May, 2018. These shutdowns also come at a significant economic cost. A 2016 Brookings report estimates that India faced a loss of about $968 million due to internet shutdowns. However, the democratic harms we have been accruing are more difficult to quantify and demonstrate.

This book seeks to give a glimpse into the lives of those directly affected by these internet shutdown experiments. From Jammu and Kashmir to Telangana, from Gujarat to Nagaland, we have collected 30 stories from across the country for an up-close look at how the everyday lives of common citizens have been impacted by internet shutdowns and website blocks. From CRPF members posted in Srinagar who use the internet to connect with their family, to students who have been cut off from education resources for competitive exams; from the disruptions in day to day life brought about by non-functional bank services in Darjeeling, to stock brokers in Ahmedabad who faced costly slowdowns; the idea of a Digital India is facing severe setbacks with these continuously increasing internet shutdowns.

When seen in a larger context, we hope that the stories in this book also demonstrate that access to the internet and freedom of speech is not just about an individual’s rights, but are also required for the collective good. The diversity of perspectives and activities that a healthy democracy demands is not met by the versioning of dominant narratives, but by allowing for, if not directly encouraging, the voices and activities of the unheard, oppressed and marginalised. We hope that in the telling of these personal stories of the day-to-day of people affected by such internet shutdowns, this book joins in the effort to position the dehumanized internet kill switches more aptly as dangers to democracy.

Sunil Abraham
Executive Director
The Centre for Internet and Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/internet-shutdown-stories

DeitY says 143 URLs have been Blocked in 2015; Procedure for Blocking Content Remains Opaque and in Urgent Need of Transparency Measures

jyoti — 2015-04-30T07:37:40Z

Across India on 30 December 2014, following an order issued by the Department of Telecom (DOT), Internet Service Providers (ISPs) blocked 32 websites including Vimeo, Dailymotion, GitHub and Pastebin.

In February 2015, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) requested the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) under the Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act) to provide information clarifying the procedures for blocking in India. We have received a response from DeitY which may be seen here.

In this post, I shall elaborate on this response from DeitY and highlight some of the accountability and transparency measures that the procedure needs. To stress the urgency of reform, I shall also touch upon two recent developments—the response from Ministry of Communication to questions raised in Parliament on the blocking procedures and the Supreme Court (SC) judgment in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India.

Section 69A and the Blocking Rules

Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2008 (S69A hereinafter) grants powers to the central government to issue directions for blocking of access to any information through any computer resource. In other words, it allows the government to block any websites under certain grounds. The Government has notified rules laying down the procedure for blocking access online under the Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public Rules, 2009 (Rules, 2009 hereinafter). CIS has produced a poster explaining the blocking procedure (download PDF, 2.037MB).

There are three key aspects of the blocking rules that need to be kept under consideration:

Officers and committees handling requests

Designated Officer (DO) – Appointed by the Central government, officer not below the rank of Joint Secretary.
Nodal Officer (NO) – Appointed by organizations including Ministries or Departments of the State governments and Union Territories and any agency of the Central Government.
Intermediary contact–Appointed by every intermediary to receive and handle blocking directions from the DO.
Committee for Examination of Request (CER) – The request along with printed sample of alleged offending information is examined by the CER—committee with the DO serving as the Chairperson and representatives from Ministry of Law and Justice; Ministry of Home Affairs; Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and representative from the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). The CER is responsible for examining each blocking request and makes recommendations including revoking blocking orders to the DO, which are taken into consideration for final approval of request for blocking by the Secretary, DOT.
Review Committee (RC) – Constituted under rule 419A of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1951, the RC includes the Cabinet Secretary, Secretary to the Government of India (Legal Affairs) and Secretary (Department of Telecom). The RC is mandated to meet at least once in 2 months and record its findings and has to validate that directions issued are in compliance with S69A(1).

Provisions outlining the procedure for blocking

Rules 6, 9 and 10 create three distinct blocking procedures, which must commence within 7 days of the DO receiving the request.

a) Rule 6 lays out the first procedure, under which any person may approach the NO and request blocking, alternatively, the NO may also raise a blocking request. After the NO of the approached Ministry or Department of the State governments and Union Territories and/or any agency of the Central Government, is satisfied of the validity of the request they forward it to the DO. Requests when not sent through the NO of any organization, must be approved by Chief Secretary of the State or Union Territory or the Advisor to the Administrator of the Union Territory, before being sent to the DO.

The DO upon receiving the request places, must acknowledge receipt within 24 four hours and places the request along with printed copy of alleged information for validation by the CER. The DO also, must make reasonable efforts to identify the person or intermediary hosting the information, and having identified them issue a notice asking them to appear and submit their reply and clarifications before the committee at a specified date and time, within forty eight hours of the receipt of notice.

Foreign entities hosting the information are also informed and the CER gives it recommendations after hearing from the intermediary or the person has clarified their position and even if there is no representation by the same and after examining if the request falls within the scope outlined under S69A(1). The blocking directions are issued by the Secretary (DeitY), after the DO forwards the request and the CER recommendations. If approval is granted the DO directs the relevant intermediary or person to block the alleged information.

b) Rule 9 outlines a procedure wherein, under emergency circumstances, and after the DO has established the necessity and expediency to block alleged information submits recommendations in writing to the Secretary, DeitY. The Secretary, upon being satisfied by the justification for, and necessity of, and expediency to block information may issue an blocking directions as an interim measure and must record the reasons for doing so in writing.

Under such circumstances, the intermediary and person hosting information is not given the opportunity of a hearing. Nevertheless, the DO is required to place the request before the CER within forty eight hours of issuing of directions for interim blocking. Only upon receiving the final recommendations from the committee can the Secretary pass a final order approving the request. If the request for blocking is not approved then the interim order passed earlier is revoked, and the intermediary or identified person should be directed to unblock the information for public access.

c) Rule 10 outlines the process when an order is issued by the courts in India. The DO upon receipt of the court order for blocking of information submits it to the Secretary, DeitY and initiates action as directed by the courts.

Confidentiality clause

Rule 16 mandates confidentiality regarding all requests and actions taken thereof, which renders any requests received by the NO and the DO, recommendations made by the DO or the CER and any written reasons for blocking or revoking blocking requests outside the purview of public scrutiny. More detail on the officers and committees that enforce the blocking rules and procedure can be found here.

Response on blocking from the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology

The response to our RTI from E-Security and Cyber Law Group is timely, given the recent clarification from the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology to a number of questions, raised by parliamentarian Shri Avinash Pande in the Rajya Sabha. The questions had been raised in reference to the Emergency blocking order under IT Act, the current status of the Central Monitoring System, Data Privacy law and Net Neutrality. The Centre for Communication Governance (CCG), National Law University New Delhi have extracted a set of 6 questions and you can read the full article here.

The governments response as quoted by CCG, clarifies under rule 9—the Government has issued directions for emergency blocking of a total number of 216 URLs from 1st January, 2014 till date and that a total of 255 URLs were blocked in 2014 and no URLs has been blocked in 2015 (till 31 March 2015) under S69A through the Committee constituted under the rules therein. Further, a total of 2091 URLs and 143 URLs were blocked in order to comply with the directions of the competent courts of India in 2014 and 2015 (till 31 March 2015) respectively. The government also clarified that the CER, had recommended not to block 19 URLs in the meetings held between 1^stJanuary 2014 upto till date and so far, two orders have been issued to revoke 251 blocked URLs from 1st January 2014 till date. Besides, CERT-In received requests for blocking of objectionable content from individuals and organisations, and these were forwarded to the concerned websites for appropriate action, however the response did not specify the number of requests.

We have prepared a table explaining the information released by the government and to highlight the inconsistency in their response.

Applicable rule and procedure outlined under the Blocking Rules	Number of websites
	2014	2015	Total
Rule 6 - Blocking requests from NO and others	255	None	255
Rule 9 - Blocking under emergency circumstances	-	-	216
Rule 10 - Blocking orders from Court	2091	143	2234
Requests from individuals and orgs forwarded to CERT-In	-	-	-
Recommendations to not block by CER	-	-	19
Number of blocking requests revoked	-	-	251

In a response to an RTI filed by the Software Freedom Law Centre, DeitY said that 708 URLs were blocked in 2012, 1,349 URLs in 2013, and 2,341 URLs in 2014.

Shreya Singhal v. Union of India

In its recent judgment, the SC of India upheld the constitutionality of 69A, stating that it was a narrowly-drawn provision with adequate safeguards. The constitutional challenge on behalf of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) considered the manner in which the blocking is done and the arguments focused on the secrecy present in blocking.

The rules may indicate that there is a requirement to identify and contact the originator of information, though as an expert has pointed out, there is no evidence of this in practice. The court has stressed the importance of a written order so that writ petitions may be filed under Article 226 of the Constitution. In doing so, the court seems to have assumed that the originator or intermediary is informed, and therefore held the view that any procedural inconsistencies may be challenged through writ petitions. However, this recourse is rendered ineffective not only due to procedural constraints, but also because of the confidentiality clause. The opaqueness through rule 16 severely reigns in the recourse that may be given to the originator and the intermediary. While the court notes that rule 16 requiring confidentality was argued to be unconstitutional, it does not state its opinion on this question in the judgment. One expert, holds the view that this, by implication, requires that requests cannot be confidential. However, such a reading down of rule 16 is yet to be tested.

Further, Sunil Abraham has pointed out, “block orders are unevenly implemented by ISPs making it impossible for anyone to independently monitor and reach a conclusion whether an internet resource is inaccessible as a result of a S69A block order or due to a network anomaly.” As there are no comprehensive list of blocked websites or of the legal orders through which they are blocked exists, the public has to rely on media reports and filing RTI requests to understand the censorship regime in India. CIS has previously analysed the leaked block lists and lists received as responses to RTI requests which have revealed that the block orders are full of errors and blocking of entire platforms and not just specific links has taken place.

While the state has the power of blocking content, doing so in secrecy and without judical scrutiny, mark deficiencies that remain in the procedure outlined under the provisions of the blocking rules . The Court could read down rule 16 except for a really narrow set of exceptions, and in not doing so, perhaps has overlooked the opportunities for reform in the existing system. The blocking of 32 websites, is an example of the opaqueness of the system of blocking orders, and where the safeguards assumed by the SC are often not observed such as there being no access to the recommendations that were made by the CER, or towards the revocation of the blocking orders subsequently. CIS filed the RTI to try and understand the grounds for blocking and related procedures and the response has thrown up some issues that must need urgent attention.

Response to RTI filed by CIS

Our first question sought clarification on the websites blocked on 30^thDecember 2014 and the response received from DeitY, E-Security and Cyber Law Group reveals that the websites had been blocked as “they were being used to post information related to ISIS using the resources provided by these websites”. The response also clarifies that the directions to block were issued on 18-12-2014 and as of 09-01-2015, after obtaining an undertaking from website owners, stating their compliance with the Government and Indian laws, the sites were unblocked.

It is not clear if ATS, Mumbai had been intercepting communication or if someone reported these websites. If the ATS was indeed intercepting communication, then as per the rules, the RC should be informed and their recommendations sought. It is unclear, if this was the case and the response evokes the confidentiality clause under rule 16 for not divulging further details. Based on our reading of the rules, court orders should be accessible to the public and without copies of requests and complaints received and knowledge of which organization raised them, there can be no appeal or recourse available to the intermediary or even the general public.

We also asked for a list of all requests for blocking of information that had been received by the DO between January 2013 and January 2015, including the copies of all files that had accepted or rejected. We also specifically, asked for a list of requests under rule 9. The response from DeitY stated that since January 1, 2015 to March 31, 2015 directions to block 143 URLs had been issued based on court orders. The response completely overlooks our request for information, covering the 2 year time period. It also does not cover all types of blocking orders under rule 6 and rule 9, nor the requests that are forwarded to CERT-In, as we have gauged from the ministry's response to the Parliament. Contrary to the SC's assumption of contacting the orginator of information, it is also clear from DeitY's response that only the websites had been contacted and the letter states that the “websites replied only after blocking of objectionable content”.

Further, seeking clarification on the functioning of the CER, we asked for the recent composition of members and the dates and copies of the minutes of all meetings including copies of the recommendations made by them. The response merely quotes rule 7 as the reference for the composition and does not provide any names or other details. We ascertain that as per the DeitY website Shri B.J. Srinath, Scientist-G/GC is the appointed Designated Officer, however this needs confirmation. While we are already aware of the structure of the CER which representatives and appointed public officers are guiding the examination of requests remains unclear. Presently, there are 3 Joint Secretaries appointed under the Ministry of Law and Justice, the Home Ministry has appointed 19, while 3 are appointed under the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. Further, it is not clear which grade of scientist would be appointed to this committee from CERT-In as the rules do not specify this. While the government has clarified in their answer to Parliament that the committee had recommended not to block 19 URLs in the meetings held between 1st January 2014 to till date, it is remains unclear who is taking these decisions to block and revoke blocked URLs. The response from DeitY specifies that the CER has met six times between 2014 and March 2015, however stops short on sharing any further information or copies of files on complaints and recommendations of the CER, citing rule 16.

Finally, answering our question on the composition of the RC the letter merely highlights the provision providing for the composition under 419A of the Indian Telegraph Rules, 1951. The response clarifies that so far, the RC has met once on 7th December, 2013 under the Chairmanship of the Cabinet Secretary, Department of Legal Affaits and Secretary, DOT. Our request for minutes of meetings and copies of orders and findings of the RC is denied by simply stating that “minutes are not available”. Under 419A, any directions for interception of any message or class of messages under sub-section (2) of Section 5 of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 issued by the competent authority shall contain reasons for such direction and a copy of such order shall be forwarded to the concerned RC within a period of seven working days. Given that the RC has met just once since 2013, it is unclear if the RC is not functioning or if the interception of messages is being guided through other procedures. Further, we do not yet know details or have any records of revocation orders or notices sent to intermediary contacts. This restricts the citizens’ right to receive information and DeitY should work to make these available for the public.

Given the response to our RTI, the Ministry's response to Parliament and the SC judgment we recommend the following steps be taken by the DeitY to ensure that we create a procedure that is just, accountable and follows the rule of law.

The revocation of rule 16 needs urgent clarification for two reasons:

Under Section 22 of the RTI Act provisions thereof, override all conflicting provisions in any other legislation.
In upholding the constitutionality of S69A the SC cites the requirement of reasons behind blocking orders to be recorded in writing, so that they may be challenged by means of writ petitions filed under A rticle 226 of the Constitution of India.

If the blocking orders or the meetings of the CER and RC that consider the reasons in the orders are to remain shrouded in secrecy and unavailable through RTI requests, filing writ petitions challenging these decisions will not be possible, rendering this very important safeguard for the protection of online free speech and expression infructuous. In summation, the need for comprehensive legislative reform remains in the blocking procedures and the government should act to address the pressing need for transparency and accountability. Not only does opacity curtial the strengths of democracy it also impedes good governance. We have filed an RTI seeking a comprehensive account of the blocking procedure, functioning of committees from 2009-2015 and we shall publish any information that we may receive.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/deity-says-143-urls-blocked-in-2015

Anti-trafficking Bill may lead to censorship

Swaraj Barooah and Gurshabad Grover — 2018-08-02T13:59:16Z

There are a few problematic provisions in the proposed legislation—it may severely impact freedom of expression.

The article was published in Livemint on July 24, 2018.

The legislative business of the monsoon session of Parliament kicked off on 18 July with the introduction of the Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and Rehabilitation) Bill, 2018, in the Lok Sabha. The intention of the Union government is to “make India a leader among South Asian countries to combat trafficking” through the passage of this Bill. Good intentions aside, there are a few problematic provisions in the proposed legislation, which may severely impact freedom of expression.

For instance, Section 36 of the Bill, which aims to prescribe punishment for the promotion or facilitation of trafficking, proposes a minimum three-year sentence for producing, publishing, broadcasting or distributing any type of material that promotes trafficking or exploitation. An attentive reading of the provision, however, reveals that it has been worded loosely enough to risk criminalizing many unrelated activities as well.

The phrase “any propaganda material that promotes trafficking of person or exploitation of a trafficked person in any manner” has wide amplitude, and many unconnected or even well-intentioned actions can be construed to come within its ambit as the Bill does not define what constitutes “promotion”. For example, in moralistic eyes, any sexual content online could be seen as promoting prurient interests, and thus also promoting trafficking.

Rather than imposing a rigorous standard of actual and direct nexus with the act of trafficking or exploitation, a vaguer standard which includes potentially unprovable causality, including by actors who may be completely unaware of such activity, is imposed. This opens the doors to using this provision for censorship and imposes a chilling effect on any literary or artistic work which may engage with sensitive topics, such as trafficking of women.

In the past, governments have been keen to restrict access to online escort services and pornography. In June 2016, the Union government banned 240 escort sites for obscenity even though it cannot do that under Section 69A or Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, or Section 8 of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act. In July 2015, the government asked internet service providers (ISPs) to block 857 pornography websites sites on grounds of outraging “morality” and “decency”, but later rescinded the order after widespread criticism. If historical record is any indication, Section 36 in this present Bill will legitimize such acts of censorship.

Section 39 proposes an even weaker standard for criminal acts by proposing that any act of publishing or advertising “which may lead to the trafficking of a person shall be punished” (emphasis added) with imprisonment for 5-10 years. In effect, the provision mandates punishment for vaguely defined actions that may not actually be connected to the trafficking of a person at all. This is in stark contrast to most provisions in criminal law, which require mens rea (intention) along with actus reus (guilty act). The excessive scope of this provision is prone to severe abuse, since without any burden of showing a causal connect, it could be argued that anything “may lead” to the trafficking of a person.

Another by-product of passing the proposed legislation would be a dramatic shift in India’s landscape of intermediary liability laws, i.e., rules which determine the liability of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and messaging services like Whatsapp and Signal for hosting or distributing unlawful content.

Provisions in the Bill that criminalize the “publication” and “distribution” of content, ignore that unlike the physical world, modern electronic communication requires third-party intermediaries to store and distribute content. This wording can implicate neutral communication pipeways, such as ISPs, online platforms, mobile messengers, which currently cannot even know of the presence of such material unless they surveil all their users. Under the proposed legislation, the fact that human traffickers used Whatsapp to communicate about their activities could be used to hold the messaging service criminally liable.

By proposing such, the Bill is in direct conflict with the internationally recognized Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability, and in dissonance with existing principles of Indian law, flowing from the Information Technology Act, 2000, that identify online platforms as “safe harbours” as long as they act as mere conduits. From the perspective of intermediaries, monitoring content is unfeasible, and sometimes technologically impossible as in the case of Whatsapp, which facilitates end-to-end encrypted messaging. And as a 2011 study by the Centre for Internet & Society showed, platforms are happy to over-comply in favour of censorship to escape liability rather than verify actual violations. The proposed changes will invariably lead to a chilling effect on speech on online platforms.

Considering these problematic provisions, it will be a wise move to send the Bill to a select committee in Parliament wherein the relevant stakeholders can engage with the lawmakers to arrive at a revised Bill, hopefully one which prevents human trafficking without threatening the Constitutional right of free speech.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/livemint-july-24-2018-swaraj-barooah-and-gurshabad-grover-anti-trafficking-bill-may-lead-to-censorship

The block heads

praskrishna — 2015-05-07T11:51:48Z

An entire government department is on the job, but can it really take down ‘offending’ online content?

The article by Sibi Arasu was published in the Hindu Businessline on April 3, 2015. Sunil Abraham gave his inputs.

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology’s (Deity) offices are as layered as its official website. From inside ‘Electronics Niketan’ at the Central Government Offices (CGO) complex in south Delhi, Deity’s army of director-generals, joint secretaries, department heads, scientists, clerks and staff of various grades and ranks keep an eye on how the country engages with the world wide web.

One set of cubicles is dedicated to the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), the nodal agency meant to combat hacking, phishing and generally fortify the internet in India. This includes the task of blocking and unblocking websites. A rather complicated job in a country where, according to one senior government official, “it’s technically infeasible to completely block content. If it’s at the gateway level, then we can filter it out. But for videos and other similar content, it is just not possible to completely block them.”

No bandwidth

Be it the AIB roasts that were taken down from YouTube or the controversial documentary India’s Daughter, which was blocked within eight hours of going online, the CERT and other allied departments have been kept busy over the past few months.

In a classic example of how blocking can go wrong, more than 36 websites were taken down in December last year to “prevent the spread of ISIS propaganda” only to be unblocked within weeks. Like elsewhere in the world, the attempt to “protect” citizens had unwittingly ended up hurting legitimate websites, including video sharing sites vimeo.com, dailymotion.com and the reference site archive.org. It was embarrassingly similar to the Chinese government’s actions in 2010 when it blocked all images of empty chairs, stools and tables as it attempted to staunch discussions about Liu Xiabo, the Nobel Peace Prize winner that year, who was missing from the awards ceremony as he was incarcerated in China.

Terming such government actions as dangerous and Orwellian, Apar Gupta, a cyber law specialist in Delhi who appeared for the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) in the PIL against Section 66A of the IT Act, says, “Any piece of content is contained within several file formats and obscured through technical devices like encryption, making its complete removal and eradication impossible.”

Internet freedom campaigners have maintained that Section 66A, which prescribed “punishment for sending offensive messages through a communication service”, was created solely to muzzle dissent and differences of opinion.

Although Section 66A was recently struck down, the law authorising blocking of content — namely, Section 69A — remains intact. The Central Government can block content it believes threatens the security of the State; the sovereignty, integrity or defence of India; friendly relations with foreign States; public order; or incites committing a cognisable offence related to any of the above. The government must, however, adhere to a set of procedures and safeguards, known as Blocking Rules.

“Larger, overbroad technical blocks can impede the functioning of the internet,” says internet policy analyst Raman Chima. “When a large website ‘blacklist’ and internet filter was proposed for Australia in 2009-10, research established that it would likely result in double-digit reductions in the internet’s speed and efficiency in that country.”

The ‘Streisand effect’, named after the Hollywood actress, is another common consequence of blocking. As Chima says, “Specific bans tend to be counterproductive and, more often than not, result in more awareness and interest in the banned content.”

Political manoeuvres

‘Ethical hacktivist’ and Hackers Hat founder Satish Ashwin sees banning and blocking as purely vote bank politics.

“Technically anything can be blocked or banned and it’s not a big deal, but the sheer volume of data uploaded makes it next to impossible to monitor and censor,” he says.

To those heralding the striking down of 66A as a victory for free speech, Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, points to the larger picture. “Nobody is really aware of the scale of censorship in India. Thousands of websites are blocked under Section 69A, mostly due to the maximalist enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). While 66A is gone, there are many other provisions within the IT Act that still regulate speech online. It is important to have quality laws drafted through an open, participatory process, where all stakeholders are consulted and responded to before bills are introduced in Parliament."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindu-businessline-april-3-2015-sibi-arasu-the-block-heads

Can Uber, Ola apps be blocked? Govt fighting cyber odds

praskrishna — 2015-06-14T09:52:28Z

The Delhi government is trying to block taxi hailing apps like Uber and Ola Cabs, but is it really possible?

The article by Siladitya Ray published in the Hindustan Times on June 4, 2015 quotes Sunil Abraham.

Taxi aggregators are in the firing line over passenger safety again after a 21-year-old Delhi woman alleged she was molested by a driver in an Uber cab near Gurgaon on Saturday morning.

The allegation came just six months after a 25-year-old financial analyst was allegedly raped in an Uber cab in Delhi, over which the victim took the cab aggregator's parent company to court in the US.

Following an order from the Delhi government, the Department of Telecommunication had issued an order to Internet Service Providers to block the websites and apps of taxi hailing aggregators like Uber, TaxiForSure and Ola Cabs.

But Internet Service Providers (ISP) have apparently expressed inability to block Uber, Ola as the web services feature strong end-to-end encryption.

How ISPs block sites

Often when an ISP blocks a website it severs your connection with the domain name. For example if ISPs want to block Google they simply block your access to www.google.com (i.e. Google's domain name), pretty simple. But if you are using an app like Google Now there is no domain name involved here the app talks directly to the server through using some form of encryption.

If we were to use an analogy, think of the ISP as a bridge that connects you to the web. The sites can be thought of as cars and their domain names as license plates. If the ISP wants to block a car with a certain license plate from going through it can do so with ease. But if a car's number plates are obscured (encryption) then ISP cannot block the car from passing through.

Uber and Ola

Most users book cabs from Ola or Uber using the company's apps, which use strong encryption effectively making their data virtually undetectable to ISPs.

"It's possible to block apps but it's much more difficult than before. Earlier you had to deal with a finite set of IP addresses but now these services are hosted on multiple cloud servers," said Sunil Abraham, the executive director of Bangalore based research organisation, the Centre for Internet and Society. "The ISPs themselves don't want to go through the pain of blocking these apps so they are asking the government to give them a solution," he added.

The government and the Department of Telecommunication are fighting near improbable odds in their endeavor to block these services on the web.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-siladitya-ray-june-4-can-uber-ola-apps-be-blocked

DesiSec: Cybersecurity and Civil Society in India

Laird Brown — 2015-06-29T16:25:43Z

As part of its project on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia, the Centre for Internet & Society conducted a series of interviews with cyber security actors. The interviews were compiled and edited into one documentary. The film produced by Purba Sarkar, edited by Aaron Joseph, and directed by Oxblood Ruffin features Malavika Jayaram, Nitin Pai, Namita Malhotra, Saikat Datta, Nishant Shah, Lawrence Liang, Anja Kovacs, Sikyong Lobsang Sangay and, Ravi Sharada Prasad.

Originally the idea was to do 24 interviews with an array of international experts: Technical, political, policy, legal, and activist. The project was initiated at the University of Toronto and over time a possibility emerged. Why not shape these interviews into a documentary about cybersecurity and civil society? And why not focus on the world’s largest democracy, India? Whether in India or the rest of the world there are several issues that are fundamental to life online: Privacy, surveillance, anonymity and, free speech. DesiSec includes all of these, and it examines the legal frameworks that shape how India deals with these challenges.

From the time it was shot till the final edit there has only been one change in the juridical topography: the dreaded 66A of the IT Act has been struck down. Otherwise, all else is in tact. DesiSec was produced by Purba Sarkar, shot and edited by Aaron Joseph, and directed by Oxblood Ruffin. It took our team from Bangalore to Delhi and, Dharamsala. We had the honour of interviewing: Malavika Jayaram, Nitin Pai, Namita Malhotra, Saikat Datta, Nishant Shah, Lawrence Liang, Anja Kovacs, Sikyong Lobsang Sangay and, Ravi Sharada Prasad. Everyone brought something special to the discussion and we are grateful for their insights. Also, we are particularly pleased to include the music of Charanjit Singh for the intro/outro of DesiSec. Mr. Singh is the inventor of acid house music, predating the Wikipedia entry for that category by five years. Someone should correct that.

DesiSec is released under the Creative Commons License Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC by 3.0). You can watch it on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/123722680 or download it legally and free of charge via torrent. Feel free to show, remix, and share with your friends. And let us know what you think!

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/desi-sec-cybersecurity-and-civil-society-in-india

The generation of e-Emergency

sunil — 2015-06-29T16:40:54Z

The next generation of censorship technology is expected to be ‘real-time content manipulation’ through ISPs and Internet companies.

The article was published in Livemint on June 22, 2015.

Censorship during the Emergency in the 1970s was done by clamping down on the media by intimidating editors and journalists, and installing a human censor at every news agency with a red pencil. In the age of both multicast and broadcast media, thought and speech control is more expensive and complicated but still possible to do. What governments across the world have realized is that traditional web censorship methods such as filtering and blocking are not effective because of circumvention technologies and the Streisand effect (a phenomenon in which an attempt to hide or censor information proves to be counter-productive). New methods to manipulate the networked public sphere have evolved accordingly. India, despite claims to the contrary, still does not have the budget and technological wherewithal to successfully pull off some of the censorship and surveillance techniques described below, but thanks to Moore’s law and to the global lack of export controls on such technologies, this might change in the future.

First, mass technological-enabled surveillance resulting in self-censorship and self-policing. The coordinated monitoring of Occupy protests in the US by the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) counter-terrorism units, police departments and the private sector showcased the bleeding edge of surveillance technologies. Stingrays or IMSI catchers are fake mobile towers that were used to monitor calls, Internet traffic and SMSes. Footage from helicopters, drones, high-res on-ground cameras and the existing CCTV network was matched with images available on social media using facial recognition technology. This intelligence was combined with data from the global-scale Internet surveillance that we know about thanks to the National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden, and what is dubbed “open source intelligence” gleaned by monitoring public social media activity; and then used by police during visits to intimidate activists and scare them off the protests.

Second, mass technological gaming—again, according to documents released by Snowden, the British spy agency, GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), has developed tools to seed false information online, cast fake votes in web polls, inflate visitor counts on sites, automatically discover content on video-hosting platform and send takedown notices, permanently disable accounts on computers, find private photographs on Facebook, monitor Skype activity in real time and harvest Skype contacts, prevent access to certain websites by using peer-to-peer based distributed denial of service attacks, spoof any email address and amplify propaganda on social media. According to The Intercept, a secret unit of GCHQ called the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) combined technology with psychology and other social sciences to “not only understand, but shape and control how online activism and discourse unfolds”. The JTRIG used fake victim blog posts, false flag operations and honey traps to discredit and manipulate activists.

Third, mass human manipulation. The exact size of the Kremlin troll army is unknown. But in an interview with Radio Liberty, St. Petersburg blogger Marat Burkhard (who spent two months working for Internet Research Agency) said, “there are about 40 rooms with about 20 people sitting in each, and each person has their assignments.” The room he worked in had each employee produce 135 comments on social media in every 12-hour shift for a monthly remuneration of 45,000 rubles. According to Burkhard, in order to bring a “feeling of authenticity”, his department was divided into teams of three—one of them would be a villain troll who would represent the voice of dissent, the other two would be the picture troll and the link troll. The picture troll would use images to counter the villain troll’s point of view by appealing to emotion while the link troll would use arguments and references to appeal to reason. In a day, the “troika” would cover 35 forums.

The next generation of censorship technology is expected to be “real-time content manipulation” through ISPs and Internet companies. We have already seen word filters where blacklisted words or phrases are automatically expunged. Last week, Bengaluru-based activist Thejesh GN detected that Airtel was injecting javascript into every web page that you download using a 3G connection. Airtel claims that it is injecting code developed by the Israeli firm Flash Networks to monitor data usage but the very same method can be used to make subtle personalized changes to web content. In China, according to a paper by Tao Zhu et al titled The Velocity of Censorship: High-Fidelity Detection of Microblog Post Deletions, “Weibo also sometimes makes it appear to a user that their post was successfully posted, but other users are not able to see the post. The poster receives no warning message in this case.”

More than two decades ago, John Gilmore, of Electronic Frontier Foundation, famously said, “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” That was when the topology of the Internet was highly decentralized and there were hundreds of ISPs that competed with each other to provide access. Given the information diet of the average netizen today, the Internet is, for all practical purposes, highly centralized and therefore governments find it easier and easier to control.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/livemint-june-22-2015-sunil-abraham-the-generation-of-e-emergency

Criminal Defamation: The Urgent Cause That has United Rahul Gandhi, Arvind Kejriwal and Subramanian Swamy

praskrishna — 2015-07-16T13:45:04Z

Three years ago when the then Janata Party president Subramanian Swamy accused Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and his mother of misappropriation of funds while trying to revive the National Herald newspaper, the Nehru-Gandhi scion threatened to sue him.

The article by Betwa Sharma was published in Huffington Post on July 15, 2015. Sunil Abraham gave his inputs.

Swamy's response was characteristic: "Grow up and file a defamation case".

In a strange turn of events, the matter of criminal defamation has brought together an unlikely cast of characters in an ongoing petition in the Supreme Court--Swamy, Gandhi and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, who knows a thing or two about making allegations.

They are petitioning the Apex Court to strike down penal provisions criminalising defamation, which they argue, has a "chilling effect" on the fundamental right to free speech. Opinion is divided around the world on whether or not defamation ought to be a criminal offence. Because some jurisdictions have stricter defamation laws, some indulge in a practise known as 'forum shopping', or suing in jurisdictions with harsher views on libel and slander.

The three leaders have filed separate petitions that are now being jointly heard by the court. They are challenging the constitutional validity of Sections 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code which make defamation a criminal offence punishable with up to two years in prison.

A verdict striking down the colonial-era S. 499, used by the British to suppress those opposing their rule, could prove to be a huge victory for free speech in India. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court struck down the draconian Section 66A of the Information Technology Act as "unconstitutional and void".

There is cause for optimism. The Supreme Court has already said that the validity of criminal defamation laws must be tested against the free speech guarantees of the constitution. The bench comprising of Justices Dipak Misra and Prafulla C Pant have observed that political debates maybe excluded as a criminal defamation offence.

While Gandhi, Subramanian and Kejriwal have been slapped with defamation suits by political rivals, there have been long-standing concerns over the threat posed by these provisions to the media and those who use social media to express their opinions against the rich and the powerful.

The government of the day is keen to maintain the status quo. In a recent submission, it has argued that S.499 is now the only provision to deal with defamation on social media and the only protection for reputation of citizens. But free speech activists say there is no evidence to show that a defamation law deters a person who is out to spread lies.

The questionable utility of S.499, the scope for its abuse and the culture of self-censorship, they argue, removes it from the ambit of "reasonable restrictions" which the state can impose on free speech under article 19 (2) of the constitution.

"Hardly a day goes by in India without some rich and powerful person initiating or threatening to initiate defamation suits against rivals or traditional media or ordinary citizens on social media," said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society. "It is unclear how much self-censorship is going on because Indians fearing jail terms avoid speaking truth to power.

On the issue of protecting people's dignity, Abraham said there is no prima facie evidence in India that criminalising defamation in India has resulted in the protection of the reputations of citizens from falsehoods.

"On the the other hand every other national media house and quite of few investigative journalists have been and continue to be harassed by criminal suits filed by the powerful," he told HuffPost India. "The chilling effect on speech is a disproportionate price for citizenry to pay for what is only a personal harm."

Under the leadership of Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa, the Tamil Nadu government filed 125 defamation cases against The Hindu and other publications between 2001 and 2004. On Tuesday, she filed a defamation suit against news portal Rediff.com for running two articles related to speculations about her health.

In the United States, defamation claims by public officials and public figures were severely curtailed after its Supreme Court ruled in 1964 that the complainant needs to prove actual malice with "clear and convincing" evidence. Further, truth is an absolute defence against defamation in the U.S.

On Tuesday, Swamy and Gandhi also argued that truth should be defence in defamation suits. “Truth is not a complete defence in criminal defamation. For a nation with a national motto of Satyameva Devata it is ironic," Swamy said.

BJP leader Swamy is of the view that defamation should only be subject to a civil suit which can be redressed by payment of monetary compensation. But the central government has argued that a defamer could be too poor to compensate the complainant.

"I am not saying there is no such thing as defamation. You can sue someone for defamation, but you cannot deprive someone of his liberty," he said in a recent interview with The Sunday Guardian.

Jayalalithaa filed a defamation suit against the senior BJP leader who alleged that most of the boats of Indian fishermen captured by Sri Lanka belong to the AIADMK chief, her close aide Sasikala and DMK leader TR Baalu.

The suit against the Congress Vice President was filed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh for allegedly blaming the Hindu right-wing organisation for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

BJP leader Nitin Gadkari sued Kejriwal after his name was included in AAP's list of "India's most corrupt."

"The accused is in the habit of making false and defamatory statements without any basis. The statements made by the accused and his party members have damaged and tarnished my image in the eyes of the people," Gadkari told the court, last year.

Legal analysts also find it hard to predict just how far the Supreme Court will go to protect free speech. Its judgment against S.66A of the IT Act is regarded as one of the biggest victories for free speech in India. Justice Misra was on the bench that struck down the provision for being “open-ended and unconstitutionally vague," and not fit to be covered under Article 19 (2).

But last month, in a judgment regarded as a blow to free speech, it was Justices Misra and Pant who ruled that freedom of speech is not an absolute right.

Senior Advocate Gopal Subramanium had argued, "Freedom to offend is also a part of freedom of speech.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/huffington-post-july-16-2015-betwa-sharma-criminal-defamation-the-urgent-cause-that-has-united-rahul-gandhi-arvind-kejriwal-and-subramanian-swamy