Centre for Internet and Society

Overview of the Constitutional Challenges to the IT Act

pranesh — 2014-12-19T09:01:50Z

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

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

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

Out of the Bedroom

nishant — 2013-09-06T08:32:58Z

We have shared it with our friends. We have watched it with our lovers. We have discussed it with our children and talked about it with our partners. It is in our bedrooms, hidden in sock drawers. It is in our laptops, in a folder marked "Miscellaneous". It is in our cellphones and tablets, protected under passwords. It is the biggest reason why people have learned to clean their browsing history and cookies from their browsers.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on August 25, 2013.

Whether we go into surreptitious shops to buy unmarked CDs or trawl through Torrent and user-generated content sites in the quest of a video, there is no denying the fact that it has become a part of our multimedia life. Even in countries like India, where consumption and distribution of pornography are punished by law, we know that pornography is rampant. With the rise of the digital technologies of easy copy and sharing, and the internet which facilitates amateur production and anonymous distribution, pornography has escaped the industrial market and become one of the most intimate and commonplace practices of the online world.

In fact, if Google trend results are to be believed, Indians are among the top 10 nationalities searching for pornography daily. Even a quick look at our internet history tells us that it has all been about porn. The morphed pictures of a naked Pooja Bhatt adorned the covers of Stardust in the late 1990s, warning us that the true potential of Photoshop had been realised. The extraordinary sensation of the Delhi Public School MMS case which captured two underage youngsters in a grainy sexcapade announced the arrival of user-generated porn in a big way. The demise of Savita Bhabhi — India's first pornographic graphic novel — is still recent enough for us to remember that the history of the internet in India is book-ended by porn and censorship.

Recent discussions on pornography have been catalysed by a public interest litigation requesting for a ban on internet pornography filed in April by Kamlesh Vaswani. Whether Vaswani's observations on what porn can make us do stem from his own personal epiphany or his self-appointed role as our moral compass is a discussion that merits its own special space. Similarly, a debate on the role, function, and use of pornography in a society is complex, rich and not for today.

Instead, I want to focus on the pre-Web imagination of porn that Vaswani and his endorsers are trying to impose upon the rest of us. There is a common misunderstanding that all porn is the same porn, no matter what the format, medium and aesthetics of representations. Or in other words, a homogenising presumption is that erotic fiction and fantasies, pictures of naked people in a magazine, adult films produced by entertainment houses, and user-generated videos on the internet are the same kind of porn. However, as historical legal debates and public discussions have shown us, what constitutes porn is specific to the technologies that produce it. There was a time when DH Lawrence's iconic novel now taught in undergraduate university courses — Lady Chatterley's Lover — was deemed pornographic and banned in India. In more recent times, the nation was in uproar at the Choli ke peeche song from Khalnayak which eventually won awards for its lyrics and choreography.

In all the controversy, there has so far been a "broadcast imagination" of how pornography gets produced, consumed and distributed. There is a very distinct separation of us versus them when it comes to pornography. They produce porn. They distribute porn. They push porn down our throats (that was probably a poor choice of words) by spamming us and buying Google adwords to infect our search results. We consume porn. And all we need to do is go and regulate, like we do with Bollywood, the central management and distribution mechanism so that the flow of pornography can be curbed. This is what I call a broadcast way of thinking, where the roles of the performers, producers, consumers and distributors of pornography are all distinct and can be regulated.

However, within the murky spaces of the World Wide Web, the scenario is quite different. Internet pornography is not the same as availability of pornography on the internet. True, the digital multimedia space of sharing and peer-2-peer distribution has made the internet the largest gateway to accessing pornographic objects which are produced through commercial production houses. However, the internet is not merely a way of getting access to existing older forms of porn. The internet also produces pornography that is new, strange, unprecedented and is an essential part of the everyday experience of being digitally connected and networked into sociality.

The recent controversies about the former congressman from New York, Anthony Weiner, sexting — sending inappropriate sexual messages through his cellphone — gives us some idea of what internet porn looks like. It is not just something captured on a phone-cam but interactive and collaboratively produced. Or as our own Porngate, where two cabinet ministers of the Karnataka legislative assembly were caught surfing some good old porn on their mobile devices while the legislature was in session, indicated, porn is not something confined to the privacy of our rooms. Naked flashmobs, young people experimenting with sexual identities in public, and sometimes bizarre videos of a bus-ride where the camera merely captures the banal and the everyday through a "pornographic gaze" are also a part of the digital porn landscape. The world of virtual reality and multiple online role-playing games offer simulated sexual experiences that allow for human, humanoid, and non-human avatars to engage in sexual activities in digital spaces. Peer-2-peer video chat platforms like Chatroulette, offer random encounters of the naked kind, where nothing is recorded but almost everything can be seen.

The list of pornography produced by the internet — as opposed to pornography made accessible through the internet — is huge. It doesn't just hide in subcultural practices but resides on popular video-sharing sites like YouTube or Tumblr blogs. It vibrates in our cellphones as we connect to people far away from us, and pulsates on the glowing screens of our tablets as we get glimpses of random strangers and their intimate bodies and moments. An attempt to ban and censor this porn is going to be futile because it does not necessarily take the shape of a full narrative text which can be examined by others to judge its moral content. Any petition that tries to censor such activities is going to fall flat on its face because it fails to recognise that sexual expression, engagement and experimentation is a part of being human — and the ubiquitous presence of digital technologies in our life is going to make the internet a fair playground for activities which might seem pornographic in nature. In fact, trying to restrict and censor them, will only make our task of identifying harmful pornography — porn that involves minors, or hate speech or extreme acts of violence — so much more difficult because it will be pushed into the underbelly of the internet which is much larger than the searched and indexed World Wide Web.

Trying to suggest that internet pornography is an appendage which can be surgically removed from everyday cyberspace is to not understand the integral part that pornography and sexual interactions play in the development and the unfolding of the internet. The more fruitful efforts would be to try and perhaps create a guideline that helps promote healthy sexual interaction and alerts us to undesirable sexual expressions which reinforce misogyny, violence, hate speech and non-consensual invasions of bodies and privacy. This blanket ban on trying to sweep all internet porn under a carpet is not going to work — it will just show up as a big bump, in places we had not foreseen.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-august-25-2013-nishant-shah-out-of-the-bedroom

Online Pre-Censorship is Harmful and Impractical

pranesh — 2011-12-12T17:00:50Z

The Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal wants Internet intermediaries to pre-censor content uploaded by their users. Pranesh Prakash takes issue with this and explains why this is a problem, even if the government's heart is in the right place. Further, he points out that now is the time to take action on the draconian IT Rules which are before the Parliament.

Mr. Sibal is a knowledgeable lawyer, and according to a senior lawyer friend of his with whom I spoke yesterday, greatly committed to ideals of freedom of speech. He would not lightly propose regulations that contravene Article 19(1)(a) [freedom of speech and expression] of our Constitution. Yet his recent proposals regarding controlling online speech seem unreasonable. My conclusion is that the minister has not properly grasped the way the Web works, is frustrated because of the arrogance of companies like Facebook, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. And while he has his heart in the right place, his lack of knowledge of the Internet is leading him astray. The more important concern is the IT Rules that have been in force since April 2011.

Background

The New York Times scooped a story on Monday revealing that Mr. Sibal and the MCIT had been in touch with Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, asking them to set up a system whereby they would manually filter user-generated content before it is published, to ensure that objectionable speech does not get published. Specifically, he mentioned content that hurt people's religious sentiments and content that Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor described as 'vile' and capable of inciting riots as being problems. Lastly, Mr. Sibal defended this as not being "censorship" by the government, but "supervision" of user-generated content by the companies themselves.

Concerns

One need not give lectures on the benefits of free speech, and Mr. Sibal is clear that he does not wish to impinge upon it. So one need not point out that freedom of speech means nothing if not the freedom to offend (as long as no harm is caused). There can, of course, be reasonable limitations on freedom of speech as provided in Article 19 of the ICCPR and in Article 19(2) of our Constitution. My problem lies elsewhere.

Secrecy

It is unfortunate that the New York Times has to be given credit for Mr. Sibal addressing a press conference on this issue (and he admitted as much). What he is proposing is not enforcement of existing rules and regulations, but of a new restriction on online speech. This should have, in a democracy, been put out for wide-ranging public consultations first.

Making intermediaries responsible

The more fundamental disagreement is that over how the question of what should not be published should be decided, and how that decision should be and how that should be carried out, and who can be held liable for unlawful speech. I believe that "to make the intermediary liable for the user violating that code would, I think, not serve the larger interests of the market." Mr. Sibal said that in May this year in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. The intermediaries (that is, all persons and companies who transmit or host content on behalf of a third party), are but messengers just like a post office and do not exercise editorial control, unlike a newspaper. (By all means prosecute Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft whenever they have created unlawful content, have exercised editorial control over unlawful content, have incited and encouraged unlawful activities, or know after a court order or the like that they are hosting illegal content and still do not remove it.) Newspapers have editors who can take responsibility for content published in the newspaper. They can afford to, because the number of articles in a newspaper is limited. YouTube, which has 48 hours of videos uploaded every minutes, cannot. One wag suggested that Mr. Sibal was not suggesting a means of censorship, but of employment generation and social welfare for censors and editors. To try and extend editorial duties to these 'intermediaries' by executive order or through 'forceful suggestions' to these companies cannot happen without amending s.79 of the Information Technology Act which ensures they are not to be held liable for their user's content: the users are. Internet speech has, to my knowledge, and to date, has never caused a riot in India. It is when it is translated into inflammatory speeches on the ground with megaphones that offensive speech, whether in books or on the Internet, actually become harmful, and those should be targeted instead. And the same laws that apply to offline speech already apply online. If such speech is inciting violence then the police can be contacted and a magistrate can take action. Indeed, Internet companies like Facebook, Google, etc., exercise self-regulation already (excessively and wrongly, I feel sometimes). Any person can flag any content on YouTube or Facebook as violating the site's terms of use. Indeed, even images of breast-feeding mothers have been removed from Facebook on the basis of such complaints. So it is mistaken to think that there is no self-regulation. In two recent cases, the High Courts of Bombay (Janhit Manch v. Union of India) and Madras (R. Karthikeyan v. Union of India) refused to direct the government and intermediaries to police online content, saying that places an excessive burden on freedom of speech.

IT Rules, 2011

In this regard, the IT Rules published in April 2011 are great offenders. While speech that is 'disparaging' (while not being defamatory) is not prohibited by any statute, yet intermediaries are required not to carry 'disparaging' speech, or speech to which the user has no right (how is this to be judged? do you have rights to the last joke that you forwarded?), or speech that promotes gambling (as the government of Sikkim does through the PlayWin lottery), and a myriad other kinds of speech that are not prohibited in print or on TV. Who is to judge whether something is 'disparaging'? The intermediary itself, on pain of being liable for prosecution if it is found have made the wrong decision. And any person may send a notice to an intermediary to 'disable' content, which has to be done within 36 hours if the intermediary doesn't want to be held liable. Worst of all, there is no requirement to inform the user whose content it is, nor to inform the public that the content is being removed. It just disappears, into a memory hole. It does not require a paranoid conspiracy theorist to see this as a grave threat to freedom of speech. Many human rights activists and lawyers have made a very strong case that the IT Rules on Intermediary Due Diligence are unconstitutional. Parliament still has an opportunity to reject these rules until the end of the 2012 budget session. Parliamentarians must act now to uphold their oaths to the Constitution.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/online-pre-censorship-harmful-impractical

Online Censorship: How Government should Approach Regulation of Speech

sunil — 2012-12-05T07:06:52Z

Why is there a constant brouhaha in India about online censorship? What must be done to address this?

Sunil Abraham's article was published in the Economic Times on December 2, 2012.

Of course, we must get the basics right â€” bad law has to be amended, read down by courts or repealed, and bad implementation of law should be addressed via reform and capacity building for the police. But most importantly those in power must understand how to approach the regulation of speech.

To begin with, speech is regulated across the world. Even in the US â€” contrary to popular impression in India â€” speech is regulated both online and offline.

However, law is not the basis of most of this regulation. Speech is largely regulated by social norms. Different corners of our online and offline society have quite complex forms of self-regulation.

The harm caused by speech is often proportionate to the power of the person speaking â€” it maybe unacceptable for a politician or a filmstar to make an inflammatory remark but that very same utterance from an ordinary citizen may be totally fine.

To complicate matters, the very same speech by the very same person could be harmful or harmless based on context. A newspaper editor may share obscene jokes with friends in a bar, but may not take similar liberties in an editorial.

The legal scholar Alan Dershowitz tells us, "The best answer to bad speech is good speech." More recently the quote has been amended, with "more speech" replacing "good speech".

Censorship by the state has to be reserved for the rarest of rare circumstances. This is because censorship usually results in unintended consequences.

The "Streisand Effect", named after the singer-actor Barbra Streisand, is one of these consequences wherein attempts to hide or censor information only result in wider circulation and greater publicity.

The Maharashtra police's attempt to censor the voices of two women has resulted in their speech being broadcast across the nation on social and mainstream media. If the state had instead focused on producing good speech and more speech, nobody would have even heard of these women.

Circumventing Censorship

Peer-to-peer technologies on the internet mimic the topology of human networks and can also precipitate unintended consequences when subject to regulation. John Gilmore, a respected free software developer, puts it succinctly: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

Most of the internet censorship in the US is due to IPR-enforcement activities. This is why Christopher Soghoian, a leading privacy activist, attributes the massive adoption of privacy-enhancing technologies such as proxies and VPNs (virtual private networks) by American consumers to the crackdown on online piracy.

In India, and even when the government has had legitimate reasons to regulate speech, there have been unintended consequences.

During the exodus of people from the North-east, the five SMS per day restriction imposed by the government resulted in another exodus from SMS to alternative messaging platforms such as BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), WhatsApp and Twitter.

In both cases the circumvention of censorship by the users has resulted in a worsening situation for law-enforcement organisations â€” VPNs and applications like WhatsApp are much more difficult to monitor and regulate.

Mixed Memes

Regulation of speech also cannot be confused with cyber war or security. Speech can occasionally have security implications but that cannot be the basis for enlightened regulation.

A cyber war expert may be tempted to think of censored content as weapons, but unlike weapons that usually remain lethal, content that can cause harm today may become completely harmless tomorrow. This is unlike a computer virus or malware. For example, during the exodus, the online edition of ET featured the complete list of 309 URLs that were in the four block orders issued by the government to ISPs.

However, this did not result in fresh harm, demonstrating the fallacy of cyber war analogies. A cyber security expert, on the other hand, may be tempted to implement a 360Â° blanket surveillance to regulate speech, but as Gilmore again puts it, "If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody."

In short, if your answer to bad speech is more censorship, more surveillance and more regulation, then as the internet meme goes, "You're Doing It Wrong".

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-times-december-2-2012-sunil-abraham-online-censorship

Online Censorship on the Rise: Why I Prefer to Save Things Offline

nishant — 2016-06-05T03:26:50Z

As governments use their power to erase what they do not approve of from the web, cloud storage will not be enough.

The article was published in the Indian Express on April 17, 2016.

It took me some time to trust the cloud. Growing up with digital technologies that were neither resilient nor reliable — a floppy drive could go kaput without you having done anything, a CD once scratched could not be recovered, hard drives malfunctioned and it was a given that once every few months your PC would crash and need a re-install — I have always been paranoid about making backups and storing information. Once I kicked into my professional years, I developed a foolproof, albeit paranoid, system, where I backed up my machines to a common hard drive, made a mirror image of that hard drive, and for absolutely crucial documents, I would put them on to a separate DVD which would have the emergency documents. It was around 2006, when I discovered the cloud.

It began with Google’s unlimited email accounts where you could mail information to yourself and then it would stay there for a digital eternity. I noticed that the size of my digital storage began decreasing. I no longer download videos I find on the web. I don’t save information on a device and I have come to think of the web as one large cloud, relying on the fact that if something is online once, it will always be available to me.

However, over the last couple of months, I have started noticing something different in my usage patterns. These days, when I do come across interesting information, instead of merely indexing it, I find myself making an offline copy of that information. Tweets enter a Storify folder. YouTube videos get downloaded. I make PDF copies of blogs and take screenshots of digital medial updates. I have been wondering why I am suddenly so invested in archiving the web when, theoretically, it is always there.

When I voiced this to a group of young students, I was surprised to hear that I wasn’t alone. The web is becoming a space that is crowded with take-downs, deletions, removals, and retractions which leave no archival memory. The students quickly pointed out that these take-downs are not just personal redactions. In fact, what we personally choose to remove has very little chances of actually disappearing from the web. Instead, these are things that are removed by governments, private companies and intermediaries who are being largely held liable for the content of the information that they make available.

Turkey, recently, demanded that German authorities remove a satirical German video titled Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan mocking their President. In response, Germany reminded the Turkish diplomacy of that lovely little thing called freedom of speech, and in the meantime, Extra 3, the group that had released the video on YouTube, added English subtitles to the video. Just for perks. I hope you gave a brownie point to Germany, even as you scrambled to see the video.

On the home front, though, things are not as celebratory. The minister of state for information and broadcasting, Rajyavardhan Rathore, and the head of the BJP’s information and technology cell, Arvind Gupta, have called for action against journalist Raghav Chopra who tweeted a photoshopped image of PM Narendra Modi bending down to touch the feet of a man dressed in Saudi Arabia’s national dress, to make a political comment about the PM’s recent visit to SA.

The two politicos, who have not had much to say about the doctored videos that were used to convict innocent students in JNU or the photoshopping that the government’s Press Information Bureau had indulged in to give us that iconic image of the prime minister doing an aerial survey of #ChennaiFloods, have taken umbrage against an image because it seems (obviously) false, and are demanding its takedown.

My proclivity for saving things offline is perhaps fuelled by this web of partisan censorship and the atmosphere of precarious hostility that governments seem to be supporting. Increasingly, we have seen, in India and around the globe, a rush of political power that exercises its clout to remove information, images and stories that they do not approve of.

Instinctively, I am reacting to the fact that intellectual questioning or cultural critique is being removed from the web at the behest of these vested powers, and that the cloud, light and airy as it sounds, is prone to some incredible acts of censorship and removal. I have found myself facing too many removal notices and take-down errors when trying to revisit bookmarked sites, that I am beginning to feel that the only way to keep my information safe might be to archive the whole web on a personal server.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-17-2016-online-censorship-on-the-rise

Online Abuse of Teen Girls in Kashmir Leads to Arrests

praskrishna — 2013-03-06T03:51:20Z

Online abuse and a fatwa aimed at a rock band of Muslim teenage girls in Kashmir have led to arrests and a threat of a lawsuit.

This article by Betwa Sharma was published in the New York Times on February 8, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Three men were arrested this week for posting threatening messages on the Facebook page of Praagaash, an amateur rock band in Indian-occupied Kashmir made of up Muslim girls. “The investigation is ongoing,” said Manoj Pandita, spokesman for the Jammu and Kashmir police, indicating that more arrests may follow.

The three men were charged under Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which applies to “offensive” messages being sent through communication services, and Section 506 of the Ranbir Penal Code, which applies to criminal intimidation. Mr. Pandita said that it had been easy to track the I.P. addresses of the Facebook users.

A prominent human rights lawyer, Parvez Imroz of the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, is planning to sue the top religious leader in Kashmir, who called for the fatwa, for “demonizing Kashmir before the international community” and for “running a parallel judicial system in the valley.”

Mr. Imroz told India Ink that human rights organizations like his needed support from the international community to highlight their concerns, and such fatwas reflected badly on the Kashmiri society. “He is diverting attention away from real issues of human rights to nonissues like music and purdah,” Mr. Imroz said.

The fatwa against the band was issued by the Grand Mufti Bashiruddin Ahmad.

In his fatwa, Mr. Ahmad advised women to only sing inside the house to other female members of the family, and wear a veil whenever they left the house. “They must stay within limits,” he said.

Following the band’s first live performance in December, Aneeqa Khalid, Noma Nazir and Farah Deeba, 10th-grade students who are 15 and 16 years old, became the target of abuse and threats on Facebook by people who accused them of being un-Islamic because they had performed in public, especially before men. Some commenters called them “sluts” and “prostitutes;” others suggested that they should be raped.

The band Praagaash, which means “darkness into light,” disbanded following a national controversy surrounding these threatening messages. The threats were condemned by many, including the state’s chief minister.

To many Kashmiris, both the fatwa and the arrests by the government are unnecessary. Some say that the controversy erupted after the state’s chief minister, Omar Abdullah, got involved by expressing his support for the band on Twitter and then calling for investigation against those writing the threatening messages.

“Nobody here had a problem with the rock band,” said Aala Fazili, a doctorate student at Kashmir University, pointing out that the band’s performance in December had not led to any protests or physical threats against them.

Mr. Fazili, 32, added that people shouldn’t be arrested for writing abusive posts on Facebook. “You cannot call an abuse a threat,” he said.

Mr. Pandita, the Kashmir police spokesman, said the investigators were making a distinction between a threat and abuse on the basis of “gravity.”

Pranesh Prakash, from the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore, asked whether people who hold protests calling for the death of the author Salman Rushdie should also be arrested for making threats.

“I would hold that no expression of violent thoughts, online or offline, should be made criminal, even if it is repugnantly misogynistic, unless it takes the form of a credible threat that causes harm, or is harassment that constitutes harm,” he said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ny-times-feb-8-2013-betwa-sharma-online-abuse-of-teen-girls-in-kashmir-leads-to-arrests

Officials Raise Questions over Indian Government’s Efforts

praskrishna — 2012-09-04T12:36:48Z

As per a recent report, it has been revealed that the Indian government despite making several efforts to resolve the issue of hate speech seems failing in the same.

This post by Bruce Totolos was published in the French Tribune on August 22, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

It is being said that no doubt the government has taken strict actions since the rumours came into picture from the last week. 245 Web pages have been blocked with effect from Friday along with limitations over text messages to five a day for 15 days. But, many websites are still containing some morphed images of violence.

As per some officials in New Delhi, it is a matter of huge concern still not being taken seriously by online companies like Google and Facebook. It is known to everyone that previous such images and SMSs led some northeastern India’s people to leave Chennai, Bangalore and Pune, they say.

However, the internet firms claim that they are making all possible endeavours. It was told that only reason for not answering certain request was it hampered users’ rights.

“The Internet intermediaries are responding slowly because now they have to trawl through their networks and identify hate speech. The government acted appropriately, but without sufficient sophistication”, said executive director Sunil Abraham from the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/frenchtribune-com-bruce-totolos-aug-22-2012-officials-raise-questions-over-indian-governments-efforts

Northeast exodus: Is there a mechanism to pre-screen social media content?

praskrishna — 2012-09-04T04:06:46Z

The government has passed the blame buck on social media and blocked hundreds of websites, which it claims, hosted hate speech and inflammatory content, enough to incite violence. But is it feasible to pre-screen objectionable or provocative content, and reject it before posting so that there is no chance of such rumours?

The article by Wahid Bukhari was published in merinews on August 23, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The government took the action after Home Minister RK Singh alleged that the exodus of northeastern people from southern states such as Bangalore, Mumbai and Pune was a result of the panic and rumours created because of the content uploaded on these websites, many according to him were created by elements across the border in Pakistan. Though many suspected that Mr Singh's claim was an excuse to save the government from its inefficiency in controlling the riots, and the exodus of the northeastern people who were seen boarding the trains to their home states with their belongings amid fears of reprisal attacks.

Was the action meant to pass on the inefficiency buck or not - the government has, at least, managed to shift the focus of the media from exodus to the debate - as to whether social networking sites or websites promoting hatred should be blocked or not - given the democratic rights of every citizen to freedom of speech and expression.

Around a hundred more websites have been reported promoting hate speech and Google, Facebook and other social networking sites like Twitter have been asked to remove such content as soon as possible but in this whole debate one question remains unanswered: How does removing a post from Twitter or Facebook make a difference, several hours after it was published? One might argue even an hour is enough for an inflammatory picture or comment to incite violence or hatred. As a consequence, one might demand that a comment is screened before it is posted on a website, otherwise it doesn't serve any purpose.

Whether pre-screening is technically possible, Pranesh Prakash maintains: "Given the amount of content uploaded on the larger social networks, pre-screening content is just not possible, while removal upon complaint is. They don't have editors like newspapers do; importantly, they shouldn't."

Perhaps, a mid way is to intervene prior to registration on social media websites. All those who register should be made aware of the content that's not permissible, and make them aware of relevant laws and repercussions of breaking them if their complicity is proved. Similarly, these sites can be asked by the Indian government to continuously remind registered users as well as general public, through mass media advertizing, about what kind of content is not permissible. The government, from its side, can strengthen cyber laws to empower sites such as Facebook and Twitter to curb posting of provocative content due to presence of these stringent laws.

Terming the government action unfortunate, Mr Prakash who is a programme manager with the Bangalore-based research and advocacy group, The Centre for Internet and Society believes that government botched up at so many levels. “I don't think the government should be going after Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. It should be going to them, to work with them on removing content,” Mr Prakash suggests. "The larger social networks have dedicated complaints mechanisms, which the government could have asked them to run 24x7 for a few days, and to expedite that process, and both complained itself and asked the public to use the complaints process,” he adds.

Though Pakistan has rubbished the claims that it has any role in fomenting trouble, but it has also asked the Indian government to provide it with evidence so that it could nab the accused. Whether or not there is any evidence is a secondary question, the primary blame will always rest with both the state and central governments who failed to stop the exodus of fear-stricken people from the northeast.

Experts like Mr Prakash are wondering why the government didn't pay back in the same coin by using the social media to dispel the rumours. “It is a pity that they notified a new policy to encourage governmental use of social media only today; they sorely needed it this last week,” Mr Prakash rues.

The government has blocked content related to thirty Twitter accounts but another surprising thing is that only accounts using the web interface have been blocked, and such accounts can still be accessed on BlackBerrys or other smartphones.

The only visible thing government did on ground when the exodus started taking place in Bangalore was the setting up of helplines but did they help in preventing the exodus - there are enough reasons to believe against it. "There were some complaints that the people attending some of these helplines could only speak in Kannada, and not the English or Hindi that people calling for help were expecting. Even such positive steps were executed badly." Mr Prakash informs.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/www-merinews-com-wahid-bukhari-august-23-2012-northeast-exodus

Noose tightens on freedom of speech on the Internet

praskrishna — 2015-03-27T01:01:18Z

A worrying trend has emerged in the last few years, where intermediaries around the world are being used as chokepoints to restrict freedom of expression online, and to hold users accountable for content.

The blog post by Gabey Goh was originally published by Digital News Asia and mirrored in Malaymail Online on March 26, 2015. Jyoti Panday gave her inputs.

“All communication across the Internet is facilitated by intermediaries: Service providers, social networks, search engines, and more,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior global policy analyst Jeremy Malcolm.

“These services are all routinely asked to take down content, and their policies for responding are often muddled, heavy-handed, or inconsistent.

“That results in censorship and the limiting of people’s rights,” he told Digital News Asia (DNA) on the sidelines of RightsCon, an Internet and human rights conference hosted in Manila from March 24-25.

This year, the government of France is moving to implement regulation that makes Internet operators “accomplices” of hate-speech offences if they host extremist messages.

In February, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) urged ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) to ensure that domain name registries and registrars “investigate copyright abuse complaints and respond appropriately.”

Closer to home, the Malaysian Government passed a controversial amendment to the Evidence Act 1950 – Section 114A – back in 2012.

Under Section 114A, an Internet user is deemed the publisher of any online content unless proven otherwise. The new legislation also makes individuals and those who administer, operate or provide spaces for online community forums, blogging and hosting services, liable for content published through their services.

Due to the potential negative impact on freedom of expression, a roadmap called the Manila Principles on Internet Liability was launched during RightsCon.

The EFF, Centre for Internet Society India, Article 19, and other global partners unveiled the principles, whose framework outlines clear, fair requirements for content removal requests and details how to minimise the damage a takedown can do.

For example, if content is restricted because it’s unlawful in one country or region, then the scope of the restriction should be geographically limited as well.

The principles also urge adoption of laws shielding intermediaries from liability for third-party content, which encourages the creation of platforms that allow for online discussion and debate about controversial issues.

“Our goal is to protect everyone’s freedom of expression with a framework of safeguards and best practices for responding to requests for content removal,” said Malcolm.

Jyoti Panday from the Centre for Internet and Society India noted that people ask for expression to be removed from the Internet for various reasons, good and bad, claiming the authority of myriad local and national laws.

“It’s easy for important, lawful content to get caught in the crossfire. We hope these principles empower everyone – from governments and intermediaries, to the public – to fight back when online expression is censored,” she said.

The Manila Principles can be summarised in six key points:

Intermediaries should be shielded by law from liability for third-party content
Content must not be required to be restricted without an order by a judicial authority
Requests for restrictions of content must be clear, be unambiguous, and follow due process
Laws and content restriction orders and practices must comply with the tests of necessity and proportionality
Laws and content restriction policies and practices must respect due process
Transparency and accountability must be built in to laws and content restriction policies and practices

“Right now, different countries have differing levels of protection when it comes to intermediary liability, and we’re saying that there should be expansive protection across all content,” said Malcolm.

“In addition, there is no logic in distinguishing between intellectual property (IP) and other forms of content as in the case in the United States for example, where under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, intermediaries are not liable for third party content but that doesn’t apply to IP,” he added.

The Manila Principles have two main targets: Governments and intermediaries themselves. The coalition, led by EFF, will be approaching governments to present the document and discuss the recommendations on how best to establish an intermediary liability regime.

This includes immunising intermediaries from liability and requiring a court order before any content can be taken down.

With intermediaries, the list includes companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, to discuss establishing transparency, responsibility and accountability in any actions taken.

“We recognise that a lot of the time, intermediaries are not waiting for a court order before taking down content, and we’re telling them to avoid removing content unless there is a sufficiently good reason and users have been notified and presented that reason,” said Malcolm.

The overall aim with the Manila Principles is to influence policy changes for the better.

Malcolm pointed out that by coincidence, some encouraging developments have taken place in India. On the same day the principles were released, the Indian Supreme Court struck down the notorious Section 66A of the country’s Information Technology Act.

Since 2009, the law had allowed both criminal charges against users and the removal of content by intermediaries based on vague allegations that the content was “grossly offensive or has menacing character,” or that false information was posted “for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred or ill will.”

Calling it a “landmark decision,” Malcolm noted that the case shows why the establishment and promotion of the Manila Principles are important.

“Not only is the potential overreach of this provision obvious on its face, but it was, in practice, misused to quell legitimate discussion online, including in the case of the plaintiffs in that case – two young women, one of whom made an innocuous Facebook post mildly critical of government officials, and the other who ‘liked’ it,” he said.

The court however, upheld section 69A of the Act, which allows the Government to block online content; and Section 79(3), which makes intermediaries such as YouTube or Facebook liable for not complying with government orders for censorship of content. — Digital News Asia

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/malaymail-online-gabey-goh-march-26-2015-noose-tightens-on-freedom-of-speech-on-the-internet

No more blocking of entire websites?

praskrishna — 2012-06-26T09:47:02Z

The Madras HC has taken one step to ensure that entire websites are no longer blocked, but it doesn't mean that arbitrary takedowns will cease.

CIS research is quoted in this article by Danish Sheikh published in the Business Standard on June 24, 2012

Vimeo’s back. As is Pastebin, and Pirate Bay and IsoHunt. For your, you know, legitimate file-sharing practices.

Having been approached by a consortium of Internet Service Providers, the Madras High Court has issued a welcome clarification of its “John Doe order” issued in favour of RK Productions for the films 3 and Dammu. Designed to protect against potential offences by yet-unidentified persons, the sweeping scope of the order left a very wide, undefined scope to ISPs dealing with potentially infringing material. The ISPs over-complied, a host of file-sharing websites were barred from Indian servers overnight — oh, and “Anonymous” got more annoyed. Note here that the vagueness of the order extended to not specifying any infringing websites in particular.

Following the representation from the ISPs, the Court has provided them a specific directive. The new order states that the interim injunction was granted only with respect to the particular URL which featured the infringing movie, and not the entire website. No more blocking entire websites — the ISPs are now required to be informed about the particulars of where the infringing movie is kept within 48 hours.

The clarification couldn’t have come at a more vital time, and will hopefully serve as a precedent to curb an alarming practice that can be traced back to 2002. Back then, the Delhi High Court was approached in a matter concerning the unauthorised transmission of Ten Sports by unlicensed cable operators. The result was the Court’s first John Doe order with respect to media transmission: a commissioner was appointed to search premises of unnamed cable operators and seize evidence by taking photographs and video films. This particular order was then relied on by the Court almost a decade later in pre-emptively injuncting piracy of UTV Software Communication’s Saat Khoon Maaf and Thank You. The trend escalated from there, with similar orders being obtained for a number of films including Don 2, Bodyguard, Kahaani and Department, to name a few.

Where the last few years have seen a steadily rising output of orders largely from the Delhi and Madras High Court, just last week it was the Bombay High Court that joined the fray. Approached by Viacom 18 Motion Pictures, it passed a John Doe pre-emptively banning the piracy of Viacom’s Gangs of Wasseypur prior to its June 22 release. Considering the Bombay High Court’s noted apprehension in granting ex-parte orders, this decision looked set to add further momentum to the John Doe juggernaut.

Instead, we get the Madras High Court’s welcome restraint. That vague injunctions are an abuse of process is a principle that has been noted time and again, with the Delhi High Court even noting that “vague and general injunction of anticipatory nature can never be granted”. This is coupled with the larger access to information and free speech issue that has been raised more vocally following the ire with the mass block of file-sharing websites. The antecedents to this scenario may well be the media infrastructure cases of the ‘50s and ‘60s, where newspaper content was indirectly being regulated by way of regulation of newsprint, advertisement space, etc. Recognising these indirect control mechanisms in their ultimate speech-restricting form, the Supreme Court struck them down as unreasonable restrictions to the right to free expression under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution.

Prevention isn’t always better than cure. The Madras High Court has thankfully taken one step in the direction. What is left dangling is the other big question — that of the intermediary rules. There may now be a barrier to blocking of entire websites in this manner, but as so many internet users have found, one doesn’t have to necessarily approach the Courts if they want internet service providers to take down content: the ISPs are happy to do that for free. As a Centre for Internet and Society study found, takedown requests sent to ISPs, no matter how trivial or flimsy, will for the most part be met by acquiescence of the order. Without appropriate checks and balances, the intermediary will over-comply.

While the ISPs’ intervention before the Madras High Court is an encouraging sign, it doesn’t mean that the arbitrary takedowns under the intermediary rules will cease to happen. The digital media site Medianama quotes an ISP representative citing concern that ISPs were being wrongfully vilified on the Internet — and (significantly) that it would adversely impact their business if video streaming was disabled for users. The same commercial considerations wouldn’t likely stand when it comes to the bit-by-bit requests that come forward under the IT rules. Along with focusing attention on the High Court’s clarification, we need to sustain the movement to strike down the intermediary rules and push for a more transparent and fair mechanism.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/no-more-blocking-of-websites

No more 66A!

geetha — 2015-03-26T02:01:31Z

In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court has struck down Section 66A. Today was a great day for freedom of speech on the Internet! When Section 66A was in operation, if you made a statement that led to offence, you could be prosecuted. We are an offence-friendly nation, judging by media reports in the last year. It was a year of book-bans, website blocking and takedown requests. Facebook’s Transparency Report showed that next to the US, India made the most requests for information about user accounts. A complaint under Section 66A would be a ground for such requests.

Section 66A hung like a sword in the middle: Shaheen Dhada was arrested in Maharashtra for observing that Bal Thackeray’s funeral shut down the city, Devu Chodankar in Goa and Syed Waqar in Karnataka were arrested for making posts about Narendra Modi, and a Puducherry man was arrested for criticizing P. Chidambaram’s son. The law was vague and so widely worded that it was prone to misuse, and was in fact being misused.

Today, the Supreme Court struck down Section 66A in its judgment on a set of petitions heard together last year and earlier this year. Stating that the law is vague, the bench comprising Chelameshwar and Nariman, JJ. held that while restrictions on free speech are constitutional insofar as they are in line with Article 19(2) of the Constitution. Section 66A, they held, does not meet this test: The central protection of free speech is the freedom to make statements that “offend, shock or disturb”, and Section 66A is an unconstitutional curtailment of these freedoms. To cross the threshold of constitutional limitation, the impugned speech must be of such a nature that it incites violence or is an exhortation to violence. Section 66A, by being extremely vague and broad, does not meet this threshold. These are, of course, drawn from news reports of the judgment; the judgment is not available yet.

Reports also say that Section 79(3)(b) has been read down. Previously, any private individual or entity, and the government and its departments could request intermediaries to take down a website, without a court order. If the intermediaries did not comply, they would lose immunity under Section 79. The Supreme Court judgment states that both in Rule 3(4) of the Intermediaries Guidelines and in Section 79(3)(b), the "actual knowledge of the court order or government notification" is necessary before website takedowns can be effected. In effect, this mean that intermediaries need not act upon private notices under Section 79, while they can act upon them if they choose. This stops intermediaries from standing judge over what constitutes an unlawful act. If they choose not to take down content after receiving a private notice, they will not lose immunity under Section 79.

Section 69A, the website blocking procedure, has been left intact by the Court, despite infirmities such as a lack of judicial review and non-transparent operation. More updates when the judgment is made available.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/no-more-66a

NGOs, individuals urge state CMs to curb Internet shutdown

praskrishna — 2017-04-07T02:43:39Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New intermediary guidelines: The good and the bad

TorShark — 2021-03-15T13:52:46Z

In pursuance of the government releasing the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, this blogpost offers a quick rundown of some of the changes brought about the Rules, and how they line up with existing principles of best practices in content moderation, among others.

This article originally appeared in the Down to Earth magazine. Reposted with permission.

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The Government of India notified the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. The operation of these rules would be in supersession of the existing intermediary liability rules under the Information Technology (IT) Act, made back in 2011.

These IL rules would have a significant impact on our relationships with internet ‘intermediaries’, i.e. gatekeepers and getaways to the internet, including social media platforms, communication and messaging channels.

The rules also make a bid to include entities that have not traditionally been considered ‘intermediaries’ within the law, including curated-content platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime as well as digital news publications.

These rules are a significant step-up from the draft version of the amendments floated by the Union government two years ago; in this period, the relationship between the government around the world and major intermediaries changed significantly.

The insistence of these entities in the past, that they are not ‘arbiters of truth’, for instance, has not always held water in their own decision-makings.

Both Twitter and Facebook, for instance, have locked the former United States president Donald Trump out of their platforms. Twitter has also resisted to fully comply with government censorship requests in India, spilling into an interesting policy tussle between the two entities. It is in the context of these changes, therefore, that we must we consider the new rules.

What changed for the good?

One of the immediate standouts of these rules is in the more granular way in which it aims to approach the problem of intermediary regulation. The previous draft — and in general the entirety of the law — had continued to treat ‘intermediaries’ as a monolithic entity, entirely definable by section 2(w) of the IT Act, which in turn derived much of its legal language from the EU E-commerce Directive of 2000.

Intermediaries in the directive were treated more like ‘simple conduits’ or dumb, passive carriers who did not play any active role in the content. While that might have been the truth of the internet when these laws and rules were first enacted, the internet today looks much different.

Not only is there a diversification of services offered by these intermediaries, there’s also a significant issue of scale, wielded by a few select players, either by centralisation or by the sheer number of user bases. A broad, general mandate would, therefore, miss out on many of these nuances, leading to imperfect regulatory outcomes.

The new rules, therefore, envisage three types of entities:

There are the ‘intermediaries’ within the traditional, section 2(w) meaning of the IT Act. This would be the broad umbrella term for all entities that would fall within the ambit of the rules.
There are the ‘social media intermediaries’ (SMI), as entities, which enable online interaction between two or more users.
The rules identify ‘significant social media intermediaries’ (SSMI), which would mean entities with user-thresholds as notified by the Central Government.

The levels of obligations vary based on these hierarchies of classification. For instance, an SSMI would be obligated with a much higher standard of transparency and accountability towards their users. They would have to fulfill by publishing six-monthly transparency reports, where they have to outline how they dealt with requests for content removal, how they deployed automated tools to filter content, and so on.

I have previously argued how transparency reports, when done well, are an excellent way of understanding the breadth of government and social media censorships. Legally mandating this is then perhaps a step in the right direction.

Some other requirements under this transparency principle include giving notice to users whose content has been disabled, allowing them to contest such removal, etc.

One of the other rules from the older draft that had raised a significant amount of concern was the proactive filtering mandate, where intermediaries were liable to basically filter for all unlawful content. This was problematic on two counts:

Developments in machine learning technologies are simply not up there to make this a possibility, which would mean that there would always be a chance that legitimate and legal content would get censored, leading to general chilling effect on digital expression
The technical and financial burden this would impose on intermediaries would have impacted the competition in the market.

The new rules seemed to have lessened this burden, by first, reducing it from being mandatory to being best endeavour-basis; and second, by reducing the ambit of ‘unlawful content’ to only include content depicting sexual abuse, child sexual abuse imagery (CSAM) and duplicating to already disabled / removed content.

This specificity would be useful for better deployment of such technologies, since previous research has shown that it’s considerably easier to train a machine learning tool on corpus of CSAM or abuse, rather than on more contextual, subjective matters such as hate speech.

What should go?

That being said, it is concerning that the new rules choose to bring online curated content platforms (OCCPs) within the ambit of the law by proposals of a three-tiered self-regulatory body and schedules outlining guidelines about the rating system these entities should deploy.

In the last two years, several attempts have been made by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), an industry body consisting of representatives of these OCCPs, to bring about a self-regulatory code that fills in the supposed regulatory gap in the Indian law.

It is not known if these stakeholders were consulted before the enactment of these provisions. Some of this framework would also apply to publishers of digital news portals.

Noticeably, this entire chapter was also missing from the old draft, and introducing it in the final form of the law without due public consultations is problematic.

Part III and onwards of the rules, which broadly deal with the regulation of these entities, therefore, should be put on hold and opened up for a period of public and stakeholder consultations to adhere to the true spirit of democratic participation.

The author would like to thank Gurshabad Grover for his editorial suggestions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/new-intermediary-guidelines-the-good-and-the-bad

New Delhi Expands Curbs on Web Content

praskrishna — 2012-08-24T13:16:22Z

India on Thursday broadened recent efforts to regulate the Internet with moves to block Twitter accounts of some prominent journalists and content from mainstream news organizations, sparking a backlash across social media in the country.

This article by R Jai Krishna and Rumman Ahmed was published in the Wall Street Journal on August 23, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Since last week, the government has blocked content that it claims has fueled continuing communal violence in the northeast of the country. That fighting, between Muslim settlers and members of an indigenous group in the state of Assam, has left more than 80 people dead and sent ripples of tension across India.

The government confirms it has blocked around 250 Web pages it says were inciting Muslims to attack northeasterners, including sites carrying doctored photos purporting to show Muslim victims of fighting in Assam. Officials say these images on the sites, coupled with mass SMS phone messages threatening reprisals, have caused panicked northeasterners to flee their homes in a number of large Indian cities.

In recent days, though, the government has quietly widened its offensive, drawing up lists of journalists' Twitter accounts and news stories by local and foreign media organizations to be blocked. The lists, some of which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by two telecom operators, include Twitter handles of journalists who have been critical of the government and some who have parodied Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The government didn't respond to requests for comment.

The government's actions caused an uproar on Twitter, where hashtags such as #GOIBlocks and #Emergency2012 were trending Thursday. "The Emergency" refers to a period in the 1970s when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi cracked down on media freedoms and civil liberties.

"The government's move to block several Twitter handles is a clear case of administrative overreach," said Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. "This action means citizens are less likely to believe that the government can use its powers responsibly."

Government officials said Internet curbs are necessary to maintain harmony in a multicultural nation of 1.2 billion people.

Pankaj Pachauri, a spokesman for Mr. Singh, acknowledged the government had asked for Twitter's help to block six accounts that impersonate the prime minister. One of those accounts appeared on the government's lists. Twitter, based in San Francisco, has agreed to review the requests, he said. A Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment. Mr. Pachauri said earlier this week that Indian cyber authorities unilaterally blocked those six accounts.

Those six Twitter accounts faced government scrutiny because they made remarks that could have increased tensions, not because they poked fun at the prime minister, Mr. Pachauri said. "We're all for media freedom and encourage criticism by the media," he added. "But when it comes to inciting trouble between communities then we have to take firm action."

U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on Tuesday that "we are always on the side of full freedom of the Internet." She added that "we also always urge the government to maintain its own commitment to human rights, fundamental freedoms, rule of law."

India's Constitution allows restrictions on free speech for a number of reasons, including defense of "the sovereignty and integrity" of the country and in order to maintain "public order, decency or morality." Critics say the government has used the vague framing of the Constitution to clamp down on a widening array of Internet material, threatening India's democratic traditions.

Last year, the government framed new rules that require Internet companies to remove within 36 hours material that falls into a range of subjective categories—for instance, anything "ethnically objectionable," "grossly harmful," "defamatory" or "blasphemous."

India's telecoms minister, Kapil Sibal, in December urged Google Inc., and other Internet companies to screen derogatory material from their sites. The requests came amid anger over content that parodied Mr. Singh and Sonia Gandhi, president of the ruling Congress party, as well as other leading politicians.

"One always wonders if the government is using the garb of hate speech and communalism to…limit political criticism online," said Apar Gupta, a cyberlaw expert at Advani & Co., a Delhi-based law firm.

Google and Facebook executives are facing criminal charges in a New Delhi court for allegedly hosting objectionable material on their sites. If found guilty, the executives could face jail time or fines. The companies have petitioned to have the charges dropped, arguing that they shouldn't be held liable for material posted by users. Both firms have said they will remove material that contravenes their own standards or local laws.

Google, Facebook and Twitter again came under fire from India this week amid violence in Assam. Google and Facebook said Tuesday that they were complying with Indian government requests to remove content. Twitter hasn't commented.

Kanchan Gupta, a columnist who has been a fierce critic of the Congress party-led government, said his Twitter account had been temporarily blocked Wednesday night and Thursday. His name was on the government lists. "They thought they could do this slyly," he said. "They didn't anticipate the backlash on Twitter."

Raghavan Jagannathan, editor in chief of FirstPost.com, an Indian news portal that was on the lists, said some of its stories had been blocked.

"We understand that the government wants to stop the circulation of incendiary material that may inflame passions, but should it be blocking news and opinions on the subject?" he said. "I am not sure the decisions are well-thought-out."

Doha, Qatar-based Al Jazeera, an international cable-news organization, was also on the list. An Al Jazeera spokesman said the company was seeking a response from the government on reports of media restrictions affecting it and other outlets.

The government appeared unmoved. "Every company whether it's a construction company or an entertainment company or a social media company, it has to operate within the laws of the given country," Junior Minister for Communications Sachin Pilot told reporters on Wednesday.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wsj-com-jai-krishna-and-rumman-ahmed-aug-23-2012-new-delhi-expands-curbs-on-web-content

Netizens Rejoice Over SC Ruling to Keep the Net Free

praskrishna — 2015-03-25T15:16:03Z

The Supreme Court ruling to strike down Section 66A of the Information Technology (IT) Act has been welcomed by the city’s netizens.

The article by Parina Dhilla was published in the New Indian Express on March 25, 2015. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

Sharanya Gopinathan, a recent graduate, was overjoyed at the decision. The youngster, who is now pursuing her masters in London, recalls the time her post on Facebook about Prime Minister Narendra Modi was reported for being offensive.

“It was just a sentence about how I felt about Mr Modi. Nothing obscene but it still got reported,” she says. She believes the Internet to be “the last guard of freedom”, where free speech has real meaning because there is no government and corporate control.

Forums propagating freedom on the World Wide Web too have applauded the verdict.

T Vishnu Vardhan, programme director of Access to Knowledge at the Centre for Internet and Society, says the draconian aspect of the IT Act has finally been removed.

The other laws coming under the IT Act’s ambit too need to be reviewed and changed, he said.

Lawyers told Express that many times, they have advised clients to take down posts that could be construed as offensive under Section 66A.

Lawrence Liang, a lawyer with the Alternative Law Forum, says, “Recently, we were approached by a woman saying she was being harassed by a mob after she tweeted about the beef ban in Maharashtra. We asked her to delete the tweet and lie low.”

“But now, I won’t advise people to take down their posts from the internet. It is a good ruling and gives people their freedom of speech and expression on the Internet,” Lawrence says.

Change on the Horizon

With bans raining down in the country, many believe the apex court’s decision will bring about change.

Yogita Dakshina, a freelance content writer who regularly posts about the hardships faced by the LGBT community, says she has always posted fearlessly but some of her family members were always scared that she would court trouble due to the provisions of Section 66A.

Prabahan Chakravorty, a PhD student, is of the view that this will be a big lift for those in the creative field. “The rights to freedom and expression need to be given to all citizens, especially writers and artists. Some people may consider a few posts offensive, but then, the world is offensive and people need to deal with that.”

On the responsibility that falls upon netizens with this verdict, Ankura Nayak, a student of Mount Carmel College, says, “People are responsible and they know what to post. There were a few people who posted irresponsible content even before this ruling. But these are few in number compared to responsible netizens.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/new-indian-express-march-25-2015-parina-dhilla-netizens-rejoice-over-sc-ruling-to-keep-the-net-free