Centre for Internet and Society

Electronication: Ragas and the Future

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T07:18:29Z

What more is better than listening to music and later on getting into a discursive conversation with its composers to better understand the transformative power of high-energy music. CIS is pleased to invite you to an evening conference followed by a concert by Charanjit Singh, Samrat B. and Imaad Shah playing improvised versions of Charanjit Singh's “Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat”.

About the Music

In 1982, seasoned Bollywood composer and arranger Charanjit Singh visited Singapore and got his hands on the now holy trinity of a Roland 303, 808, and Jupiter 8 - the core of acid house and the gear that forged the genesis of electronic dance music as we know it today.

Later that year, EMI India releases an album limited to a few thousand copies: "Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to A Disco Beat". It presents Charanjit's effort at using what was then an entirely new technology to bridge the gap between programmed beats, synth lines, and classical Indian music motifs.

It essentially sinks without a trace.

In 2008, Dutch label Bollywood Connection re-released this LP to an unsuspecting and wholly ignorant public, convinced that these beats were established in the clubs of Chicago and Detroit in 1986, except they never were.

Since the re-release, this album has been raising eyebrows worldwide.

About the Musicians

Charanjit Singh is a seasoned Bollywood composer and arranger who lives in Bombay. We recently met him, and we are now working with him to bring his work back into the twenty-first century and into the public eye, where it belongs. On March 6, he will give a performance from this landmark album for the first time in nearly 30 years.

Samrat B. performs under the name Teddy Boy Kill along with another musician. Streaming from continuous transmutation of music & audio-emotive desires, the sound of Teddy Boy Kill stems out of Psychedelic, Dub, Electro, Rock & Funk. The music is an attempt to revive the dance & groove mentality.

Imaad Shah is a musician, writer, and actor based in Mumbai. An avid enthusiast of music and pop history, he has dug deep into the Bollywood sound culture and is part of Pulp Society, a funk jazz act from Mumbai.

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

Google Policy Fellowship Program: Asia Chapter

praskrishna — 2011-08-02T07:34:24Z

For the ardent followers of free and open Internet and for those who love to debate on technology, media law and Internet-related policy issues, there is some good news. The Centre for Internet and Society, India is conducting a Google Policy Fellowship program this summer!

Offered for the first time in Asia Pacific, the Google Policy Fellowship offers successful applicants the opportunity to develop research and debate on issues relating to freedom of expression for a minimum of ten weeks from June to August 2011. The applicants will be selected in Australia, India and Hong Kong respectively.

The Centre for Internet and Society will select the India Fellow, and is accepting applications for the position before March 27, 2011. Google is providing a USD 7,500 stipend to the India Fellow, who will be selected by April 18, 2011.

To apply, please send to google.fellowship@cis-india.org the following materials:

Statement of Purpose: A brief write-up outlining about your interest and qualifications for the programme including the relevant academic, professional and extracurricular experiences. As part of the write-up, also explain on what you hope to gain from participation in the programme and what research work concerning free expression online you would like to further through this programme. (About 1200 words max).
Resume
Three references

More information about the focus of the work that the Google Policy Fellow will take on is described below1. More information about the Google Policy Fellowship program is available in the FAQ2.

Research Agenda Outline

The research proposals, and the fellowship itself, are to be anchored in the reality of the growing threat to civil liberties in cyberspace, with the consequent curbs on free expression that arise. The aim of the research is to chart out a comprehensive map of the legal and policy frameworks relating to free expression within the Asia-Pacific region and also examine people’s attitudes and ground-level movements relating to the same. This second component will necessarily involve some amount of empirical research: the fellows across different regions (for 2011, there will be fellows from India, Australia and Hong Kong) will be expected to use a survey on similar lines, so that the results could be adequately contrasted.

The research would involve but not necessarily be limited to the following areas:

Understanding Dissent

This component would involve looking at how dissent is negotiated in the region by the legal system and the ways in which governments seek to stifle and control online dissent. Specific points of interrogation would include:

The extent to which the constitution and other laws in the region protect freedom of expression and the extent to which they are enforced.
Judicial decisions relating to free expression, censorship and dissent. Have they examined how speech and other activities on the Internet should be afforded free speech protection?
The kind of material deemed objectionable and subject to censorship and/or penalization.
The kind of penalties placed on writers, commentators and bloggers for posting objectionable materials on the Internet.
Understanding the economic environment in which free expression operates: chains of media ownership, state restrictions on the means of journalistic production and distribution, and the levels of state control through allocation of advertising or subsidies would be part of this question.
Further, what are the laws relating to encryption and telecom security, as well as to intermediary liability, and how do they affect free expression?

Understanding Free Expression

To be examined here is the question of how freedom of expression is perceived by people. What is the extent to which people believe the right is available to them — as balanced by conceivably conflicting rights such as privacy?

One part of proceeding on this would be to track a set of activist bloggers, gauging their take on various issues.
Another part would include tracking public opinion through comments pages on articles relating to free speech issues; taking a survey or coordinating focus group research. However, this is by no means the most reliable way to gauge the same and is, in particular, one area that will require an appropriate methodology to be developed by the fellows in consultation with the partner organizations.

Both these components are essential in being able to proceed with the third aspect, mentioned below.

Understanding and Facilitating Movements

This final aspect will involve looking at how free expression advocates come together, or fail to do so.

Is there a defined activist community in the region?
If not, what are the possible reasons behind failure of collaboration or organization? Have there been attempts towards the same?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Google Policy Fellowship program?

The Google Policy Fellowship program offers students interested in Internet and technology related policy issues with an opportunity to spend their summer working on these issues at the Centre for Internet and Society at Bangalore. Students will work for a period of ten weeks starting from June 2011. The research agenda for the program is based on legal and policy frameworks in the region connected to the ground-level perception of free expression.
Applications for the Fellowship should carry these:

Statement of Purpose: A brief write-up outlining about your interest and qualifications for the programme including the relevant academic, professional and extracurricular experiences. As part of the write-up, also explain on what you hope to gain from participation in the programme and what research work concerning free expression online you would like to further through this programme. (About 1200 words max).
Resume
Three references

Important Dates
What is the program timeline?

March 27, 2011:	Student application deadline; applications must be received by midnight 00:00 GMT.
April 18, 2011:	Student applicants are notified of the status of their applications.
June 2011:	Students begin their fellowship with the host organization (start date to be determined by students and the host organization); Google issues initial student stipends.
July 2011:	Mid-term evaluations; Google issues mid-term stipends.
August 2011:	Final evaluations; Google issues final stipends.

EligibilityI am an International student can I apply and participate in the program?

Are there any age restrictions on participating?

Yes. You must be 18 years of age or older by 1 January 2011 to be eligible to participate in Google Policy Fellowship program in 2011.

Are there citizenship requirements for the Fellowship?

For the time being, we are only accepting students eligible to work in India (e.g. Indian citizens, permanent residents of India, and individuals presently holding an Indian student visa. Google cannot provide guidance or assistance on obtaining the necessary documentation to meet the criteria.

Who is eligible to participate as a student in Google Policy Fellowship program?

In order to participate in the program, you must be a student. Google defines a student as an individual enrolled in or accepted into an accredited institution including (but not necessarily limited to) colleges, universities, masters programs, PhD programs and undergraduate programs. Eligibility is based on enrollment in an accredited university by 1 January 2011.

I am an International student can I apply and participate in the program?

In order to participate in the program, you must be a student (see Google's definition of a student above). You must also be eligible to work in India (see section on citizen requirements for fellowship above). Google cannot provide guidance or assistance on obtaining the necessary documentation to meet this criterion.

I have been accepted into an accredited post-secondary school program, but have not yet begun attending. Can I still take part in the program?

As long as you are enrolled in a college or university program as of 1 January 2011, you are eligible to participate in the program.

I graduate in the middle of the program. Can I still participate?

As long as you are enrolled in a college or university program as of 1 January 2011, you are eligible to participate in the program.

Payments, Forms, and Other Administrative Stuff

How do payments work*?

Google will provide a stipend of USD 7,500 equivalent to each Fellow for the summer.

Accepted students in good standing with their host organization will receive a USD 2,500 stipend payable shortly after they begin the Fellowship in June 2011.
Students who receive passing mid-term evaluations by their host organization will receive a USD 1,500 stipend shortly after the mid-term evaluation in July 2011.
Students who receive passing final evaluations by their host organization and who have submitted their final program evaluations will receive a USD 3,500 stipend shortly after final evaluations in August 2011.

Please note: Payments will be made by electronic bank transfer, and are contingent upon satisfactory evaluations by the host organization, completion of all required enrollment and other forms. Fellows are responsible for payment of any taxes associated with their receipt of the Fellowship stipend.

*While the three step payment structure given here corresponds to the one in the United States, disbursement of the amount may be altered as felt necessary.

What documentation is required from students?

Students should be prepared, upon request, to provide Google or the host organization with transcripts from their accredited institution as proof of enrollment or admission status. Transcripts do not need to be official (photo copy of original will be sufficient).

I would like to use the work I did for my Google Policy Fellowship to obtain course credit from my university. Is this acceptable?

Yes. If you need documentation from Google to provide to your school for course credit, you can contact Google. We will not provide documentation until we have received a final evaluation from your mentoring organization.

Host Organizations

What is Google's relationship with the Centre for Internet and Society?

Google provides the funding and administrative support for individual fellows directly. Google and the Centre for Internet and Society are not partners or affiliates. The Centre for Internet and Society does not represent the views or opinions of Google and cannot bind Google legally.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/google-policy-fellowship

Global Challenges to Freedom of Expression

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T07:17:59Z

The Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, Human Rights Law Network, Delhi and the Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore are pleased to invite you to a public lecture by Mr. Frank La Rue, President of the Central American Institute for Studies of Social Democracy and UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression on March 4, 2011, 6 pm at the Constitutional Club in New Delhi.

Frank La Rue

Mr. La Rue is the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He has worked on human rights for the past 25 years. He is the founder of the Centre for Legal Action for Human Rights (CALDH), both in Washington DC and Guatemala, which became the first Guatemalan NGO to bring cases of human rights violations to the Inter-American System. CALDH was also the first Guatemalan NGO to promote economic, social and cultural rights. Mr. La Rue also brought the first genocide case against the military dictatorship in Guatemala. As a human rights activist, his name was presented to the Nobel Peace Prize committee in 2004.

La Rue has previously served as a Presidential Commissioner for Human Rights in Guatemala, as a Human Rights Adviser to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Guatemala and as a consultant to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. He is President of Instituto Demos in Guatemala City. La Rue holds a BA in Legal and Social Sciences from the University of San Carlos, Guatemala and a postgraduate degree in U.S. foreign policy from Johns Hopkins University.

The entrance is free. Refreshments will be served from 5.30 pm onwards.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/global-freedom-expression

Role of the Internet in Fostering Freedom of Expression and Strengthening Activism in India - A Workshop in Delhi

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T07:18:10Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (India) and the Central American Institute for Studies of Social Democracy DEMOS (Guatemala) have the pleasure to invite you to a day-long workshop on the role of the Internet in fostering freedom of expression and strengthening activism in India. The workshop will take place in the Constitution Club in Delhi on 4 March 2011.

With the significant role reported for new technologies in recent revolutions in Tunesia, Egypt, and elsewhere, activists in India, too, have taken a renewed interest in the potential of the Internet to support their struggles for social change and social justice. But what are some of the potential stumble blocks activists in India might run into in their exploration of the Internet's potential? What are the legal restrictions and frameworks activists should be aware of when they use new technologies in their work? And what can we do to create an environment in which the online world unequivocally supports efforts for greater democratisation and social justice offline, rather than thwart them?

It is questions such as these that this workshop seeks to answer, through a mix of panel discussions, unconference sessions, a film screening, and technical and legal clinics in its day-long program.

Our hope is that the workshop will help participants as well as organisers to get a stronger sense of the potential and challenges of online activism in the particular context of India, as well as to start building stronger networks among the activists interested in these issues in the country.

Participation in the workshop is free. However, we would be grateful if you could confirm your attendance by emailing Anja Kovacs at "anja at cisindia dot org", ideally by 2 March.

We hope you will join us to contribute your own insights and experiences as well as to learn from others about this important new arena of activists' work.

Looking forward to welcoming you at the workshop!

The Agenda

9.30-9.45: Welcome and introductions

9.45-10.15:   Introduction to the Internet and freedom of expression
   By Frank La Rue, President of the Central American Institute for Studies of Social Democracy
   and UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression and Opinion

10.15-10.45: Film screening: “Brave New Medium”
   By Delhi-based docu film maker Subasri Krishnan
   The film addresses Internet and censorship in South-East Asia
   while raising pertinent questions about the implications of this lessons for Indian activists,
   and will be screened in the presence of the filmmaker.

10.45-11.30: Unconference: Online challenges and ways forward for Indian activists:
where are we today and what to do next?
Small group discussion sessions, as per the priorities of the participants

11.30-11.50: Tea/Coffee Break

11.50-12.40: Reporting back and plenary discussion: Challenges for freedom of expression on
the Internet in India and abroad: legal framework, ground realities, alternative visions
With national and international activists, lawyers and researchers as additional resource persons

12.40-13.00: Consultation: Can a global “Internet Bill of Rights” help?
With Lisa Horner, Dynamic Coalition on Internet Rights and Principles of the UN Internet
Governance Forum

13.00 - 14.00: Lunch Break (lunch will be provided)

14.00 - 15.30: Parallel sessions:

legal clinic with a representative from Google and human rights lawyers – to answer any legal question regarding freedom of expression online you may have
technical clinic with a representative from Tactical Tech – to explore the significance of terms like
“Tor” and “proxy” and ways in which you can stay safe and secure online at all times.
If you have a laptop, bring it if you intend to attend this session!

15.30 - 16.15: Strategies for the way forward

Moderated by Mr Frank La Rue

16.15-16.30 : Closing remarks

16.30 - 17.00: Tea/Coffee

Followed by a public lecture by Mr. Frank La Rue at 6 pm, at the same venue, on Global Challenges to Freedom of Expression. Entrance free. All welcome.

Information about the Organisers

The Centre for Internet and Society

The Centre for Internet and Society is located in Bangalore, India. It critically engages with concerns of digital pluralism and public accountability in the field of Internet and Society, with particular emphasis on South-South dialogues and exchange. Through multidisciplinary research, intervention, and collaboration, it seeks to explore, understand, and affect the shape and form of the internet, and its relationship with the political, cultural, and social milieu of our times.

DEMOS Institute

The Demos Institute, based in Guatemala, is a research centre that promotes democratic alternatives for Guatemala, under the human rights framework. Within DEMOS, there is a research team which supports the mandate of Frank La Rue, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, in the making of his annual reports before the United Nations Human Rights Council.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/fostering-freedom-of-expression

New Kids on the Blog

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T16:10:34Z

Across the world, the blogosphere is shrinking. But that might not be a bad thing. Look closer, self-indulgence has found newer platforms, and only the fittest and the smartest blogs have survived. This article was published by the Indian Express on February 6, 2011. Indian Express reporter spoke with Nishant Shah.

Meet aneesha, a personable 20-something in a red jacket, with a coffee “without cream” cupped in her hands. Seven years ago, this Delhi-based professional was an avid user of LiveJournal. Most of her friends are from the online world; she met their blogs before she knew them personally. “My family’s perception of me and what I am are very different,” she says, “I hide myself in the layers of the internet.” Aneesha found herself and her friends through blogs; today, however, she has no time or inclination for the blogging world. “We used to write about the sunshine, a cute dog, a nice day. Who has the time for that any more?”

“I quit”. “We are moving out”. “This blog is Dead”.

An aerial view of the blogosphere resembles an abandoned city, with silence blowing through boarded-up windows. Recent Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults in the US reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. According to the 2010 report, “In 2006, 28 per cent of teens in the 12-17 age group, and adults between 18 and 29 were bloggers, but by 2009, the numbers had dropped to 14 per cent of teens and 15 per cent of adults. During the same period, the percentage of online adults over 30 who were bloggers rose from 7 per cent to 11 per cent.” These numbers reflect American reality, but the blogosphere has not been similarly mapped and analysed in India, says Nishant Shah, director, research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. When contacted, WordPress, a blog tool and publishing platform, said that they don’t publish country-specific statistics either.

While blogging in itself seems to have peaked and plateaued, blog-like activities have moved to other online spaces. Blogs were at the social media forefront around five years ago. According to Technorati, an internet search engine for blogs, the blogosphere in 2004 was eight times as large as it was in June 2003. Since then, Blogger and WordPress have been stagnating, says Nielsen, a media-research firm. A 2010 article in The Economist pointed out, that according to Blogads, which sells ads, “media buyers’ inquiries increased tenfold between 2004 and 2008, but have grown by only 17 per cent since then.”

But the numbers only tell a part of the story. The immensity of the blogging world means that it will always remain terra incognita. Its vastness allows poorly-written, lazily-reasoned dribbles to exist, but it also provides an unparalleled democratic platform (if you have access to the internet). The blogosphere, which had become an endless echo chamber, has evolved into a more interesting space, with startling diversity. Teenagers have found new fads, and moved out; instead, adults are setting up their couches here. Over the last four-five years, the fittest and smartest blogs have survived, whereas those with a readership of one have sunk to Google’s ocean floor. Few bloggers actually bother to delete their accounts, most starve away because of the author’s neglect and the audiences’ disinterest. The ones that have thrived have created communities of kindred souls, with an eye for beauty or a knack for the kooky. The Indian blogosphere is rich ground for posts on cinema, economics, sports, design and politics. Blogs can be conclaves of critics against the mainstream, they can be crucial support systems for the grieving. But how did we get here?

Peter Merholz, a lover of words and etymologies, and founding partner of consultancy Adaptive Path, created the word “blog” in 1999.

Playing with syllables, he decided to change “weblog” into “blog” for short. This San Francisco-based designer writes in his blog, “I like that it’s roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking.”

For something that started as verbal upchucking, blogging has evolved over the decade. Anupam Mukerji, aka the Fake IPL Player, whose blog was the sensational sideshow that overshadowed the second edition of the Indian Premier League in 2009, says, “Self-indulgence is out. People want to be entertained and nobody really cares what you had for breakfast.”

In the early part of this decade, blogging was about self-expression, within a small community (like LiveJournal), says Aneesha. Kiran Jonnalagadda, a Bangalore-based social technologist, and founder of HasGeek, which organises technical discussions, recalls, “Your blog was not secret, but was private by virtue of not many people being online. It was a safe assumption for young people that their parents and siblings would never read their blog. The medium of the blog was the most advanced technology of the day. It was crude by modern standards, but fantastic compared to anything earlier.” Aneesha and Jonnalagadda abandoned LiveJournal after their initial euphoria. Today, it is said, only the Russians use it, since it was bought over by a Russian company in 2007.

Blogging has come of age in India where we now see the growth of the “modern blogger”, says Jonnalagadda, one of the early Indian bloggers. “It’s important to distinguish between these two — the blogger as someone who indulged in self-expression in the early 2000s, who’s now moved to Facebook and other tools, versus the modern blogger who uses the same technology but is actually a small media publisher serving a niche segment.”

Facebook and Twitter are dummy-friendly and easily satisfy the exhibitionist, the voyeur, the curious or the intellectual. In 2010, there were 152 million blogs on the internet; it doesn’t seem much in comparison to 600 million Facebook users. On Facebook, it takes just a few seconds to upload a picture. A “thumbs up” is all it takes to “like” a photo or a comment. A personal update becomes part of the newsflash on friends’ homepages. Facebook’s “Notes” can satisfy the desire to write long, random and personal outpourings. “Tagging” friends in these notes assures one of a readership. Sharing so little with so many has never been this effortless. Blogs, defined as a format of writing, where pieces are arranged in a reverse chronological order, are no longer the preferred tool for the personal.

Technorati reports that the significant growth of mobile blogging is a key trend in 2010. Though the smartphone may still be relatively new in India, bloggers have reported that mobile blogging has lead to shorter posts and to a growing preference for Facebook and Twitter. Kiruba Shankar, CEO of Business Blogging Pvt Ltd, a social media consultancy in Chennai, and a once-prolific blogger, says, “Five years back, I was averaging two posts a day. In 2010, which was my worst year in blogging, I did one post every two months! It’s not that I stopped writing. I just moved my updates to Twitter and Facebook.” Shankar has even written an entire book in 140-character capsules on the merits of collaborative work: Crowdsourcing Tweet. He explains, “I love reading smaller books. I love tweeting my thoughts. I wanted to eat the elephant in smaller bites and so I jotted down points in tweets.”

On the Web, none of these social mediums work in isolation, each is connected with the other. Facebook and Twitter have also become ways to promote blogs, with people often posting their links and thereby increasing their readership and the scope of the conversation.

With blogs moving beyond the personal, the rise of the modern blogger writing for a niche audience is of particular interest. Mumbai-based Chandrahas Choudhury, author of The Middle Stage, a blog of essays on Indian and world literature, says, “Blogs have matured over the years in India. People who are serious have kept it. Lots of the press indulge in the criticism that blogs are not edited. But I’ve seen many great blogs. It’s a very good way of learning how to write good prose.” The Middle Stage provides an important space for literary criticism at a time when newspapers are squeezing out literary columns. Blogs give “maximum freedom”, says Choudhury, as one can increase the content through links; they also allow one to quote freely from other texts, which newspapers do not allow.

Shankar emphasises that search engines give more importance to any site with fresh content, and that blogs have high “archival value”, compared with “Facebook or Twitter where old updates seem to fall off the face of the earth”. The Google requisite for new content has made the group blog a better option than the personal as it makes it easier to generate content regularly. Successful group blogs are making an impact.

Little Design Book, “an online journal of design, visual culture and material culture”, is run by Ruchita Madhok, Aditya Palsule, Avinash Rajagopal and Shreyas Krishnan. The editors, who are based in London, New York, and Bangalore respectively, work collaboratively and communicate through Skype. Through smart and pithy posts, they describe designs that are too good to be true and those which are too awful to seem probable. On this team blog, art and design interact in meaningful ways, producing discussions and insights. Speaking from New York on the behalf of his team, Rajagopal feels that design blogs have taken off recently in India. “The Web is a great place to discuss design because it is an inherently democratic medium. Anyone can have their say.”

Others, who have made use of the democratic and immediate nature of the internet, include Pavitra Mohan, who runs the successful blog Masala Chai, a “creative collective that features south Asian art and design”. These blogs about Indian art and design are few but they are playing an important role in the promotion and criticism of the arts. Mohan says, “There’s high art and low art. They are both provided a uniform platform on the Web.” Started three years ago, the blog recently became a physical reality, with Masala Chai opening its first outlet in Chennai.

Rajagopal feels, however, that there’s still scope for editorialising content. “Many blogs post images of design objects, and say a few obligatory words. This has its necessary place in the blogging world. But we also need many strident, opinionated voices.”

Strident voices with trenchant opinions ring in collective blogs like Kafila, run by no single CEO but by 22 members. Speaking only for himself and not on behalf of Kafila, Shivam Vij, writer and member, says, “Blogging is ‘self-publishing’. To read blogs (and today, together with social media) is to get an uncut view of what a society thinks, without the frame of the organised media. This allows people to use blogging and social media to influence opinion, and thus cause change, good or bad.”

While blogs can be viewed as enjoyable entertainment or a platform for serious discussion and debate, blogs can also change lives. It can make famous the anonymous man stooped over a keyboard, with a prank in his head and spunk in his prose. Anupam Mukerji, the Fake IPL Player whose anonymous blog fooled thousands of cricket fans and administrators, and who revealed his identity in August last year, says, “I am still the same guy, but people respond to me differently. The blog changed my life.”

Blogging was also the “perfect tonic” for actor Lisa Ray, who started writing The Yellow Diaries once she’d been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the white blood cells, in June 2009. Her blog posts, written with heart and without fuss, chronicled her battle with the disease, from being a “cancer intern” to a “cancer survivor”. In what ways did the blog help her? “In every way,” she says. “It helped me process what I was going through. It helped me be honest with myself and face my fears head on. It also helped me connect with others by sharing a very human experience. It helped dilute my fear.” Her blog also helped others, obvious in the hundreds of comments left by readers. Talking about readers’ responses, she says, “I do remember thinking that we suffer from the ‘pathology of perfection’ in contemporary society and the only antidote is to celebrate our ‘humanness’ in all forms. To embrace the hurt and pain as much as the joys and success.”

Blogging was also a tonic for Indian Homemaker or Seema Rao, blogger and mother of Tejaswee Rao, a 19-year-old journalism student who passed away last year. Seema has been a frequent blogger for the last three years and now maintains her daughter’s blog In My Arrogant Opinion. She feels her daughter lives on through her presence on the Web. Sitting in a Gurgaon living room, surrounded by photos of her daughter, Rao says, “The family wanted a memorial gathering. But I know people will talk about her illness, they’ll say you should have gone to another hospital. I feel the blogosphere is more mature. A memorial would have been traumatic. I get support from bloggers, from people who don’t even know my name. On Tejaswee’s birthday, a mother in Hyderabad sent me a cake, with TJ written on it. I don’t know how I would have coped without the blogs.”

The original article was published in the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/new-kids

Can the mouse be a tool of revolution in India?

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T16:26:49Z

Do you consider yourself a ‘slacktivist’?” Vikram Sengupta considers the question for a couple of seconds, and then excuses himself. “I’ll call you back. I’m in the middle of something right now,” he says, and hangs up. Being called a ‘slacktivist’ is probably not very flattering, first thing in the morning or at any other time of the day. But this writer has been at the receiving end of endless mails from him, mails which sought to impose a burning moral imperative to sign up instantly and save the grand Canadian Musk Ox or the Mexican Dumpy Frog. The question, therefore, is not unjustified.

Activists vs slacktivists

The slick application of the word ‘slacktivist’ is the work of eminent scholar and author of The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov. Rather stinging in its import, it refers to people who, while campaigning for social causes, limit their action to the click of a mouse. In an earlier interview with DNA Sunday, Morozov was quick to clarify that he had nothing against online activism (activism through social-networking sites, websites, blogs and online petitions), “but I’d rather see the people signing (petitions) also join some offline political movements and campaign for change in the real world as much as they do in the virtual world,” he had said.

Sengupta does call back. And when the question is put to him again, he says, “People can call me a ‘slacktivist’ if they want. Look, I don’t have a lot of time to devote to activism and I don’t even know if signing petitions actually works. But when I see that a simple click of mine might possibly help save a rainforest or rid the world of its nuclear arsenal, I can’t just cynically turn away. I don’t know… I feel uncomfortable doing it.”

The phenomenon of ‘slacktivism’ elicits quite strong responses from the Indian activist community. People who grapple with the hard-knock realities of activism are not amused by the casual, momentary concern of the ‘slacktivist’.

Ashley Tellis is a freelance journalist, academic and gay rights activist. “The central limitation here is that one-click activism [slacktivism] becomes a substitute for sustained campaigns and engagement with persistent inequalities. The Indian middle-class, notorious for its apolitical and consumerist selfishness, can now feel smug and assuage its rotten conscience by thinking it has taken action on the net,” says Tellis, with some emotion.

While Tellis castigates, in no uncertain terms, the seeming apathy of the middle-class, he also acknowledges its prodigious influence on the Indian socio-political mind space. “The middle-class is an important segment. It has power, it has English, and it has the ability to be heard,” he admits.

Middle class audience

While this helps when it is mobilised for a good cause, many find it problematic that so much influence is concentrated in the hands of a single segment of society. In fact, if you take online activism, the number of people who can be reached through the internet is staggeringly low.

In a country of approximately 120 crore people, only about 5 crore [as per Indiastats.com] have access to the internet. Compare this to Tunisia, where the figure is an impressive 27%, or Egypt, where internet penetration is 16% [World Bank figures]. Given this lack of net access, more than 95% of Indians are taken out of consideration, in one fell swoop, when it comes to internet-specific activism strategies.

Anja Kovacs, a fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society says, “Most of these online campaigns are aligned to the profile of its audience.” She argues, in her essay ‘Inquilab 2.0?’ that if the audience is mostly urban and middle-class, it stands to reason that a majority of online campaigns would deal with issues that are relevant to this particular segment.

Kamayani Bali Mahabal, a lawyer and human rights activist, disagrees with this assessment. “Okay, the audience may be middle class, but the issues aren’t all middle class at all,” she counters indignantly. “Look at the ‘Say No to UID’ campaign — there is no debate or dialogue that has been initiated by Nandan Nilekani, the chairperson of UIDAI [Unique ID Authority of India], and this online campaign has created a platform where people’s issues and concerns can be clarified. Many believe that the UID will have a negative impact on the poor and the migrants; this campaign has gotten people to come together to discuss, debate and strategise as well,” she says.

But Kovacs insists, “The fact remains that it is people from the middle-class who represent the voices of a largely silent majority. I find this model of activism questionable.” The accuracy of how the voiceless are being represented is a cause of concern for her, as is the very idea of a platform that denies a large section of a vibrant social democracy the chance to express themselves directly.

The whole situation, Kovacs seems to indicate, is like Chinese whispers, where information might get altered in the retelling. “There are some innovative enterprises like CGNet Swara that tackle this problem. It’s a citizen journalism service, where ordinary citizens can both call in to record news as well as listen to the recorded messages. And they do put some selected messages online, but such enterprises are few and far between.” she says ruefully.

An aid to offline activism

So as things stand, the internet is an indispensable tool to reach out to the influential Indian middle-class. Yet, given India’s socio-economic reality, it’s also a problematic and, in some cases, ineffective medium. Bali Mahabal, when asked how she reconciles these contradictions, says, “I am an offline as well as an online activist. These are not mutually exclusive roles. I straddle both worlds and I can multi-task!”

In fact, this is a strategy that a lot of offline activists are warming up to now. In 2010, Himanshu Kumar put up a video in which he said,

“To the people in the cities, I want to say that… you write something on the internet, it doesn’t make any difference to the government. Neither do people read the internet, nor does the government.” Coming from one of the leading advocates of tribal rights in the Chhattisgarh area, this video was a scathing indictment of online activists.

Kumar, however, seems to have softened his stance on the issue since then. He still maintains that online activism by itself is not sufficient to bring about substantial change, but he speaks of how the internet helped him in his campaign in Dantewada.

“When we were in Dantewada, it was almost like a different planet. We had no connection to the outside world except through the internet. It annoyed the police quite a bit because they knew that if they tried anything untoward, we could get the word out. So the internet is definitely a value addition to on-the-ground activism, but by itself, it has its limitations.”

It is clear that the internet as a platform for social activism is here to stay. As access to the net increases among Indians, so will its effectiveness. Kovacs, in her essay writes of a person who says, rather movingly, “I believe that… ordinary people can use this medium [internet] to actually make a difference, you know…to change the world.”

But if activists want to live up to this unnamed person’s lofty expectations, they also need to be fully conscious of the limitations of the internet as a medium for social change.

Read the original in DNA here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/mouse-a-tool-of-revolution

What Are You Accused of? Find Out Online

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T16:48:30Z

Starting Tuesday, police authorities in the Indian capital will make many crime reports, also known as First Information Reports, publicly accessible from its Web site. The report can be attained by entering details such as the name of the accused or victim and also the area where the crime took place. So far, no crime reports have been posted on the Web site.

The step is meant to help people who have been accused of a crime, and who aren’t able to find out from police—or who are perhaps reluctant to approach a police station—find out what exactly they’re supposed to have done.

“In case a police officer refuses to reveal the First Information Report, the accused can get a copy online and defend himself,” Rajan Bhagat, Delhi police spokesman told India Real Time Tuesday.

After police register a crime report, they’re supposed to carry out an investigation and then decide whether or not to bring charges.

Mr. Bhagat said the crime reports were being put online to comply with a 35-page Delhi High Court order on December 6.

“The liberty of an individual is inextricably linked with his right to be aware how he has been booked under law and on what allegations,” the court said at the time in an order that quotes Cuban revolutionary José Martí .

Mr. Bhagat said the software for uploading the FIRs has been installed at all police stations across the capital. The crime report is supposed to be made available online within 24 hours after a crime is registered.

Depending on whether the crime reports are searchable or not, and if people other than those named in the reports can access them, they could also prove useful for analyzing crime patterns in the city.

Of course, there exists some ambiguity in the new process, including how many crime reports will actually end up being uploaded online.

Crime reports for offences categorized as “sensitive” need not be uploaded. These include issues of terrorist acts, crimes relating to national security, rape, murder, kidnapping for ransom and “cases in which desperate gangsters are involved and there is the danger of witnesses or the complainant being intimidated,” the court order said.

“We cannot reveal the identity of serious criminals; this can hamper the investigation process,” said Mr. Bhagat, adding that the decision for a crime report not to be uploaded must be made by a senior police officer together with a local magistrate from the area where the crime was committed.

Some legal experts aren’t happy about the “selective” airing of information by the Delhi police.

“The service would be a complete failure,” said Pinaki Misra, senior counsel at the Delhi High Court.

Mr. Misra said the First Information Report is a public document–the first step towards registering criminal activity–and it should be freely accessible.

“There’s no reason why such information should be deemed confidential and selectively uploaded,” he said.

But others said there was good reason to avoid making a crime report public in some cases, such as to protect the identity of victims of sexual crimes, or even to protect suspects in cases where crimes could instigate violence against them.

Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Center for Internet and Society, a think-tank based in Bangalore, said the Delhi police’s new initiative was “a positive step with necessary safeguards.”

He added that the disclosure of too much information by police or other investigating agencies can sometimes lead to incidents of “mob justice,” pointing to recent occasions where bystanders have attacked people involved in highly publicized cases at their court appearances.

“The onus now is on the Delhi police as to how and what they put it in actual practice,” Mr. Abraham said.

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/what-are-you-accused

January 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T11:25:44Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! It gives us immense pleasure to present regular updates on the progress of our research on the mainstream Internet media. In this issue of we bring our latest project updates, news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Monographs finalised from these projects have been published on the CIS website for public review:

Digital Natives

CIS has interest in developing Digital Identities as a core research area and looks at practices, policies and scholarships in the field to explore relationships between Internet, technology and identity.

Column on Digital Natives

A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. The following article was published in the Indian Express recently:

Is That a Friend on Your Wall? [published in the Indian Express on 9 January 2010]

Workshop

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project will take place in Santiago, Chile, from the 8 to 10 February. Open Call and FAQs for the workshop are online:

Blog Entry by Maesey Angelina

Maesy Angelina is a MA candidate on International Development, specializing in Children and Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. She is working on her research on the activism of digital natives under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme. She spent a month at CIS, working on her dissertation, exploring the Blank Noise Project under the Digital Natives with a Cause framework. She writes a series of blog entries. The latest is:

The Digital Tipping Point

Announcement

Rising Voices Seeks Micro-Grant Proposals for Citizen Media Outreach

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

New Blog Entry

Accessibility in Telecommunications

Intellectual Property

Copyright, patents and trademarks are the most important components on the Internet. CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime. Our latest endeavour has resulted into these:

New Blog Entry

New Release of IPR Chapter of India-EU Free Trade Agreement

Internet Governance

Although there may not be one centralised authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cybercrime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” Within the larger field of Internet governance, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a multi-stakeholder policy dialogue forum that was instituted by the WSIS processes and that is their only formal outcome, has fast emerged as one of the key institutions. As the definition quoted above indicates, a unique feature of the field of Internet governance is that, unlike many other governance spheres, it does not only involve governments. Historically, not only governments but also the technical community and private players have played a crucial role in the development of the Internet. In the context of the IGF, that role is not only explicitly acknowledged but also institutionalised as the IGF formally brings together governments, private players and civil society actors from all areas of and organisations involved in Internet governance. Moreover, now that the open and egalitarian potential of the Internet is increasingly under attack, this unique nature of the IGF, in addition to its WSIS roots, has made it a prime venue to remind stakeholders in all areas of Internet governance of the commitment they have made earlier to building a “people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society” (WSIS Geneva Principles, Para 1). CIS involvement in the field of Internet governance has the following shape:

New Blog Entry

Jurisdictional Issues in Cyberspace

Privacy

CIS has undertaken many new and exciting projects. One of these, "Privacy in Asia", is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and is being completed in collaboration with Society and Action Group. "Privacy in Asia" is a two-year project that commenced on 24 March 2010 and will complete within two years from the commencement date, unless otherwise agreed to by the parties. The project was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around privacy challenges and violations in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote an over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Apart from "Privacy in Asia" CIS is also participating in the " Privacy and Identity" project, which is funded by the Ford Foundation and managed by the Centre for Study of Culture and Society. The project is a research inquiry into the history of Privacy in India and how it shapes the contemporary debates around technology mediated identity projects like Aadhaar. The "Privacy and Identity" project started in August 2010.

New Blog Entries

Staff Update

Prashant Iyengar is a lawyer and legal scholar who has worked extensively on intellectual property issues particularly focusing on copyright reform and open access. He is a past recipient of an Open Society Institute fellowship for research into Open Information Policy, and has been affiliated with the Alternative Law Forum – a collective of lawyers in Bangalore engaged in human rights practice.

Prashant joined the Centre for Internet and Society as a lead researcher in the Privacy India project recently.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers. CIS campaigns to facilitate this.

Column

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

The policy langurs [published on 6 January 2011]

News & Media Coverage

Civic hackers seek to find their feet in India (Livemint, 24 January 2011) and (IndiaInfoline, January 2011)
A Tweet and a poke from the CEO (Livemint, 24 January 2011)
Clicktivism & a brave new world order (Mail Today, 2 January 2011)
Would it be a unique identity crisis? (Bangalore Mirror, 2 January 2011)
Nel suk dei nativi digitali. Perché gli studenti 2.0 hanno bisogno di una bussola per orientarsi (Il Sore24 ORE, 2 January 2011)
A Refreshing Start! (Verveonline, Volume 19, Issue 1, January, 2011)
Getting Connected (Livemint, January 2011)
Knowledge Warriors (Il Sore24 ORE, January 2011)
Nishant Shah Quoted in Livemint 2011 Tweet-out (Livemint, January 2011)
Digital Natives with a Cause? - Workshop in Chile seeks participants (Bahama islands info, 30 December 2010)
Mothers discuss kids, music, fashions, on Net (The Hindu, 26 December 2010)

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Follow CIS on identi.ca
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at www.cis-india.org

Looking forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to write to us for any queries or details required. If you do not wish to receive these emails, please do write to us and we will unsubscribe your mail ID from the mailing list.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2011-bulletin

"Privacy matters"

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T07:20:22Z

Privacy India invites individuals to attend the second "Privacy matters" conference, a one-day event on the 5th February 2011 at the TERI Southern Regional Centre, Bangalore. Privacy India, Society in Action Group, and the Centre for Internet & Society have joined hands to organize the event.

The “Privacy matters” conference will focus on discussing the challenges to privacy that India is currently facing. The right to privacy in India has been a neglected area of study and engagement. Although sectoral legislation deals with privacy issues, e.g., the TRAI Act for telephony or RBI guidelines for banking, India does not as yet have a horizontal legislation that deals comprehensively with privacy across all contexts. This lack of uniformity has led to ironically imbalanced results. In India today one has a stronger right to privacy over telephone records than over one’s own medical records. The absence of a minimum guarantee of privacy is felt most heavily by marginalized communities, including HIV patients, children, women, sexuality minorities, prisoners, etc. – people who most need to know that sensitive information is protected.

The emergence of information and communications technologies over the past two decades has radically transformed the speed and costs of access to information. However, this enhanced climate of access to information has been a mixed blessing. Whilst augmenting our access to knowledge, this new networked information economy has also now made it much easier, quicker, and cheaper to gain access to intimate personal information about individuals than ever before. As people expose more and more of their lives to others through the use of social networks, reliance on mobile phones, global trade, etc., there has emerged a heightened risk of privacy violations in India. As privacy continues to be a growing concern for individuals, nations, and the international community, it is critical that India understands and addresses the questions, challenges, implications and dilemmas that violations of privacy pose.

Who We Are

Privacy India was set up in collaboration with The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore and Society in Action Group (SAG), under the auspices of the international organization ‘Privacy International.’ Privacy International is a non-profit group that provides assistance to civil society groups, governments, international and regional bodies, the media and the public in a number of countries (see www.privacyinternational.org). Its Advisory Board is made up of distinguished intellectuals, academicians, thinkers and activists such as Noam Chomsky, the late Harold Pinter, and others, and it has collaborated with organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

'Privacy Matters' conference agenda

February 5th, 2011 --- 10:30 am - 4:30pm

TERI Southern Regional Centre

4th Main, Domlur II Stage
Bangalore - 560 071

Time	Item
10:30 -10:45	Welcome Address Who is PI and what are our objectives Why is privacy important in India Prashant Iyengar (Lead Researcher at Privacy India)
10:45-11:15	Keynote: Ashish Rajadhyaksha (Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Culture & Society)
11:15-11:30	Tea Break
11:30 –12:30	Session I: Privacy and Open Government Data Property Rights, Privacy, and Open Government Data: Zainab Bawa (CIS-RAW Fellow)
12:30 – 1:30	Session II: Privacy Rights and Minorities Privacy Rights of Sexualality Minorities: Arvind Narrain (Alternative Law Forum) Now you see her, now you don’t - Issues of sex workers and questions around privacy: Shubha Chacko (Sangama) The UID and Refugees: Sahana Basavapatna
1:30 – 2:30	Lunch
2:30 – 3:00	Session III: Identity and Privacy Malavika Jarayam (Jayaram & Jayaram) Hamish Fraser (Partner at Truman Hoyle, Sydney Australia) Michael Whitener (Principal and co-founder of VistaLaw International LLC)
3:00-3:30	Session IV: Privacy and the Media/Social Networking Privacy and Social Networking: Ujjvala Ballal (Inclusive Planet) Privacy Issues in Social Networking Websites: Gagan K. (NLSIU law student)
3:30 – 3:45	Tea break
3:45 – 4:30	Session V: Open discussion and opinion sharing

RSVP:

prashant@privacyindia.org
elonnai@privacyindia.org

Download the poster here

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/privacy-conferencefeb5

4 Popular Myths about UID

Prashant Iyengar — 2012-06-20T04:37:08Z

By now, there is already a lot of material in the public domain that is critical about the UID/Aadhar project, writes Prashant Iyengar in this blog entry published in Privacy India on January 22, 2011.

(See aadhararticles.blogspot.com for an exhaustive catalogue). Much of this material has criticized the UID for the ‘big brotherly’ techno-surveillance regime that it threatens to unleash, usually under the guise of delivering assured benefits to the marginal peasant. Many commentators have questioned the haste with which a project of this scale and complexity has sought to be pushed through. Some have expressed doubts on the feasibility – financial, technical or logistical – of the scheme. Much of this material has criticized the UID for the ‘big brotherly’ techno-surveillance regime that it threatens to unleash, usually under the guise of delivering assured benefits to the marginal peasant. Many commentators have questioned the haste with which a project of this scale and complexity has sought to be pushed through. Some have expressed doubts on the feasibility – financial, technical or logistical – of the scheme.

I do not intend to rehearse these arguments in this post. Instead, I pick four somewhat obscure, but troublesome assertions made about the UID and test their veracity against documents available on the UIDIA site itself. The purpose is to cut through all the equivocation behind the claims that UID officials have been making, and arrive at some minimal clarity on what the UID is (and isn’t).

Registration is voluntary!

How does one make sense of Nandan Nilenkani’s cryptic remark, “I wouldn’t call it compulsory. I would rather say that it will become ubiquitous”?

In a sense, this is true enough. Nowhere in the entire bulk of UID documentation will you encounter the express words “mandatory” or “compulsory”. Hence, proved! But that isn’t to say, however, that there is any way you will be able to avoid getting registered.

Very rapidly, accessing basic services and your very status as a citizen will be conditional on your possessing an Aadhar number. This is owing to the complex operational structure that the UID Scheme adopts which leaves the task of enrollment entirely in the hands of third party ‘Registrars’ who include a host of Central and State social security and welfare departments (including the Ministry of Rural Development which administers the Rural employment guarantee scheme), banks and insurance companies. There is nothing in the Aadhar Scheme that forbids these Registrars from making access to their services conditional on one’s consent to UID registration. In practice, many of them have and will continue to make UID registration a preliminary formality before access is granted to their services. So your ‘freedom’ to resist UID registration will depend on your ability to forego your minimum guarantee of the right to employment, cooking gas, banking and insurance services, food rations etc.

And if miraculously you are able to subsist without these services, there is still one minor detail that is seldom mentioned in conversations about UID: without a UID number, you will not be counted as a citizen of India. This is owing to the fact that the Registrar General of India, the authority responsible for compiling the National Population Register of India under the Citizenship Act, also happens to be a ‘Registrar’ for the purposes of the UID. Which means that one’s registration in the NPR will entail automatic enrollment in the UID. The Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003 makes it mandatory for everyone to be enrolled in the National Population Register. So, paradoxically, although the Aadhar number does not confer citizenship, one cannot be a citizen anymore without owning an Aadhar number.

In other words, the UID scheme avoids the charge of being compulsory, by outsourcing its compulsion entirely.

The UID Scheme will only collect a minimal set of information

A frequently made assertion about the UID scheme is that the data collected will be limited to a standard set of information like one’s name, residence, date of birth, photo, all 10 finger prints and iris image. Once again, this is only a half truth. As mentioned previously, the entire process of enrollment is carried out through Registrars who have absolute freedom to expand the categories of information collected to include data that is entirely orthogonal to the purposes of the UID. This freedom is typically guaranteed by a clause in the MOUs which the UIDAI has signed with Registrars enabling them to collect additional data that “is required for their business or service”. Thus, for instance, in Himachal Pradesh, citizens are asked to provide additional details such as information about their ration cards, PAN cards, LPG connection and bank accounts[i]

To employ a telling epithet found in one of the UID documents, the ‘Registrars own the process of enrollment’.

Privacy is guaranteed

Although the UIDAI makes repeated assertions regarding its intent to respect privacy and ensure data protection, the precise mechanism through which these objectives will be secured is extremely unclear.

To begin with, the entire responsibility for devising schemes for safeguarding information during the collection phase rests entirely on the Registrars. The UIDAI’s own responsibility for privacy begins only from the moment the information is transmitted to it by the Registrars – by which time the information has already passed through many hands including the Enrolling Agency, and the Intermediary who passes on information from the Registrar to the UIDAI.
Rather than setting out an explicit redressal mechanism and a liability regime for privacy violations, the UID’s documents stop at loosely describing the responsibility of the Registrars as a ‘fiduciary duty’ towards the resident/citizen’s information. The Registrars are tasked with maintaining records of the data collected for a minimum period of six months. No maximum period is specified and Registrars are free to make what use of the data they see fit.
In addition, the Registrars are mandated to keep copies of all documents collected from the Resident either in physical or scanned copies “till the UIDAI finalizes its document storage agency.”[ii]
The ‘Data Protection and Security Guidelines’ which the UIDAI requires all Registrars to observe merely contains pious injunctions calling on them to observe care at all stages of data collection and to develop appropriate internal policies. There is mention of the desirability of external audits and periodic reporting mechanisms, but the details of these schemes are left to the individual Registrar to draw up.
Although the Draft National Identification Authority of India Bill penalizes the intentional disclosure or dissemination of identity information collected in the course of enrollment or authentication, this does not guard against accidental leaks and does not mandate the service providers to positively employ heightened security procedures. Prosecution of offences under the Act can only proceed with the sanction of the UID Authority, which further burdens the task of criminal enforcement in these cases and would make it difficult for individuals to obtain redress quickly. The total absence of a provision for civil remedies against Registrars makes it unlikely that they will take the task of protecting privacy seriously.
In other words, the individual’s right to privacy is only as strong as the weakest link in the elaborate chain of information collection, processing and storage.

The UIDAI will not disclose any information and will only authenticate information with Yes/No answers

This is another of the frequently misleading claims made by the UID Authority. Thus, for instance, in April, 2010, in response to a question in the course of an interview, Nandan Nilekani said “UID itself has very limited fields, it has only four or five fields — name, address, date of birth, sex and all that. But it also does not supply this data to anybody. .. the only authentication you can get from our system is a yes or no. So, you can’t query and say what’s this guys name or what’s his date of birth, you can’t get all that.”[iii]

This statement is, however belied by many of the UIDAI’s own documents.

The draft NIA Bill, for instance, permits the Authority to issue regulations on the sharing of “the information of aadhaar number holders, with their written consent, with such agencies engaged in delivery of public benefits and public services as the Authority may by order direct”. In practice, prior “written consent” for sharing is obtained from the resident as a matter of course at the time of enrollment itself, and it is impossible to obtain an Aadhar number without consenting to sharing by the UID Authority.[iv] In practice, in India, a large number of forms will be filled in by assistants and the written consent box will be ticked as a matter of course without the resident understanding the full implications of her “consent”.
The draft NIA Bill permits the authority to “make any disclosure of information (including identity information) made in the interests of national security in pursuance of a direction to that effect issued by an officer not below the rank of Joint Secretary or equivalent in the Central Government after obtaining approval of the Minister in charge”. There is nothing in the Act that requires that this information be made available on an individual basis – in other words, it is possible for the data to be shared en-masse with any agency “in the interests of national security”.
There is nothing preventing “Registrars” who carry out the actual data collection functions from sharing this information with anyone they choose. Thus, for instance, the Aadhar information collected during the exercise of compiling the National Population Register will can be shared in whichever manner the Registrar General of India chooses – irrespective of what the UIDAI does with that information.

So, while ordinarily, the UIDAI would not authenticate information other than giving Yes/No responses, there are mechanisms already in place that presume that all this information will be made available, on demand, to whichever agency that happens to be interested.

[i] 2011. UID project picks up pace. Indian Express. Available at: http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/735790 [Accessed January 22, 2011].
[ii] UIDAI – Document Storage Guidelines for Registrars Ver. 1.2, August 2010.
[iii] 2010. To issue first set of UIDs by Feb 2011: Nilekani – CNBC-TV18 -. Money Control. Available at: http://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/to-issue-first-setuids-by-feb-2011-nilekani_449820-4.html [Accessed January 22, 2011].
[iv] For instance, a flowchart of the Resident Enrollment Process issued by the UID stipulates “Record Resident’s consent for Information Sharing” as the tenth step in the enrollment process. Unless this step is followed, the enrollment process cannot proceed!

Click to read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/popular-myths-about-uid

Getting Connected

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T17:03:14Z

Nishant Shah of the Centre for Internet & Society talks about the growing adoption of social media, and what can constitute a "social media network"

See the video in livemint here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/social-media

Clicktivism & a brave new world order

nishant — 2011-04-02T01:02:51Z

THE FIRST decade of this century has been one of accelerated change. The proliferation of the Internet has ushered in ubiquitous transformations in the way we live. And yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Certain human values remain sacred. As a result, more and more people have come out to voice their support for equality, justice and non-discrimination. The last ten years have seen the rise of individuals empowered by the Internet to effect change around them. Across the world people have used the power of the digital revolution to fight for issues that are relevant to them. From human rights advocacy to fighting corruption, from mobilising masses for greater participation in the electoral process to campaigning to save the environment, cyber activism has taken many shapes. These instances are shaped as much by the peoples intentions as they are by the regional contexts of the interventions. You too can become a cyber activist, but first, you must first grasp the four principles that power the participation of citizens in the processes of social change and political transformation.

The FOAF Phenomenon

As our lives become more networked because of Facebook, Twitter and Orkut, our contact lists have become more prolific and diverse than the little black book of phone numbers. We have always belonged to different groups, but now digital networks have introduced a phenomenon that is popularly called Friend of a Friend (FOAF). When you add people to your social network, you gain access to their networks and groups, forming weak but significant ties. Most people in the networks inherit at least seven levels of FOAF, thus expanding the scope of their reach. This ability to disseminate messages and ideas across a vast number of people — going viral — is the basis of cyber activism.

Power of Clicktivism

In the digital world, people who might not have the time or resources to participate directly in causes they believe in, find a way of being valuable. Platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr offer participants the ability to relay information and messages to create awareness. People who think of clicktivism as a way of shirking responsibilities in the real world fail to recognise that these clickers have been behind mass mobilisations of opinions and resources.

Virtual Reality Imitates Life

Cyber activism does not mean that the actions remain confined to online spaces. Most successful cyber activism campaigns collapse the real life-virtual reality differences. They seamlessly work in the physical and digital domains, playing on the strengths of both the spaces. They invite and mobilise people to perform actions that range from signing petitions and participating in policy making, to performing random acts of kindness and coordinating flash-mobs as signs of protest.

No Information Fatigue Please!

Even as we droop with information fatigue, there is no denying that the information highway has given us new ways of thinking about the world around us. It is easy now to find an audience for our opinions through blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogspot, and the rise of user-generated content sites like Wikipedia and YouTube enable people to question their own assumptions. As a multiplicity of ideas emerge, it paves the way for the rise of a more conscious citizen, aware of their rights and keen for change. At the end of the day, cyber activism is a reminder of the fact change, like charity, begins at home. And the Internet helps in building S.M.A.R.T. (Simple. Moral. Accountable.

Responsible. Transparent) structures that empower citizens to stand up for what they think is right. It reminds us that there is power in words and that powerful words can lead to transformative actions. Cyber activism foregrounds the fact that we do not inherit the world from our ancestors, we borrow it from the future generations, and that we have the power to protect and preserve it.

Read the original article in Mail Today here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/clicktivism-a-brave-new-world-order

CIS to Screen Subasri’s film “Brave New Medium”

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T07:21:09Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) will host a screening of a film “Brave New Medium,” at 6 p.m. on Monday, 10 January 2011. The film is directed by Subasri Krishnan.

"Brave New Medium" documents the complicated dynamics of Internet and censorship across different parts of South-East Asia. It looks at how human rights activists in the region use the Internet as a tool of resistance. The film also examines ways of understanding censorship beyond the lens of the banning and the banned.

Subasri Krishnan

Subasri Krishnan has been an independent film-maker for the past 6 years. She has directed a number of commissioned non-fiction films on issues ranging from Gender, Micro-Finance, Governance, Farmer’s Suicides to NREGA and the Right to Freedom of Expression. She has just completed a film on Internet Censorship in both democratic and non-democratic countries in South-East Asia. Currently she is working on a research/film project on the idea of official identity documents and the notion of personhood, especially in the context of UIDAI.

In 2008, Subasri was awarded the prestigious George Washington International Documentary Filmmaker Fellowship. Subasri graduated from the Mass Communication Research Centre at Jamia Millia Islamia.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/brave-new-medium

Would it be a unique identity crisis ?

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T17:10:30Z

The UID project will centralise a humongous amount of data but the fear is that it might fall into the wrong hands.

The Unique Identification (UID) project is already up and running. It’s touted as a watershed in inclusive politics, of bringing people, who by virtue of physical remoteness, their station in society or other liabilities were excluded from the system, back into it. UID Chairman Nandan Nilekani recently said that the aadhaar number will not replace the passport, driving license or the voter identity card and that by 2014, 60 per cent of the country’s population will have the 12-digit UID number. The idea, though it has not been made explicit, is that Aadhaar will eventually become the key document for the common man to navigate the system, whether it is opening a bank account or making a rent agreement to booking a train ticket or applying for a job.

In fact, there is the implicit danger that sooner than later the original idea of inclusiveness could be turned on its head by denying benefits to people who don’t have the Aadhaar! “There is nothing to ensure that you will continue to receive the same benefits like those who have the UID number. The claim that it is not mandatory is legally correct. But in practice it would not be,” said Prof Sridhar Krishnaswamy of W B University for Juridical Sciences.

It is a fundamental premise that data subjects ought to have “inalienable moral rights” about the “integrity” of the data collected about them. But even as UID is one of the best things that could have happened to deepen the democratic process in our society, the often un-remarked fact is that the project has also become the biggest industrial collector of personal information. Considering the size and heterogeneity of the Indian population, it becomes as big as Google, and the implications of this are quite frightening. The UID draft bill, which has to be cleared by Parliament for it to become law, has only perfunctorily looked at the dangers posed by such huge and centralized collection of data. It glosses over the issue, content with making conservative noises about “the interlinking of databases”. This only shows how casual our policy makers, even the most enlightened of them, are towards the whole issue of safeguarding privacy.

The Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has analyzed the draft UID bill in considerable depth. They have identified three main areas where the bill needs to be drastically reworked: (i) plugging all loopholes which would enable corporate organizations from accessing information from the Aadhar database for their own commercial or R & D purposes; (ii) stipulating a maximum period for the data to be stored; (iii) to be transparent about the methods it uses to collect, store and disseminate data.

Prof Krishnaswamy agreed that the UID bill has not taken the corporate threat seriously enough. He contends that the UID authorities should take small, concrete steps that would act as effective safeguards. “In the mobile phone segment, user information is stored only for six months. Now, the government is proposing a similar time cap for ISP too. But when it comes to UID there is no such time limit. It means personal information could be held perpetually,” he explained. All that UID Assistant Director A K Pandey had to say to this was, “if that is it, then we have to live with it.”

Another worrying aspect of the proposed bill, according to Usha Ramanathan, an activist and expert on identity and digital issues, is its failure to fix accountability on the main players including enrollers, outsourcing companies, and the UDAI authority itself. “The data collector and data controller should be equally held responsible for the protection of data,” she said. However, UID authorities themselves are of the view that the apprehensions are being overplayed. Pandey maintained that there was nothing in the UID that would compromise the privacy of individuals. “You go to a bank or the LIC office and you give whatever information they ask you. But when it comes to UID alone you say the information you give could be dangerous. We don’t quite understand this,” he retorted. He played down the fears that in the central data storage vital information could go corrupt. “We have taken adequate measures to protect it. We will have a backup,” he said.

The issue of transparency of data collection and storage remains. The CIS analysts feel that the UID should put out a synopsis of the algorithms it will use in collating and protecting data so that the public at large can be reassured of the firewalls that are in place. Then there is also the issue of not having concrete provisions in the UID bill to deal with special cases like whistleblowers and victims of abuse whose identities need to be protected even more carefully.

The UID authority also bypasses the question of whether it is confusing data protection with the larger issue of protection of privacy. A person’s identity is more than her date of birth, surname, religion, fingerprint or even the sum of these. Such information is basically data and allows governments or corporate bodies to provide a person a nominal identity, one that is indispensable if she is to be part of a socio-political system. The state and corporate entities conveniently deny a person her self, thereby reducing her to a subject instead of seeing each individual as a thinking, acting agency.

Be that as it may, right now the concern of civil society is to make at least protection of data as foolproof as possible. Aadhaar is just one of the projects that pose a threat to the privacy of individual citizens. There is the broader problem of how the Internet and mobile phones, the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and the widespread use of credit and debit cards has led to blatant misuse of personal information gathered online, sharing of consumer data without consent and the state’s own Big Brother surveillance. The need for an effective privacy law in India is imperative.

Read the original in Bangalore Mirror

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/unique-identity-crisis

Nel suk dei nativi digitali. Perché gli studenti 2.0 hanno bisogno di una bussola per orientarsi

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T01:31:15Z

Addio al vecchio sapere lineare fondato sulla parola scritta e sulla trasmissione di conoscenza maestro-alunno: imparare oggi ha la forma di un suk arabo nell'ora di punta. Tra social network, video-racconti su YouTube, la musica di MySpace, il linguaggio sincopato delle chat e le bufale online, gli studenti di nuova generazione hanno bisogno di una bussola per orientarsi. Ma la scuola non c'è. O meglio, non ce la fa: a studenti 2.0 corrispondono spesso istituti scolastici da secolo scorso.

Chi sono questi famigerati "nativi digitali" nati e cresciuti a rivoluzione Internet compiuta? Come ha scritto l'ex direttore del programma Comparative media studies dell' Mit di Boston, Henry Jenkins, la loro cultura è "partecipativa" e si fonda su "produzione e condivisione di creazioni digitali" e una "partnership informale" tra insegnanti e alunni che porta il bambino a sentirsi responsabile del progetto educativo. Il maestro non è più un trasmettitore di conoscenza ma un "facilitatore", che fa da filtro tra il caos della rete e il cervello del piccolo studente.

"Frequentano gli schermi interattivi fin dalla nascita", spiega Paolo Ferri docente di tecnologie didattiche e teoria e tecnica dei nuovi media all'Università Bicocca di Milano, "e considerano Internet "il principale strumento di reperimento, condivisione e gestione dell'informazione". È la prima generazione (che oggi ha tra gli o e i 12 anni) veramente hi-tech che pensa, apprende e conosce in maniera differente dai suoi fratelli maggiori. "Se per noi imparare significava leggere-studiare-ripetere, per i bambini cresciuti con i videogames vuol dire innanzitutto risolvere i problemi in maniera attiva", spiega Ferri che studia e promuove da anni il "digital learning".

I bambini cresciuti con consolle e cellulare sono "abituati a vedere la risoluzione di compiti cognitivi come un problema pragmatico", aggiunge. Lynn Clark direttrice dell' Estlow International Center for Journalism and New Media dell'Università di Denver ha condotto un progetto di ricerca su 300 famiglie americane per capire come se la cavano con i media digitali.

"Grazie ai videogiochi, il sapere dei bambini si nutre di simboli, sfide e modelli sempre diversi di narrazione", spiega Clark che aggiunge: "quando le modalità di apprendimento scolastico sono simili a quelle di un gioco ci sono maggiori chances che gli alunni apprendano volentieri e in fretta". "Se qualcosa può essere visto, ascoltato, suonato, perché dovrebbe essere raccontato a parole?", si chiede Paolo Ferri.

Nishant Shah, che a 26 anni dirige il Center for Internet and Society di Bangalore in India, lo spiega così via Skype: "La tecnologia dei nostri padri è quella televisiva: un modello analogico che stabilisce ruoli, responsabilità e struttura della produzione, diffusione e consumo di conoscenza. Con l'esplosione del p2p - l'idea di una rete dove non esiste gerarchia e tutto viene condiviso- i ruoli sono messi in discussione dallo studente, che si considera parte attiva nella produzione di sapere e vede i libri come una fonte tra le tante".

Se è vero che il "l'ha detto Internet" ha assunto tra i bambini l'autorevolezza di una sentenza della Cassazione, è innegabile che la rete sia la patria del vero-simile. "Internet sta ridisegnando i confini della verità - continua Shah - e questo pone grandi sfide per gli educatori del XXI secolo: come si fa a imparare utilizzando fonti che non hanno approvazione istituzionale? Come si può riconoscere un valido provider di conoscenza nel caos online?".

Anche il professore della Bicocca ammette che "la cut-and-paste culture e la presunzione di veridicità della Rete" tendono ad abbassare la percezione critica degli utenti: "Internet diventa per i bambini "la fonte" a prescindere dall'autorevolezza del sito e da chi scrive", dice.

Se passa il modello Wikipedia, crolla l'importanza dell'autore. O, come ha scritto l'antropologa Susan D. Blum sul New York Times, "se per lo studente non è fondamentale essere unico, va bene usare parole di altri. Dice cose a cui non crede? Allora è ok scrivere testi su argomenti sconosciuti con l'unico scopo di prendere un buon voto: conoscere è diventato un mezzo per ottenere consensi e socialità".

Per il momento le iniziative più interessanti di digital learning riguardano i fratelli più grandi. Dal prossimo anno in 2500 campus universitari americani arriverà un software per pc, iPad e telefonini (il costo va dai 30 ai 70 dollari e il maggiore produttore è la Turning Technologies) chiamato "clickers", che permette all'insegnante di verificare il livello di attenzione dello studente - immerso nella navigazione internet - chiedendo feedback sulla tastiera ogni 15 minuti. Il professore di Harvard Charles Nesson ha tenuto un corso virtuale su Second Life, mentre il progetto di educazione civica "YouMedia", sponsorizzato dall'amministrazione di Chicago, promuove l'apprendimento attraverso video-racconti pubblici di libri.

Nella Woodside High School, in California, gli studenti hanno borse di studio per comprare l'iPad, un centro multimediale da tre milioni di dollari e lezioni su come registrare la musica e usare Internet in maniera responsabile. Grazie ai computer economici del guru informatico Nicholas Negroponte, tutti i bambini uruguaiani delle elementari hanno un pc.

In Europa - che ha messo la competenza digitale al quarto posto (dopo prima lingua, lingua straniera e matematica e scienze) tra le competenze chiave per l'educazione degli stati membri dell'Unione - il paese più "nativi digitali oriented" è l'Inghilterra, dove la riforma del sistema scolastico voluta dal governo Blair ha ridotto drasticamente il numero degli studenti per classi, favorendo così la personalizzazione dell'insegnamento, e tagliato il numero delle materie. "Sono passati- sottolinea Paolo Ferri - da un modello disciplinare basato sui contenuti a quello per competenze che si regge su un principio: imparare ad imparare". Ferri ricorda che la lavagna interattiva è presente nel 100% delle classi primarie e secondarie inglesi mentre in Italia si punta ad averne una su dieci entro il 2011. Qui la strada è ancora tutta in salita.

Il ministero dell'Istruzione porta avanti il progetto LIM, che riguarda l'introduzione di lavagne interattive nelle aule, e quello Cl@ssi 2.0 che punta a finanziare con 30mila euro 156 classi (in Italia ci sono circa 25mila scuole) delle scuole medie inferiori per lo sviluppo di progetti innovativi. "C'è una grande carenza di investimenti dall'alto - denuncia Ferri - arginata da qualche dirigente di buona volontà". Per il professore della Bicocca è a livello territoriale, grazie all'autonomia scolastica e alle capacità manageriali e creative di qualche preside, che si vedono i migliori esperimenti.

A Bollate, un comune di 37 mila abitanti alle porte di Milano, per imparare a usare l'iPad basta chiedere aiuto a un bambino. Nelle aule dell'Istituto di via Brianza - due scuole elementari e due medie inferiori - al posto di quadernetti e matite, da settembre gli alunni usano il tablet computer prodotto dalla Apple.

Qualche centinaia di chilometri più a Sud, a Reggio Emilia - la città dove tutti vorrebbero avere 3 anni per quel "Reggio Approach", lodato dal New York Times (parole d'ordine: arte, assemblee di classe e respiro globale), che ha fatto guadagnare al capoluogo emiliano il titolo di capitale mondiale degli asili nido - software, dispositivi elettronici e lavagne interattive hanno ormai sostituito seggioloni e orsacchiotti.

Bollate e Reggio non sono residui di una bizzarra avanguardia pedagogica, il cui simbolo cinematografico è ancora "Bianca" di Nanni Moretti, con le vicende della scuola "Marylin Monroe" dove al posto della foto del presidente della Repubblica c'e' Dino Zoff e i professori giocano alle slot machines e al flipper. Dimostrano piuttosto che ci sono, anche in Italia, presidi e maestri che hanno capito chi sono e come si educano i nativi digitali.

"Ma il risultato è quella di una cartina dell'innovazione a macchia di leopardo", dichiara Ferri, che tuttavia si dice ottimista. Da un lato perché "nel 2013 andrà in pensione la metà degli insegnanti italiani", dall'altro perché crede nel contagio positivo: "In 10 anni le scuole al passo con le trasformazioni sociali e tecnologiche, e per questo premiate con finanziamenti e alto numero di iscrizioni, avranno costretto le altre ad adeguarsi". Una speranza? No, un dovere. Perché "innovare innovare innovare", il famoso mantra di Hal Varian di Google News, è l'unica chance di sopravvivenza anche per la scuola italiana.

Read the original article here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/nel-suk