Surveillance in India: Policy and Practice

by Prasad Krishna last modified Mar 15, 2017 01:05 AM
The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy organized a brainstorming session on net neutrality on February 8, 2017 and a public seminar on surveillance in India the following day on February 9, 2017 in New Delhi. Pranesh Prakash gave a talk.

Pranesh presented a narrative of the current state of surveillance law, our knowledge of current surveillance practices (including noting where programmes like Natgrid, CMS, etc. fit in), and charted a rough map of reforms needed and outstanding policy research questions.

Pranesh Prakash

Pranesh Prakash is a Policy Director at - and was part of the founding team of - the Centre for Internet and Society, a non-profit organisation that engages in research and policy advocacy. He is also the Legal Lead at Creative Commons India and an Affiliated Fellow at the Yale Law School's Information Society Project, and has been on the Executive Committee of the NCUC at ICANN. In 2014, he was selected by Forbes India for its inaugural "30 under 30"​ list of young achievers, and in 2012 he was recognized as an Internet Freedom Fellow by the U.S. government.

His research interests converge at the intersections of technology, culture, economics, law, and justice. His current work focuses on interrogating, promoting, and engaging with policymakers on the areas of access to knowledge (primarily copyright reform), 'openness' (including open government data, open standards, free/libre/open source software, and open access), freedom of expression, privacy, digital security, and Internet governance. He is a prominent voice on these issues, with the newspaper Mint calling him “one of the clearest thinkers in this area”, and his research having been quoted in the Indian parliament. He regularly speaks at national and international conferences on these topics. He has a degree in arts and law from the National Law School in Bangalore, and while there he helped found the Indian Journal of Law and Technology, and was part of its editorial board for two years.

Click here to see the agenda for the brainstorming session on net neutrality.


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