Centre for Internet and Society

India encryption policy draft faces backlash

praskrishna — 2015-09-22T01:59:44Z

The department of information technology is facing a backlash from industry experts, Internet watchers and netizens on its draft of the National Encryption Policy that it recently made public.

The article by Moulishree Srivastava was published in Livemint on September 22, 2015. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

While the draft policy aims to enable a secure environment for both information and transactions in cyberspace for individuals, businesses and government, experts are concerned over privacy and outdated standards prescribed in the policy, among other things.

The policy puts the onus to produce encrypted information when demanded by government agencies on Indian citizens as well as on all the online service providers including instant messaging and e-commerce services that use encryption technology (to convert plain information to an unreadable format).

The department put the policy online late last week and it came on the radar of industry watchers and experts over the weekend. The policy is open for comments from the public till 16 October.

The policy, in its current form, is poorly drafted and the measures listed in it make Indian information systems vulnerable to cyber attacks, experts say.

For instance, the policy has mandated the use of specific standards and algorithms for encryption.

Encryption can be compared to the process of translating information in one language into a foreign language.

“Specifying certain algorithms to be used for encryption, and restricting the key sizes is same as saying that you are only allowed to communicate using a language from a given set of government-specified languages and no other language can be used,” said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society.

However, the ones mentioned in the draft policy are outdated and unsafe to use, experts say. Another thing that weakens the security considerably is the req-uirement for businesses and citizens to keep the information (that was encrypted and sent over) for 90 days, in case law en-forcement agencies demand it. But that also means that for those 90 days, cyber criminals, too, can access it, warn experts.

Another big gap in the policy is that it leaves out “sensitive departments/agencies of the government designated for performing sensitive and strategic roles”, said Prakash.

“When the policy states its mission to be the enhancing of confidentiality of information and of security of critical networks by laying out information security best practices, how does it make any sense to keep sensitive or strategic government department and agencies outside its purview?” he asked. “After all, these are the organizations that most need to be kept secure to enhance national cybersecurity.”

The draft is also ambiguous on which online services—be it shopping online or accessing email—people can use (in compliance with the law) and which online service providers will have to be registered with the government.

The policy states that “service providers located within and outside India, using encryption technology for providing any type of services in India, must enter into an agreement with the government for providing such services in India”. Users can only use the services that are registered with the government.

“This is the first time when users are actually being told what are the things they can and cannot do,” said Prakash.

“The government must take note that the knowledge and expertise of common citizens may be inadequate to understand the nuances of encryption,” said cyber law expert Na Vijayashankar on his blog. “For example, if a citizen uses a service available on the Internet which uses, say, a higher level of encryption than what is appro-ved, then this policy may make him liable for the violation.”

The problem is enhanced because all online services use some encryption technology. This means that practically all online activity will fall under this new policy.

For instance, companies like Apple or Microsoft use encryption technologies at various levels of their operating systems; e-commerce services like Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal; web browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and mail services like Gmail, Yahoo and Rediff may be required to register with the government. The only way they may escape this requirement is if there is an exemption for products that are in use at a large scale. Network security service providers like Cisco Inc. will also need to comply. (Cisco declined to respond to a query.) Snapdeal said it is still examining the draft policy, while Amazon, Google, Microsoft did not reply to emails sent by Mint. Yahoo said its spokesperson was unavailable.

One clause that is drawing a lot of ire from industry veterans and technology enthusiasts requires individual users and businesses to store all information that was sent in an encrypted form for 90 days from the date of transaction. The users would also be required to reproduce the plain text and the encrypted text, if demanded by law enforcement agencies.

The draft policy also overlooks the privacy concerns of citizens and businesses. “It is clearly a violation of freedom of speech. A large part of the policy states how the government can interfere with users, like, by demanding their private messages. The policy is anti-privacy law,” said Prakash. “Privacy and security go hand in hand. So, as this policy weakens the security of the information, it puts the privacy at greater risk.”

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-moulishree-srivastava-september-22-2015-india-encryption-policy-draft-faces-backlash

India blocks access to 857 porn sites

pranesh — 2015-08-05T01:31:32Z

India has blocked free access to 857 porn sites in what it says is a move to prevent children from accessing them.

The story was published by BBC on August 3, 2015. Pranesh Prakash gave his inputs.

Adults will still be able to access the sites using virtual private networks (VPNs) or proxy servers. In July, the Supreme Court expressed its unhappiness over the government's inability to block sites, especially those featuring child pornography.

Telecom companies have said they will not be able to enforce the "ban" immediately.

"We have to block each site one by one and it will take a few days for all service providers to block all the sites," an unnamed telecom company executive told The Times of India newspaper.

A senior official, who preferred to remained unnamed, told the BBC Hindi that India's department of telecommunications had "advised" telecom operators and Internet service providers to "control free and open access" to 857 porn sites.

"There is no total ban. This was done in the backdrop of Supreme Court's observation on children having free access to porn sites. The idea is also to protect India's cultural fabric. This will not prevent adults from visiting porn sites," the official said.

In July, the top court had observed that it was not for the court to order a ban on porn sites.

"It is an issue for the government to deal with. Can we pass an interim order directing blocking of all adult websites? And let us keep in mind the possible contention of a person who could ask what crime have I committed by browsing adult websites in private within the four walls of my house. Could he not argue about his right to freedom to do something within the four walls of his house without violating any law?," the court said.

According to statistics released by adult site Pornhub, India was its fourth largest source of traffic in 2014, behind the US, UK and Canada. Pranesh Prakash of the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society said the directive to block the 857 sites was "the largest single order of its kind" in India.

"The government's reasoning that it is not a ban because adults can still access the porn sites is ridiculous," he told the BBC. The move has caused a great deal of comment on Indian social media networks, with many prominent personalities coming forward to condemn it.

Popular author Chetan Bhagat, writer and commentator Nilanjana Roy, politician Milind Deora and director Ram Gopal Varma have all added their voices to the debate.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bbc-news-august-3-2015-india-blocks-access-to-857-porn-sites

India bans Facebook’s ‘free’ Internet for the poor

praskrishna — 2016-02-10T02:53:49Z

India’s telecom regulator said Monday that service providers cannot charge discriminatory prices for Internet services, a blow to Facebook’s global effort to provide low-cost Internet to developing countries.

The article by Annie Gowen was published in Washington Post on February 8, 2016. Sunil Abraham gave inputs. The article was also mirrored by NDTV.

Facebook’s “Free Basics” program provides a pared-down version of Facebook and weather and job listings to some 15 million mobile-phone users in 37 countries around the world.

When it debuted in India in April, however, Free Basics immediately ran afoul of Internet activists who said it violated the principle of “net neutrality,” which holds that consumers should be able to access the entire Internet unfettered by price or speed.

On Monday, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India agreed, prohibiting data service providers from offering or charging different prices for data — even if it’s free. The Free Basics program has run into trouble elsewhere in the world recently — with Egypt banning it and Google clarifying that it pulled out of the application during a testing phase in Zambia.

In a statement, Facebook said that while the company was “disappointed with the outcome, we will continue our efforts to eliminate barriers and give the unconnected an easier path to the Internet.”

In an interview before the ruling, Chris Daniels, Facebook’s vice president for Internet.org — the umbrella organization of the global effort — said India’s negative reaction has been “unique versus other markets we’ve seen. We’ve been welcomed with open arms in many countries.”

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg launched the program to great fanfare in 2013, partnering with other international tech firms on a mission to connect the 4 billion people in the world without Internet access — which he says is a basic human right.

India has 300 million mobile Internet users but still has close to 1 billion people without proper Internet access. But it is second only to the United States in number of Facebook users, with 130 million, with vast expansion potential as Facebook works to increase its user base beyond the developed world.

Yet the Free Basics program was controversial from the start in India, where critics accused Facebook of creating a “walled garden” for poor users that allowed them access to only a portion of the web that Facebook controlled.

Dozens of well-known tech entrepreneurs, university professors and tech industry groups spoke out against it, saying that the curated app, with its handpicked weather, job and other listings, put India’s scrappy start-ups and software developers at a disadvantage.

On Monday, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder and creator of India’s payment application PayTM, applauded the regulator’s move.

He had been among the program’s fiercest critics, dubbing Free Basics “poor Internet for poor people” and comparing Facebook’s actions to that of British colonialists and their East India Co.

“India, Do u buy into this baby internet?” Sharma tweeted in December. “The East India company came with similar ‘charity’ to Indians a few years back!”

“In a country like India that’s just taking off, it’s important that there is an equal playground for every app developer,” he said in an interview.

In December, India’s regulator put out a position paper on differential pricing and asked for public comment on whether such programs were fair.

In response, Facebook launched a public relations blitz, with television and newspaper advertisements, billboards and an opinion piece by Zuckerberg in the Times of India in which he argued against criticism that the social-media giant was providing the service simply to expand its user base.

Facebook also engineered a prompt to users that sent “robo” letters of support for Free Basics to India’s telecommunications regulator. The regulator, flooded with form letters, was not amused.

Facebook’s behavior may not have helped its cause, some analysts said.

“Facebook went overboard with its propaganda [and] convinced ‘the powers that be’ that it cannot be trusted with mature stewardship of our information society,” said Sunil Abraham of the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

Yet David Kirkpatrick, the author of “The Facebook Effect,” says that Zuckerberg is determined to see the program succeed.

“Facebook is relentless,” he said. “Zuckerberg has said from the beginning his goal is to make the world more open and connected. And that’s a phrase he continues to repeat 10 years later.”

The regulator had asked Facebook, and its local telecom partner, Reliance Communications, to suspend Free Basics’ operations during the public comment period. But the social-media giant and its partner appeared to flout the suspension order, with the program continuing to be operational on Reliance SIM cards.

A spokesman for Reliance earlier said that the applications was in “testing mode” and that it was not commercially promoting the product.

The regulatory body said Monday that anybody violating the order in the future will be subject to a fine of about $735 a day. It will return to review the policy in two years to see if it is effective.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/washington-post-annie-gowen-february-8-2016-india-bans-facebooks-free-internet-for-the-poor

India and Regional Mega-Trade Agreements

praskrishna — 2016-07-30T12:59:56Z

Anubha Sinha was invited by the Observer Research Foundation for a panel discussion on "India and Regional Mega-Trade Agreements" with Ambassador Robert Holleyman, Deputy US Trade Representative and Ambassador Shyam Saran, Chairman, Research and Information System for Developing Countries on July 25, 2016 at ORF Conference Hall in New Delhi.

The discussion comes at a critical time for digital trade in Asia, with the recent conclusion of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the continent's emergence as a major contributor the global digital economy.

The growth of the digital economy has spurred new concerns about global tax regimes, and the negotiation of trade terms - including non-tariff barriers and the alignment of policies - even as intellectual property rights are redefined and e-commerce changes industry practices. The backdrop to these developments is the rapid and unpredictable advance of technology, which has prompted the need for adaptive policies. The Digital 2 Dozen, the US tenets for unrestricted commerce and an open internet, is attached for your reference.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/india-and-regional-mega-trade-agreements

India and France to Digitise Manuscripts, Artworks & Archives

praskrishna — 2015-12-15T08:15:15Z

The Indian and French governments have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) which will assist in technical knowledge sharing, competency, skill building and cultural exchange between the two countries, as per a PIB release.

This was published by Medianama on October 29, 2015. CIS memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Goa University was mentioned.

The MoU will assist a program on digitisation of old manuscripts and documents, which began in France 7 years ago. The Ministry of Culture will benefit from this and build a national virtual library in India, which will store and share manuscripts, archives and artworks. This library will also link and share all knowledge resources from various Indian and French government institutes and organisations.

The French government is also keen on sorting and deciphering its collection of thousands of Indian documents in Sanskrit, Tamil and other Indian languages with the help of the Indian government, which also incidentally includes correspondence between Rabindranath Tagore and French scholar Sylvan Levin.

NMM digitised over 30 lakh manuscripts last year
In March, we reported that the 12 year old government body National Mission for Manuscripts (NMM) had digitised over thirty lakh manuscripts and 18,588,390 pages in all as of 31 December 2014. Mahesh Sharma, Union Minister of State for Culture, Tourism & Civil Aviation said that the National Archives of India (NAI) was set to digitise another 1,100,000 historic records.

Previous digitisation initiatives:

In November 2014, around 55 books written by the Indian author and activist Niranjana in Kannada would be digitized and made available on Kannada Wikisource, allowing Kannada speakers to access these books easily.
In October 2014, the Ministry of Culture launched a national portal for museums. Collections in all museums under its control and those under the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) will be digitized and presented on this portal.
In July 2014, the Department of Biotechnology and Department of Science and Technology released the draft of Open Access Policy under the Ministry of Science and Technology.
In September 2013, Goa University entered into a 3 year MoU with the Centre for Internet and Society for building the Konkani Wikipedia.
In June 2013, Tata Communications Media Services planned to digitize documents of historical and cultural significance such as films and documentaries from the archives of Doordarshan and Films Division of India which go back to 1947 including speeches of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders.
In May 2013, Punjabi Sahitya Akademi Reference Lab scanned and saved around 1,000 manuscripts, stone-printed scripts, poetry books on computer hard discs, adding that the digitized editions will be available across the globe through the internet.

Check out our digitisation and government coverage.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/medianama-sneha-johari-october-29-2015-india-and-france-to-digitise-manuscripts-artworks-and-archives

India Access To Knowledge/Draft Work plan July 2014 - June 2015

vishnu — 2014-04-08T09:51:27Z

One of the key mandates of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is to work towards catalysing the growth of the open knowledge movement in South-Asia and in Indic languages. CIS has been a steward of the Wikimedia movement in India since December 2008 when Jimmy Wales visited Bangalore. From September 2012 it has been actively involved in growing the movement in India through a grant received from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Based on the 18-month experience of working with various Indic Wikimedia communities, CIS-A2K has developed its Work Plan for July 2014 to June 2015.

This was originally published on Wikimedia blog

This work plan consists of 21 plans across 6 verticals. These are:

7 Language Area Plans: CIS-A2K has put in significant efforts in four focus language areas plans during the last year and has been successful in reaching most of its goals. In 2014-15 we will further deepen our engagement in these four language areas (Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu). Further, this experience and the learnings from it will be leveraged to work on three more large Indic language Wikipedia projects, which are Bangla, Hindi and Marathi. We have developed a detailed plan for each of these language areas, which can be seen here.
3 Community Strengthening Initiatives: We propose community strengthening initiatives that will further grow the Indic Wikimedia projects and the associated community, both qualitatively and quantitatively. These initiatives, focussing on building capacity and nurturing leadership in the Indic communities, will ensure that growth is sustained beyond the CIS-A2K program. A detailed plan for each of these initiatives is available here.
8 Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects: These stand-alone projects will have clear deliverables in a limited span of time, and will help us understand how to take up bigger initiatives in the respective language. All the stand-alone projects are more fully described here.
Creating Movement Resources: Once CIS-A2K began actively working with the Indic Wikimedia communities, it soon realized that unlike in English there were not many Wikimedia-related resources available in Indic languages. During the last year we produced some resources which were mostly unplanned outcomes. However, we feel there is an urgent need to create movement resources in Indic languages like a Creative Commons (CC) handbook; a Copyright handbook; training manuals; video tutorials, etc. See our plans for concerted efforts to create resources for strengthening the Wikimedia movement in India and in Indic languages here.
Publicity, Research and Documentation: Many of the Indic Wikimedia projects in spite of being in existence for more than 10 years have not received adequate publicity. Also, the Wikimedia movement in India could benefit from more systematic research and documentation. CIS-A2K will put in more intensive efforts into Publicity, Research and Documentation of the Wikimedia movement in India during this year as per the plans discussed here.
General Support and Service to the Movement: CIS-A2K deeply believes in extending support and service to the Wikimedia volunteer community in India. This has been one of the important aspects of our work so far. We have honoured up to 100 requests of all sizes that we received from the Wikimedia volunteer communities across all Indic languages. This page gives more details about the proposed work.

The work plan includes details of aims, objectives, programme activities and expected outcomes. Most of the language area plans were put together in active consultation with the respective Wikimedia language communities. Various inputs and ideas contributed, opportunities provided, and challenges thrown at the CIS-A2K program during the last year by the Wikimedia communities in India, our institutional partners, Executive Committee (EC) of Wikimedia India Chapter (WMIN) and the Wikimedia Foundation's Grantmaking Team have significantly informed our work plans.

Introduction

Background to CIS-A2K Program

The Wikimedia Foundation approved a grant of ₹26,000,000 to CIS in Bangalore, India to expand their A2K programme in India. The grant was released over a three phase period - first in September 2012 (₹ 11,000,000), second in June 2013 (₹ 7,500,000) and third in December 2014(₹ 7,500,000). The purpose of the grant was to enable the A2K team to work with the Wikimedia community of volunteers in India to expand the Indic Wikimedia projects and associated communities. In addition, the grant was aimed at generating improvements in India-relevant free knowledge in Wikimedia’s English projects, and the wider distribution of Wikimedia’s free knowledge within India.

CIS-A2K created an Annual Work Plan (2013-2014) that is being successfully implemented. Most of the projected outcomes against the plans have already been met. There have also been many unplanned outcomes. CIS-A2K has periodically been sharing its work openly with the Wikimedia community in India, WMIN and WMF's Grantmaking team. See all our reports and newsletters here.

Objective

The objective of the CIS-A2K is to catalyse the growth of open knowledge movement in South Asia and in Indic languages. Within the Wikimedia universe CIS-A2K specifically strives to further grow the Indic and English Wikimedia projects and communities by a) supporting and serving the Wikimedia communities; b) building institutional partnerships; c) bringing more content under free license; d) designing and executing projects with community participation; e) strengthening the Wikimedia volunteers; and f) fostering and enabling an appropriate legal and technological ecosystem.

Context

It is important to understand the two broader contexts in which CIS-A2K program operates, which underpins the implementation of this work plan.

Linguistic Diversity of India: India is known for its linguistic diversity. India is home to several dominant languages and also several small languages which are facing extinction. Due to the large number of languages that exist in India, the country has more than 20 different language Wikipedias. Each Indic Wikimedia language project is different from the others in terms of community structure, speaker base, literacy level, technical knowledge, existing documentation, language corpora and challenges in the cyberspace, etc. Hence, each Indian language has its own strengths and challenges which are quite different from each other.

Since each Indian language is so distinct, we cannot apply a ‘one-size fits all’ approach; hence CIS-A2K early on adopted the strategy of creating a detailed plan for each language. During 2013-14 we chose five (of which only four could be executed) Indic languages for focussed intervention and developed [plans]. This strategy did pay off and we have now decided to work on seven languages. It is important to note that we are cautious about not massively scaling up this strategy and our choice to work on seven language areas is well informed. However, we have planned to execute some stand-alone projects in other Indic languages and will provide need based support to other Indic Wikimedia communities.
Institutional Context: The A2K program is housed at CIS Bangalore. CIS is an almost 6 year old non-profit organisation [with offices in Bengaluru and New Delhi] focussing on interdisciplinary policy and academic research. CIS conducts policy research in the following areas - accessibility, access for knowledge [including free/open source software, open content, open standards, open access and open data], internet governance [including privacy and freedom of speech and expression], telecom [limited to shared backhaul and shared spectrum]. CIS produces academic research focusing on digital natives and digital humanities.

CIS shares the same values as Wikimedia and the free and open source software community. CIS believes Wikimedia's objectives of disseminating free knowledge to each and every individual. There are certain advantages the A2K program has because of its location within CIS. Some of these include: a) opportunity to leverage the strong network CIS has developed with various free culture / openness movement stakeholders in the past 6 years of its existence; b) the advantage of having an office space in a city which is the hub of the openness movement in India; c) readily available administrative and support staff and systems that saves a lot of A2K staff's time; d) cross-pollination of ideas and work done in other CIS programs and vice-versa; e) organisational principles like subsidiarity, war on meta-work, post-facto accountability, and amorphous institutional boundaries give the A2K team members amazing programmatic agility; and f) the right kind of ecosystem for free knowledge work[1] There are also some disadvantages: a) CIS being a non-chapter or Wikimedia volunteer-driven entity faces very valid questions about legitimacy, representation and "voluntary sector" vs. "volunteer" dichotomy; b) a section of the community view CIS-A2K as a competitor to WMIN for financial resources which undermines trust-building and consequently threatens synergies between WMIN and A2K c) CIS has to be conservative about attributing Wikimedia growth and community growth to A2K initiatives as it can be misconstrued as credit-grabbing.[2]

Methodology

Process

This work plan is put together based on an extensive engagement with various stakeholders of Wikimedia movement in India. These include a) some Wikimedia volunteers across Indic Wikimedia projects; b) WMIN Executive Committee; d) Institutional Partners of CIS-A2K; e) a few like-minded advocates of free knowledge; f) A2K Program Adviser Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana; and g) a few of the Wikimedia Foundation staff. Some of the language area plans were shared with that particular language Wikimedia community for feedback over the Wikipedia village pumps, mailing lists and social media groups. Each plan document has a list of contributors who have contributed in developing the plan.

Structure

There are 21 diverse plans within this plan. During the work planning exercise we realized that this diversity is both a good feature and a potential bug. We were concerned about making these plans intelligible. So we have worked very hard to come up with a standard template for all plans. Thus a cursory glance may give the impression that some plans look similar, but they are not. However, you may see repetitions in strategies across plans. Also in some plans we had to deviate from the template. Moreover, it is less productive to compare one sub-plan with another sub-plan as each plan was developed taking into consideration a) specific strengths and opportunities that CIS-A2K program could build on; b) particular needs for support to which we could respond; and c) specific challenges that require localized solutions.

Granularity

This plan is not set in stone and will be periodically (right now quarterly) reviewed and revised if required. The intention of this work plan is to continually ensure better design and better engagement. Thus this "plans within the plan" structure was essential to evolve a sense of granularity of the CIS-A2K team’s work along with micro-level outcome and impact metrics. This will give us the flexibility to amputate a plan, if it fails, without affecting the rest of the plans. We also believe that this granularity in plans will give a focussed direction for the CIS-A2K team and the volunteers who will collaborate with us in the implementation.

Mapping Plan to Budget/Mission Level Transparency

Each plan has an independent budget and is closely mapped on to the implementation plan. An attempt is made to correlate why we are spending a certain amount on a certain activity. Thus all these budgets are very optimally planned and the overall budget is an assimilation. CIS-A2K believes that this will give mission level transparency to our work and provide a clear structure of accountability to the movement.

Annual Work Plan July 2014-June 2015

Language Area Work Plans

CIS-A2K has put in significant efforts in four focus language areas plans during the last year and has been successful in reaching most of the proposed goals. In 2014-15 we will further deepen our engagement in these four language areas (Kannada, Konkani, Odia and Telugu). Further, this experience and the learnings from it will be leveraged to work on three more large Indic Wikipedia projects, which are Bangla, Hindi and Marathi. We have developed a detailed plan for each of these language areas, which is given below.

Some of the key factors that determined the selection of languages areas have included:

Deepening the work. We have decided to continue our work in the language areas chosen last year as we believe that we need to deepen our work to ensure that the momentum we have built will be sustained even after our exit.
Networking of institutions and groups. The A2K team has put together a list of knowledge institutions, groups and individuals with whom it has some connections and believes that it can bring them into the Wikimedia movement. These collaborations will not only result in significant quality-content contributions, but will lead to the diversification and expansion of that particular language Wikimedia community.
Willingness of that particular language community to interact and engage with the A2K team. Though we tried approaching other language communities informally, we were given to understand that they would like to consider engaging with us at a later stage. We respect the community's decision and express our willingness to work with newer language areas in a subsequent phase.
Familiarity of the A2K team members with the language. Each of us are editors/can edit or at least read the discussions in most of the above language Wikipedias. This will give us an insider's perspective of what is happening in that particular language community and the Wikimedia projects.

Community Strengthening Initiatives

CIS-A2K proposes to undertake three community strengthening initiatives that will further grow the Indic Wikimedia projects and the associated community, both qualitatively and quantitatively. These initiatives, focussing on building capacity and nurturing leadership in the Indic communities, will ensure that growth is sustained beyond the CIS-A2K program.

Nurturing Mediawiki and Tech Talent in Indic Communities: Through this initiative CIS-A2K aims to make the Indic Wikimedia communities relatively more self-reliant in addressing minor technical issues through nurturing and building community level technical leadership. This could go a long way in reducing excessive dependency on the Engineering resources and will help the Indic communities in building strong technical liaison with the Media Wiki global community and the WMF Engineer team. The detailed plan is available here.
Wikimedia Train the Trainer Program, CIS-A2K: The program will help build capacity and enable community members to conduct outreach sessions independently or with minimal support to introduce Wikipedia to prospective editors in their respective Indian languages. See here for a detailed design of this initiative.
Wiki-Data India Marathon: Wikidata India Marathon will be a month long travelling event (or a set of events) across India. The primary objective of this marathon will be to introduce Wikidata to various Indic Wikimedia communities and show how it can be used and what benefits it has. For more details see here.

Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects

Many project ideas came up as potential opportunities and as unplanned outcomes of our work during the last year. Based on an internal evaluation and thorough due-diligence we have short-listed some projects that could have high rate of success and learning. We propose to take up 8 such projects as stand-alone Wikimedia projects during this work plan period. These stand-alone projects will have clear deliverables in a limited span of time, and will help us understand how to take up bigger initiatives in the respective language.

Med GLAM Project at Calicut Medical College: The main objective of this project is to create, curate and make openly available images from the Department of Pathology, Calicut Medical College (CMC) for the benefit of medical and para-medical students and staff of CMC specifically and for the larger medical fraternity across the world, using free/open knowledge database Wikimedia Commons.
Wiki Loves Public Art (India): This is a photography competition that seeks to get photographs of works of public art on Wikipedia. The competition is modelled on Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) which has been running successfully since 2010. We plan to execute this in active collaboration with WMIN GLAM SIG.
100 Books on Gujarati Wikisource: The main objective of this project is to add significant content to Gujarati Wikisource using OCR. This project will be executed in collaboration with Gujarati Wikimedia community, WMIN Chapter, Forbes Gujarati Sabha (which will provide access to copyright free Gujarati content to be put up on Gujarati Wikisource) and The Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda.
Urdu Wikipedia Education Program at MANUU: This project aims to roll out Wikipedia Educational Programme aimed at the students of Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad.
Odia Wikisource as OER: This project aims to make Odia Wikisource a live project. Towards this three things will be done by CIS-A2K. First, to get a major Odia author's (Dr. Jagannath Mohanty) content re-released under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and to host it on Odia Wikisource. Second, with the help of Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences undertake a project whereby the students will type and proof read the books on Odia Wikisource, which could be used as OER across various educational institutions. Third, the digitized children's literature in Odia will be freely distributed across the government schools in an offline form. This project is inspired by the Malayalam Wikimedia community's efforts of introducing Wikisource in schools as part of the IT at Schools program in Kerala.
Making the Tulu Wikipedia Live
Making the Santali Wikipedia Live
Telugu Wiki Bus: This pilot project aims to create massive awareness about Indic Wikimedia projects in smaller cities and towns. This is modelled on the Google bus program and will be implemented in the Telugu speaking region of Andhra Pradesh.

Creating Movement Resources

Once CIS-A2K began actively working with the Indic Wikimedia communities, it soon realized that unlike English there are not many Wikimedia related resources available in Indic languages. During the last year we produced some resources, which were mostly unplanned outcomes. However, we feel that there is an urgent need for concerted efforts to create resources to strengthen the Wikimedia movement in India and in Indic languages. We strongly believe that creating these movement resources will go a long way in growing and strengthening the Wikimedia volunteers beyond the limits of CIS-A2K program. Some of the activities in this plan have a larger fit with the larger institutional work of CIS in the domain of Intellectual Property Rights and Openness.[3] We will collaborate with the legal expertise within CIS in executing some of these activities. A detailed plan of activities under this initiative along with a budget can be seen here.

Publicity, Research and Documentation

Many of the Indic Wikimedia projects in spite of being in existence for more than 10 years have not received adequate publicity. Many of the long time Indic Wikimedia volunteers have, during our interactions, expressed the need to increase the publicity about the Indic Wikimedia projects so that there is increased public awareness. CIS-A2K has left no stone unturned to get print and electronic media publicity for Indic Wikimedia projects and communities duirng 2013-14. Because of our efforts there were about 100 news items the print media[4] and about 10 programs on electronic media[5] in the last year.

Also the Wikimedia movement in India could benefit with more systematic research and documentation. It should be noted that CIS has been doing research about the Wikimedia movement way before the Access to Knowledge program got a grant from Wikimedia Foundation. Researching on various elements of the Wikimedia movement is not something new for CIS and the team will continue its efforts in this direction. In addition to action research, we undertook systematic documentation of the movement during the last year. More intensive efforts will be put in Publicity, Research and Documentation of the Wikimedia movement in India during this year as per the plans discussed here.

General Support and Service to the Movement

CIS-A2K deeply believes in extending support and service to the Wikimedia volunteer community in India. This has been one of the important aspects of our work. We have honoured up to 100 requests of all sizes that we received from the Wikimedia volunteer communities across all Indic languages. Most of these requests are listed here and here. CIS-A2K also receives requests over e-mail and some community members do reach out to us over mobile phones to place requests. In general the quick response time of CIS-A2K to these requests has been appreciated by many of the community members. We would like to continue with our efforts in supporting and serving the Wikimedia community in India and maintain the quick response time. CIS-A2K has actively consulted with the Wikimedia India Chapter (WMIN) before supporting most of the community requests, especially when it involved allocating funds for large community events like Tamil Wikipedia 10th anniversary celebrations. We also ensure that supporting community events is done in a transparent manner. However, we would need to review our methods and further streamline systems of support, which will be worked up on during this year. This page will give more details about the proposed work.

Learning and Evaluation

Based on discussions with the Wikimedia India Chapter EC and with some members of the Wikimeda community, the A2K programme had put together some evaluation tools to assess the impact of its work during the last year. We have included some more metrics for evaluation this year.

Evaluation Tools

Quarterly growth of no. of articles
Quarterly growth of no. of total editors
Quarterly growth of no. of new editors
Quarterly growth of no. of active editors
Quarterly growth of no. of very active editors
No. of page views
No. of articles < 2 KB < 5 KB
No. of new tools/gadgets made available during a time-slice
No. of mentoring interactions
No. of bugs filed and resolved
No. of edits (Article, Other mainspace edits)
Print and electronic media mentions

Reports

We will undertake quarterly and annually review of its work using the above evaluation tools. The team will also report the successes and learnings to the Wikimedia India & the global community. In addition to this the A2K team will actively review progress of each language area plan in collaboration with the respective Wikimedia community. Based on this feedback we will undertake mid-course corrections, should there be a need. This will be openly shared on the respective plan discussion pages on Meta. In addition to this, A2K will continue to publish monthly newsletter informing the larger community of the various activities A2K has undertaken in a certain month and is planning to undertake in the upcoming month. Towards the the end of the grant, A2K will share an impact report encompassing analysis of all year long work done by A2K. To summarize following reports will be published in the year of 2014 - 2015:

Quarterly Report 1 (July 2014 - October 2014)
Quarterly Report 2 (November 2014 - February 2015)
Quarterly Report 3 (March 2015 - June 2015)
Impact Report (July 2014 - June 2015)
Monthly Newsletters

Monthly Review and Learning Sessions

CIS-A2K conducted many weekly learning sessions to critically reflect on the successes and failures of our work internally. We had also used these weekly sessions to learn about new developments (tools, policies, etc) in the Wikimedia universe. However, this could not be sustained for a long period. We will take measures to revive this and make it a monthly exercise, which we will try to record or screen cast on CIS website. Simultaneously we will use this to do a monthly review of the progress of the various plans and discuss about the upcoming month's events.

Budget

As stated above in the methodology section, each of the 21 plans have an independent budget, which is closely mapped on to the implementation plan. Below we have give a concise picture of the budget requirements against the 6 verticals. As part of the WMF's grant to CIS, we have received Rs. 15,000,000.00 or US$ 242,178.00 during the last year. The proposed budget of Rs. 18,406,454.00 or US$ 297.831.00 is about 23 per cent more than the previous year's grant.

Sl. No.	Budget Item	FDC (INR)	FDC (US$)	Other Sources and in kind support (INR)	Other Sources and in kind support (US$)
1	Language Area Plans	Rs. 7,466,440.00	120,813.05338	Rs. 2,100,000.00	33,979.70279
2	Community Strengthening Initiatives	Rs. 2,610,400.00	42,238.3886	Rs. 200,000.00	3,236.16217
3	Stand Alone Wikimedia Projects	Rs. 2,584,300.00	41,816.06949	Rs. 2,495,000.00	40,371.12308
4	Creating Movement Resources	Rs. 1,188,000.00	19,222.80329	Rs. 2,400,000.00	38,833.94605
5	Publicity, Research & Documentation	Rs. 780,000.00	12,621.03247	Rs. 0.00	0.00000
6	General Support and Service to the Movement	Rs. 636,000.00	10,290.99570	Rs. 0.00	0.00000
7	Other Expenses	Rs. 1,468,000.00	23,753.43033	Rs. 2,964,000.00	47,959.92337
	Total before Institutional Development	Rs. 16,733,140.00	270,755.77331	Rs. 10,159,000.00	164,380.85745
8	Institutional Development (10%)	Rs. 1,673,314.00	27,075.57733	Rs. 0.00	0.00000
	TOTAL BUDGET	Rs. 18,406,454.00	297,831.35064	Rs. 10,159,000.00	164,380.85745

Other than item no. 7 and 8 the entire budget will go towards the programmatic implementation of the plans. The staff costs are not separately listed here as we see the CIS-A2K team as a programmatic investment and each of the team member's time is budgeted against a specific activity or plan. We propose to raise Rs. 10,159,000.00 or US$ 163,380.00 other sources and in-kind support towards executing this work plan. A detailed budget analysis is available here. Please See this google spreadsheet which gives a micro level picture of the Budget against each of the planned activity.

Giving Feedback

We appreciate your valuable feedback. However, for the sake of structured engagement by everyone, we request you to consider the following before you share your feedback.

For feedback on the overall A2K Work Plan you can write here.
For feedback on respective Language area plans, please write on the discussion page of the respective language plan.

For Bangla plan here.
For Hindi plan here.
For Kannada plan here.
For Konkani plan here.
For Marathi plan here.
For Odia plan here.
For Telugu plan here.

For feedback on Community Strengthening initiatives, please write on discussion page of the respective project page.
For feedback on Stand-alone Wikimedia Projects, please write on discussion page of the respective project page.
For feedback on Creating Movement Resources, please write here.
For feedback on Publicity, Research and Documentation, please write here.
For feedback on General Support and Service to the Movement, please write here.
Alternatively you could also share your feedback over e-mail at vishnu at cis-india.org. Please use the subject line Feedback on Work Plan.
Should you feel the need to discuss any aspect of the plan before sharing your feedback, please write to us and we can set up a telephone/Skype call.

Notes

[1]. CIS supports the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University through a fellowship and participation on the advisory board; CIS supports the open data community through support for the founders of Data Meet; CIS is supporting venue costs for some of Cyber Security and Privacy Foundation's outreach programmes; CIS has supported the last edition of the Goa Project; CIS allows various groups to use its Bangalore and Delhi offices for meetings such as Null Con Bangalore, Bitcoin Delhi, Arduino, Dojo, Crypto Party and Maker Party communities. In the past, CIS has hosted Inclusive Planet India and Has Geek at its Bangalore office.

[2]. See the discussion in this TechCrunch article. Also see this blog which inspired TechCrunch to do a feature about the growth of Indic Wikipedia projects.

[3]. Openness initiative at CIS

[4]. All the four foucs language areas during the last year's plan received significant print media coverage because of CIS-A2K's efforts. In addition, even the mainstream English print media did stories on indic Wikimedia projects, which was unprecedented.

[5].There were 6 television programs and 1 radio program on Telugu Wikipedia and 2 television programs and 1 radio interview on Kannada Wikipedia.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/india-access-to-knowledge-draft-work-plan-july-2014-june-2015

Inclusive Financial Services - Global Trends in Accessibility Requirements

nirmita — 2015-05-03T06:55:49Z

Inclusive Financial Services is a G3ict White Paper researched in cooperation with the Centre for Internet and Society. The research paper comprises a Foreword and Introduction, four chapters — Barriers to Access for Persons with Disabilities and Diverse Abilities, International Framework, Integrating Accessibility into the System, and State of Practice - Impact of the Convention on Inclusive Finance and Accessibility Efforts around the Globe.

Foreword

Global demand for accessibility continues to grow, due in part to the strengthening voice worldwide of more than one billion people with disabilities, including the aging population, and important frameworks, such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. From a private sector standpoint, the Convention represents a unique opportunity to ensure equal access to information while achieving global harmonization of standards and economies of scale. Understanding that technology is the great equalizer for underserved populations and having a clear roadmap towards inclusive information and communications technologies (ICT), rather than simple compliance strategies, will benefit everyone in every industry.

Specifically, the financial services sector is faced with the need to transform operations while providing truly exceptional customer experiences. Disruptive trends -- such as the aging population, influx of mobile devices and global regulations – are driving demand for more human-centric technology, and creating an opportunity for innovation that are proving to be differentiators for the institutions embracing them. Consumer demand to be in control of interactions and information is forcing those in financial services to reconsider what’s important to stay competitive. By offering an online experience through any device personalized to individual needs, preferences and abilities, organizations can ensure they are reaching the broadest base of the population, especially the “unbanked” and “underbanked,” to enhance interactions and improve sales opportunities.

Customers with lifelong disabilities or age-related impairments represent an increasingly large population among the biggest markets in the world such as OECD countries and China. Also, in many countries aging persons are the holders of a majority of the assets and highly dependent on insurance, retirement and banking services. Ensuring they can use the services they need without encountering accessibility barriers is a powerful way to earn their loyalty in a highly competitive environment.

IBM has a long tradition and culture of accessibility and understands the importance of improving the user experience, managing accessibility compliance, and creating an inclusive workplace environment. Consistent with our own experience, this report highlights the organizational and process adjustments needed to ensure everyone has equal access to timely information they need for work and life.

By creating a holistic strategy for embedding accessible technology across the entire enterprise - from processes to product development to people – organizations can reinvigorate individual channels and harmonize them across the bank. G3ict has written this timely publication for the financial services sector that provides a clear picture of the global forces at work that are transforming how employee- and client-facing applications, products and services are delivered to reach the broadest set of customers. The report also serves as a useful benchmarking source for governments and advocates based on its review of existing solutions already implemented around the world. We applaud G3ict for taking this first step on the road of advocating for greater accessibility of financial services in cooperation with stakeholders from around the world.

Ian Hurst, General Manager, Global Financial Services Sector, IBM Corporation
Frances W. West, Chief Accessibility Officer, IBM Corporation

Introduction

Financial services play a necessary and important role in societies by enabling access to products, resources, and services, enabling savings and asset creation, and facilitating economic self-sufficiency. Access to financial services for all is a necessity in today’s world not simply at the community or household level, but at an individual level, to open doors to banking services, credit services, stocks and shares, insurance, and other markets. Access to and inclusion in financial services is crucial to poverty reduction and participation in economic prosperity and growth and development.

The increasing pervasiveness of technology in the delivery of financial services and the disruption of traditional channels of delivery through ‘FinTech’ (technology for financial service delivery) have generated new enthusiasm and newer ways for reaching out to persons who remain unbanked. Similarly, the increasing nature of services now available through technology has triggered growing demand among persons who remained marginalized from traditional paper-based banking services, as well as calls to ensure that they do not in turn create new barriers to access. Accompanying this growth spurt in technology there has also been an increasing recognition of the rights of persons with disabilities and the utmost importance of providing equal access to them to all services, including financial services.

Persons with disabilities and diverse abilities have been amongst those traditionally marginalized from the financial services sector through a mix of inaccessibility, presumptions of limited need and capacity to manage finances, and mindsets that did not view them as a profitable consumer base. This paradigm is now rapidly changing with growing evidence of their demand and need for access to services as well as the increasing income base of persons with disabilities around the world. Persons with disabilities and diverse abilities are demanding better and easier access to the entire range of financial services. Access to and inclusion in financial services is important to persons across the economic spectrum. And for persons with disabilities who live under the poverty line, it is essential that they are involved in financial inclusion initiatives and programs that will empower them and enable them to become financially independent.

A range of factors are serving as drivers to enhance the inclusion of persons with disabilities and diverse abilities through accessible financial services including demographics, attaining a competitive advantage and improving market share nationally and globally, Corporate Social Responsibility, regulations, legislation and compliance, enhancing business value, ensuring and increasing an inclusive workplace for employees with disabilities, maximizing on technology advances, and ensuring diversity and inclusion for all.

This report offers an introduction and overview to the need for, and mechanisms to achieve accessibility in financial services:

Chapter 1 offers an understanding of the barriers posed by inaccessible financial services to persons with different disabilities.

Chapter 2 highlights the different international mandates and frameworks that are accelerating the promotion of financial inclusion for persons with disabilities.

Chapter 3 offers in-depth descriptions of the accessibility needs based on the type of technology in use, along with examples of effective practices and solutions to promote inclusion. It also offers a look at how different countries are striving to achieve the accessibility mandate.

Chapter 4 focuses on the state of practice of financial inclusion for persons with disabilities across countries and the implementation of the Convention’s requirements for ICT accessibility and financial inclusion. This chapter describes findings from two major studies undertaken by G3ict that paint a picture of the state of financial accessibility today and offer a glimpse into the financial sector’s commitment to incorporate accessibility into their work and services in the future.

Finally, in the Conclusions section, the report offers recommendations for relevant stakeholders to incorporate the principles of inclusion to drive accessibility through product design and delivery, policy and legal structures, and distribution channels and pathways.

Download the report

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/inclusive-financial-services-global-trends-in-accessibility-requirements

Inclusive Disaster and Emergency Management for Persons with Disabilities

praskrishna — 2013-10-04T06:55:59Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/emergency-services-report.pdf

Inaugural EPT Award for Open Access

praskrishna — 2011-12-31T10:46:47Z

The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development is pleased to announce the winners of a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developing countries who have made a significant personal contribution to advancing the cause of open access (OA) and the free exchange of research findings.

We received 30 proposals from organisations in 17 developing countries on four continents, naming individuals who have worked hard to promote OA and who have achieved substantial progress. The selection of a single winner was extremely difficult as we received nominations for so many individuals who have made impressive strides by any or all of the following means:

establishing OA institutional repositories;

setting up or encouraging conversion to OA journals;
achieving establishment of OA mandates requiring research to be OA on publication, or other policy developments;
advocating OA via seminars, publications, workshops, videos;
training others in the technology of setting up IRs;
preparing and establishing e-learning projects;
working towards the acceptance of Creative Commons licensing arrangements for research publications;
developing software for use in OA practices.

Because of the high standard of the applicants, we have decided to name a single winner, but also to recognise three other individuals who were very close runners-up. All will receive a certificate and the winner will receive in addition an engraved plaque in the next few weeks.

We are very happy to announce that the winner of the inaugural award is Dr Francis Jayakanth of the National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Dr Jayakanth played a significant role in the establishment of India’s first institutional repository (IR) (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in). He now manages the IR and has provided technical support for establishing IRs in many other universities and institutes in India. He has been the key resource person at many events to train people in setting up IRs and OA journals. He has delivered presentations on IRs, OA journals, the OAI protocol, OAI compliance, the benefits of OA to authors and institutions and the role of libraries. He has developed a free and open source software tool (CDSOAI), which is widely used.

The Indian Institute of Science is the most prestigious institute in India and its IR now holds >31,400 records, making the century-old institute's research far more globally visible than before. The University Grants Commission in India has been impressed by the IISC’s IR and has directed all universities in India to replicate this effort.

Dr Francis Jayakanth can indeed be considered an OA ‘renaissance man’, an advocate and technical expert in all aspect of Open Access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level.
The EPT is proud to congratulate Dr Jayakanth as our first Award winner. We believe this Award and the example of our first winner will inspire many others and lead to similarly impressive nominations in 2012.

The runners-up for this award were (in alphabetical order):

Ina Smith, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa;
Tatyan Zayseva, Khazar University, Azerbaijan;
Xiaolin Zhang, National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The EPT wishes to congratulate them and all who have been proposed, since without exception they have made a significant personal contribution to the sharing of research findings across the world. We will be sharing some of their stories and successes on our blog over the next few weeks.

Electronic Publishing Trust for Development

Web site http://www.epublishingtrust.org
EPT Blog http://www.epublishingtrust.blogspot.com

What is Open Access?

Open Access provides the means to maximize the visibility, and thus the uptake and use, of research outputs. Open Access is the immediate (upon or before publication), online, free availability of research outputs without any of the restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements. It is definitely not vanity publishing or self-publishing, nor about the literature that scholars might normally expect to be paid for, such as books for which they hope to earn royalty payments. It concerns the outputs that scholars normally give away free to be published – journal articles, conference papers and datasets of various kinds.

Not only scholars benefit from Open Access. They are the most obvious beneficiaries, perhaps, because their work gains instant worldwide visibility, and they also gain as readers if much more world research is available on an Open Access basis for them to access freely and read. But there are many other beneficiaries, too.

Research institutions benefit from having a management information tool that enables them to assess and monitor their research programmes, and they have a marketing tool that enables them to provide a shop window for their research efforts. The same advantages apply to external research funders who need to be able to access and keep track of outputs from their funding, and measure and assess how effectively their money has been spent. They also can ensure that the results of their spending have had the widest possible dissemination.

It is because Open Access is so much in the interest of research funders and employers that an increasing number of them around the world are introducing Open Access policies that require their funded researchers to provide Open Access to their work.

The advantages of Open Access for science and scholarship are, in brief:

Open Access brings greater visibility and impact
Open Access moves research along faster
Open Access enables better management and assessment of research
Open Access provides the material on which the new semantic web tools for data-mining and text-mining can work, generating new knowledge from existing findings

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/ept-award-for-open-access

Inaugural EPT Award for Dr. Francis Jayakanth

praskrishna — 2012-02-27T12:24:25Z

Programme

16.00	Welcome and introduction to the award Subbiah Arunachalam
16.05	Presenting the award and felicitation Prof. M S Swaminathan
16.15	Acceptance speech Dr Francis Jayakanth
16.25	Felicitation by eminent scientists Prof. G Baskaran Prof. K Mangala Sunder
16.35	Vote of thanks
16.40	Tea

Video

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/inaugural-ept-award-for-dr.-francis-jayakanth

In Parts of India, Internet Shutdowns Are a Fact of Life

Megha Bahree — 2019-05-27T15:43:53Z

Fears of a censored internet are rising, as the government cites fake news and unlawful content in blocking internet access.

The article by Megha Bahree was published in Top10 VPN on May 21, 2019. Gurshabad Grover was quoted.

In 2017, Faakirah Suraiya Irfan, a lawyer and mental health counselor in the northern Indian state of Kashmir, was online with a patient when the internet went down. In the restive state the government frequently, and without any warning, shuts down the internet, so it was not an unusual occurrence. But for Irfan, who was employed by women’s career networking platform Sheroes to offer online counseling services to its members, the interruption couldn’t have come at a worse time. She was in the midst of talking a patient out of suicidal thoughts.

“At that point when you lose the network, you just lose the person,” said Irfan. “I’m talking, and I’m in a flow and trying to get them to open up but then in the middle of that the internet is shut down.”

Irfan quit her job after a year because “the work was through the internet and [owing to the frequent network shutdowns] it just wasn’t working.”

Internet, interrupted

In the last couple of years India has seen a phenomenal increase in the number of people coming online thanks to an explosion of cheap data and affordable smartphones. With more than 500 million people online, it has the second largest number of internet users in the world, after China.

But that growth has been accompanied by the usual sins of abuse, including a rise in online trolls and the spread of fake news. New Delhi has responded with a heavy hand. It has implemented internet shutdowns, banned apps and blocked hundreds of websites. Unsurprisingly, all of this has led to increasing fears of censorship in the world’s largest democracy.

India leads the world in the number of internet shutdowns, with over 100 reported incidents in 2018 alone, according to the latest Freedom On The Net report. The study tracks internet freedom in 65 countries, covering 87 percent of the world’s internet users, and addresses internet access, freedom of expression, and privacy issues. The report followed events between June 2017 and May 2018 and India came in as “partly free” with a score of 43 out of 100.

“There’s a censorship process underway in India,” said Apar Gupta, a lawyer and executive director of Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), an organization that works to defend net neutrality, freedom and privacy. “There’s a complete lack of transparency on what’s being done, why and who’s doing this.”

Shutdown throughout elections

India has just concluded the world’s largest general election with over 900 million people eligible to vote. But ongoing internet shutdowns prevented many people from accessing information as they prepared to cast their ballot.

Over the voting period of April 11 to May 19, the states of Rajasthan, West Bengal and Kashmir reported mobile internet shutdowns. News agency UNI reported that in April, authorities in parts of north Kashmir suspended internet services of all cellular providers in the region as it went to poll. This came two days after a shutdown in another region in Kashmir. The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), a legal services organization that aims to protect digital freedom and which tracks internet shutdowns across the country, found there have been 30 shutdowns in the state so far this year, and 40 across the country.

“There’s a complete lack of transparency on what’s being done, why and who’s doing this.” – Apar Gupta

Shutdowns have a couple of provisions in law, says Gupta. One was passedin 2017 and empowers both the federal and the state government to suspend telecom services, and by extension, internet services. The other – which prohibits public gatherings – dates back to when the British ruled the country. The law was initially used to prevent Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the leader of India’s independence struggle, from organizing protest marches and now is regularly used to restrict internet access. The latter is more frequently used as it allows even local authorities to issue orders for shutdowns without a review process, says Mishi Choudhary, legal director of SFLC.

IFF’s Gupta says these shutdowns “disturb the constitutional protection for free expression.” He adds: “Such a disproportionate action beyond legal doctrine practically disrupts daily life to a severe degree and causes immense hardship. It provokes anxiety among families who talk to each, causes business losses and reduces the political freedom in a country.”

History of services suspended

In India, internet shutdowns began somewhere around 2012, picked up pace from 2015 and peaked in 2018. According to the New Delhi think tank Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, the internet was shut down for a total of 16,315 hours between 2012 and 2017, costing the economy approximately $3.04 billion.

Shutdowns can be partial—when a specific class of websites are blocked, like all internet messaging sites—or complete when the entire internet is cut off. Kashmir has the dubious honor of the highest number of shutdowns at 155 to date, according to the SFLC.

The longest shutdown in the country occurred in Kashmir in the summer of 2016 after a local rebel was killed that July. Mobile internet services were suspended for 133 days. While internet services on postpaid connections were restored by November, users with prepaid connections got their internet access back only in January 2017, nearly six months after they had been cut off.

The second longest suspension of internet services took place in Darjeeling in eastern India in June 2017 during a local secessionist agitation. Initially, just the mobile internet services were shut off but within a couple of days, the broadband services were cut off as well, according to SFLC’s tracker. Ultimately there were no internet services in Darjeeling for a total of one hundred days.

In both cases, it wasn’t clear who ordered the shutdown, as reflected in local media reports. Typically, shutdowns happen without any warning and in most cases the only explanation offered is that services were suspended “as a precautionary measure to maintain law and order”.

In a country where internet usage has risen dramatically in the last few years, the shutdowns have been “a blunt instrument to bring the digital economy to its knees and deprive the citizens the freedom to communicate,” says Choudhary.

In the summer of 2016, mobile internet in Kashmir was shut off for four months.

India’s data explosion

It was a new telecom entrant that drastically changed the dynamics of the country’s internet access, and brought vast numbers of people online.

In September 2016, Reliance Industries, which is owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, launched 4G network Jio. The network allowed subscribers to use internet plans to make calls, send text messages or browse the internet, and it jump-started the business by offering its services for free initially. Once it started charging for data, its rates were incredibly cheap. A year later it offered low-cost 4G handsets for a refundable security deposit of $22. In 2018 it offered a 4G phone for a third of that price. The strategy helped it gain millions of users, and encouraged the transition from feature phones to smartphones, giving users easy access to the internet.

“The internet shutdowns are a blunt instrument to bring the digital economy to its knees.” – Mishi Choudhary

Rajakumari Dayamenti, a native of Sabantongba village in the north eastern state of Manipur, was one such user. Before Jio set up a cellphone tower in her village, Dayamenti plugged a 10-meter-long USB extension cord into a Huawei modem that she stuck on her rooftop, creating her own mini tower to get online.

Cheap data and the millions of new users also ensured the rise of apps, with entertainment becoming one of the biggest drivers. Users in the big Indian cities have flocked to the same apps as their peers across the globe, including Apple Music, Spotify, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp. In the smaller cities, however, consumers have turned to more local and regional social networking apps like ShareChat and to apps that offer free content like Wynk, Gaana and Hotstar, Star India’s mobile and digital entertainment platform. For news, users turn to Facebook as well as UC News and Dailyhunt.

Disrupting daily life

Lateef Mushtaq, a native of Kashmir who is pursuing an undergraduate degree in technology in Delhi, has experienced internet disruptions countless times, he says. Mushtaq was on a two-week internship in Kashmir last July with state-owned telecom company BSNL to measure internet speeds in different areas when the internet was shut down. The company had to extend the internship to six weeks so he could complete the project.

More recently in February he was home and was scheduled to take an exam online when a suicide bomber blew up a convoy of vehicles carrying security personnel, killing at least 40 in an area called Pulwama. India blamed archenemy and the neighboring state of Pakistan, which denied the allegations.

In the midst of escalating tensions between the two nuclear armed neighbors, the internet speed in Mushtaq’s area was reduced to 2G. But he still had to take his exam, a frustrating experience as he found that the same page was being reloaded after he would submit his responses instead of moving forward to the next set of questions.

“I was submitting my answers, but it kept going back to the previous page,” he says. “I kept answering the same questions again and again.” Mushtaq couldn’t finish the paper and scored 63 percent on it. He says he could’ve done much better.

“In Delhi the internet is never shut down so when it happens to me now, I feel like I’m locked down in a single room without access to the world,” he says.

Finding any available network

While mobile phone services are disrupted frequently, the government occasionally spares the state-run BSNL as the armed forces also use this service. Mushtaq has in the past tried to get a BSNL broadband connection but without success. These connections are prized possessions and Kashmiri teenagers develop hacking skills early in an effort to ride on any broadband network when the government shuts their mobile services down.

“If we hear about a house with broadband, we try to crack the password,” admits Mushtaq. Networks that are secured on WiFi Protected Access (WPA) security standard are easy to crack and there are several apps on the Google play store that help with that, says Mushtaq.

When it’s just some sites or apps have been blocked, Mushtaq and his friends have turned to virtual private networks (VPNs) or proxy services to find a way around the blocks, he says.

Internet shutdowns have cost India’s economy approximately $3.04 billion

But during a complete shutdown none of these workarounds do the trick, as Musthtaq found last year. He had to drive to another part of Kashmir where the internet was still working to check his score for an important entrance exam. Once he got the signal on his phone, he pulled up and sat on the roadside waiting for the website to load.

Similarly, during the 100-day shutdown in Darjeeling, Nirmal Tamang drove his daughter on his motorcycle more than 40 miles to another city where the internet was working so she could fill forms online to apply for undergraduate studies.

Battling ‘unlawful’ content

Rumors or provocative messaging on social media and instant messaging platforms have often been cited as reasons to order internet restrictions.

One critical issue involved the spate of mob attacks in India in the past couple years, fueled by widely circulated messages such as reports of strangers abducting children.

According to an analysis by IndiaSpend, a data journalism website, between January 1, 2017, and July 5, 2018 33 people were killed and at least 99 injured in 69 reported cases of mobs attacking people they suspected were planning to abduct children. In all the cases, the charges turned out to be baseless, with 77 percent of the reports based on fake news that had spread through social media.

With at least 200 million users in India, WhatsApp was one of the mediums through which these rumors spread, and in the aftermath of the violence, came to be a poster child for fake news.

New Delhi responded by asking the platform to take responsibility for the messages circulating on it, stating: “Such a platform cannot evade accountability and responsibility especially when good technological inventions are abused by some miscreants who resort to provocative messages which lead to spread of violence.” It added, “WhatsApp must take immediate action to end this menace and ensure that their platform is not used for such mala fide activities.” (In response, last July WhatsApp introduced a limit in India on the number of times a user could forward a message to five. It has now imposed that limit on the rest of the world as well.)

Since then, the Indian government has proposed rules that would force internet companies to remove content from their platforms. In late December, it issued a draft policy of rules intended to curb the misuse of social media and stop the spreading of fake news.

Apar Gupta likens the government’s proposal to “Chinese style censorship that would weaken free expression”

Under the policy, the government has proposed an amendment to Section 79 of India’s IT Act, which would require internet companies to take down content deemed inappropriate by authorities. And if a company receives a complaint from a law enforcement agency, it would be required to trace and report it within 72 hours and to disable that user’s access within 24 hours. Should this amendment go through, it would effectively break the end-to-end encryption that secures user communications on platforms like WhatsApp.

Another recommendation in the draft policy says that internet companies will have to purge their platforms of “unlawful” content. However, the policy doesn’t clearly define what makes something “unlawful”, raising concerns that the clause could be easily abused by authorities to remove any content they wish.

Internet companies and privacy advocates say the new measures, if implemented, pose a threat to free speech and would encourage censorship.

It’s “plainly unconstitutional,” says Gurshabad Grover, policy officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, a nonprofit organization. “By mandating online platforms to detect and remove “unlawful content” through automation, the draft rules shift the burden of judging whether content is legal from the state to private organizations. They will only lead to a great chilling effect on speech, and a regime of online censorship regulated by private parties,” he says.

IFF’s Gupta likens the proposal to “Chinese style censorship that would weaken free expression standards” and his organization has asked for a complete rollback of the proposal.

Website censorship on the rise

Large-scale disruptions and intentional slowdowns are not the only tools employed by the government to exert control over the internet. Specific websites and apps are also sporadically blocked.

In April 2017, in the wake of massive student protests in Kashmir, the state government banned access to 22 social media apps including Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Snapchat, Skype, Telegram and WeChat, for a month.

Two experts at the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner said the restrictions had “a significantly disproportionate impact on the fundamental rights of everyone in Kashmir,” and that they “fail to meet the standards required under international human rights law to limit freedom of expression.”

Another crackdown targeted the country’s 827 porn websites. In India it is not illegal to watch porn privately and the country has the dubious honor of being the world’s third-biggest porn watching country. Unsurprisingly, the ban didn’t fully succeed.

Within days of the government order, Pornhub, one of the biggest adult content sites, had launched a mirror website for India with an altered web address. Other workarounds in use included VPN or proxy services such as hide.me, hidester, and whoer.net. As per a TorrentFreak report, the search for VPNs shot up in the days after the ban. Users also switched to different browsers such as Alibaba’s UC Browser or the Opera browser where the banned sites could still be accessed.

Privacy advocates say the government’s amends to internet policy, if implemented, would encourage censorship.

Most recently, an Indian court banned China’s Beijing Bytedance Technology Co.-owned music and video app TikTok which had been downloaded by nearly 300 million users in India.

The ban came on the heels of a handful of incidences—a 24-year-old man in the southern city of Chennai reportedly committed suicide on being harassed for posting videos of himself dressed as a woman. Soon after, a member of a local political party of Chennai’s home state of Tamil Nadu declared that the younger generation was hooked on TikTok and getting pushed onto the path of cultural degradation. In response, a state minister promised to seek the federal government’s help to ban the app.

A Tamil Nadu court then banned downloads of the app and forbade the media from showing videos from the app, stating: “The dangerous aspect is that inappropriate contents including language and pornography are being posted in the TikTok App. There is a possibility of children contacting strangers directly […] Without understanding the dangers involved in these kinds of Mobile Apps, it is unfortunate that our children are testing with these Apps.”

After TikTok responded that it was experiencing a daily financial loss of $500,000 and 250 jobs had been put at risk, the ban was eventually lifted, at which point the app’s downloads surged.

No reason for some blocks

However, not all website and app bans are justified, explained or commented upon by the government. In August 2018, for example, the country’s telecom minister informed parliament that since January 2016, the Department of Telecom had asked internet service providers to ban 11,045 websites, news agency Press Trust of India reported. Yet the minister didn’t offer any explanations on why these websites had been targeted.

One site that has been blocked on multiple occasions is the Internet Archive, also known as the Wayback Machine. In the past few months, other sites that have been banned include audio streaming site SoundCloud, encrypted messaging service Telegram, and graphic design website Behance, among others. According to IFF’s Gupta, the reasons for the blocks are not disclosed.

Internet service providers have become the de facto enforcers of the government’s digital concerns.

In January, IFF received several complaints from users that they couldn’t access Reddit. The IFF then invited users to fill an online form to share the list of sites and VPNs that they were unable to access. By late March it had received nearly 200 responses from across the country. Reddit frequently appeared, as did several other major platforms including Spotify, Alexa.com, SoundCloud, Telegram and several VPNs. The largest number of complaints came from those who were Reliance Jio customers, followed by Airtel.

An Airtel Spokesperson said that the company “supports an open internet and does not block any content on its network unless directed by the authorities/court in accordance with the applicable law.”

A Jio spokesperson declined to comment.

To save India’s open internet

Gupta calls these “core net neutrality violations,” as internet service providers are legally obliged to provide equal access to all internet content. This, he says, “ultimately results in a very different version of the internet from the global commons and allows the ISPs, even sometimes political interests, to become gatekeepers to access of information.”

While India has net neutrality rules in place – thanks to a massive campaign in 2015 called Save the Internet – the problem, says Gupta, is a lack of enforcement. “A policy fix is required to enforce net neutrality rules,” he says.

In March, IFF relaunched a campaign for an open internet, asking users to report net neutrality violations and sign a petition asking the Department of Telecom and the country’s telecom regulator to introduce a clear enforcement mechanism. Some of these efforts are showing signs of success already, says Gupta, as the regulator is considering issuing a consultation paper on enforcing net neutrality.

Internet service providers have become the de facto enforcers of the government’s digital concerns.

Kushal Das, an India-based member of the Tor Project and a developer at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, says telecom companies like Jio block all VPNs so they retain insights into users’ browsing preferences that can be useful for advertisers.

“If you use a VPN, Jio will not know your taste in food, et cetera,” says Das. But Tor software can bypass these blocks and the number of Tor users in India has shot up three times since October 2017 to roughly 60,000 now, says Das.

“We should be able to ask people in power why blockades are being implemented,” says Das.

Policy points to restrictions

However, the Narendra Modi-led government has been keen to bring in rules for greater control over data and the internet.

In February, the government proposed a draft national e-commerce policy that sees data as “a collective resource” or a “national asset” that the government holds in trust but which can be auctioned off, like a coal mine. The draft also cautioned that this belongs to Indians and cannot be extended to foreigners.

IFF’s Gupta says the fact that the very framework of its drafting has not been made sufficiently public is worrying. “It may all seem very dull and dry but … any platform changes, any changes to government policy in India will reflect in demand in Europe and America eventually,” he says, due the large internet user base in India.

For now, in the days after a general election, all these policy proposals are on hold and it’s not clear how soon a new government would turn its attention to internet policies.

The one thing that activists can take some relief in is the fact that the government has acknowledged at least some of the internet shutdowns in the country were implemented without sufficient cause. In December, the Department of Telecom, in response to a request for information filed by IFF, said that “frequent internet suspension orders were being issued by various State governments… even in situations where it is not warranted.” It added that it had asked all state governments to “sensitize concerned officials/agencies” against such actions.

It’s anyone’s guess how long that pause will last.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/top-10-vpn-megha-bahree-may-21-2019-in-parts-of-india-internet-shutdowns-are-a-fact-of-life

Improving the Processes for Disclosing Security Vulnerabilities to Government Entities in India.pdf

karan — 2019-03-20T08:12:07Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/Improving%20the%20Processes%20for%20Disclosing%20Security%20Vulnerabilities%20to%20Government%20Entities%20in%20India.pdf

Improving Telugu Village Articles

Pavan Santhosh — 2016-11-26T02:27:39Z

Telugu wikipedians on 6 October 2016 held a discussion on improving the quality of Telugu articles. The event was organized by IIIT, Hyderabad, CIS-A2K and OpenGeo.

A possible collaboration between Wikipedia and free and open source enthusiasts and environmental groups was explored at the meeting. Subodh Kulkarni and Pavan Santhosh made a presentation about Wikipedia. The participants were from different groups such as SOUL (Save Our Urban Lakes), OpenGeo.org (organization that works for open source mapping) and Sweccha (organization working to expand free software movement in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh).

Prof. Madhav Gadgil moderated a discussion on how these organizations could collaborate for different Wikimedia projects. The discussion primarily revolved around improving ongoing Telugu village articles.

Prof. Gadgil stressed on compiling articles using reliable and verifiable sources. He also urged the participants to upload geo-tagged photos to Commons especially photos of lakes of which the authorities have denied existence. The discussion also focused on the synergy between OpenGeo and Wikipedia.

Post-lunch, Prof. Gadgil delivered a lecture on “Human Knowledge: An Evolutionary Perspective in IIT”. Prof. Gadgil explained that the next big leap in evolution of human knowledge is free knowledge in which everyone can contribute and utilize which was Wikipedia. He urged the scholars and students to contribute to Wikipedia which is the future for knowledge society.

Telugu and English wikipedians including Vinay, Lubna Sarwath, Undavalli Ravikumar, Raju and many more participated in the event.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/improving-telugu-village-articles

Imagining the Internet – A History and Forecast

radha — 2011-04-02T14:26:36Z

Workshop: A Rights-Based Framework - Open Standards - A report on the workshop by Senior segment producer, Janna Anderson - IGF 2009 – Egypt – Sharm El Sheikh (Nov 15th, 2009)

Workshop description:

This workshop tackled the open-standards issues being faced now and those that are likely to be encountered in the

future by governments, consumers and the public. It addressed portability and interoperability, which affect everything from personal identities to communications protocols, documents, multimedia, databases and hardware.

Workshop participants included:

Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Consortium, Web Foundation; Steve Mutkoski, director of standards and interoperability for Microsoft; Rishab Ghosh, Open Source Initiative board member, program leader of FLOSS (Free/Libre and
Open-Source Software) UNU-MERIT, The Netherlands; Renu Budhiraja, director of E-Governance Group in the government of India's Department of Information Technology; Sunil Abraham, director of policy for the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India.

November 15, 2009 - The public's right to knowledge generated by their governments was a key focus of this discussion of standards and interoperability, kicked off with an opening statement by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. "This year, in 2009, I have been asking governments to put their information online," he said, referring to a talk he gave earlier in the year at TED (the annual Technology, Entertainment, Design conference). He said citizens deserve to have access to the valuable data being produced by and for their governments.

Berners-Lee was busy on Day One of IGF 2009. He had spoken at an earlier session on the mobile Internet, and he later delivered an opening keynote at which he whipped out his smartphone and said he was going online to Twitter to officially announce the creation of the World Wide Web Foundation.

Many democratic governments have begun to publish much more detailed and complete sets of public data online over the past year. It has been one of the hallmarks of the first year of the Obama Administration in the U.S.

Renu Budhiraja, director of e-Governance in the government of India's Department of Information Technology, was enthusiastic about her government's work to share knowledge.

"National policy should be based on open standards," she said, urging that all government services should be equally accessible. "Objectives are to take a holistic view, avoid duplication of effort, build solutions that are scalable and make them replicable. The ideal is to provide a window to government for citizens to make it available in an open, accessible way."

"We must consider citizens' rights when we consider open standards," said Sunil Abraham, director of policy for the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He was critical of proprietary software and hardware, saying they constrain access and the rights of citizens to access information. Abraham founded Mahiti, which aims to reduce the cost and complexity of information and communication technology for the non-profit organizations and the voluntary sector by using free software. He said that in many developing countries people are not able to shift to use of free software because of practical barriers of
politics and economics tied to intellectual property rules.

Steve Mutkoski, director of standards and interoperability for Microsoft, said improving the process of making government data transparent and accessible is complex, and it goes beyond challenging the royalties charged by IP owners. "Technical aspects are a very small part of the issue," he said, ticking off examples of typical difficulties originating in political and legal realms. "The bigger issues include the 'file cabinet mentality' of governments, and then there are the problems with legacy software and hardware."

Mutkoski said applications and devices for which standards have already been established also suffer from a lack of interoperability in implementation. "There are gaps in standards, ambiguities," he said. "Not every standard comes fully baked and ready to go. Looking back at WiFi, that certainly wasn't the case." He said he has studied the processes behind the establishment of thousands of standards, and his work has shown that the best standards are produced in a transparent ongoing process in which they are allowed to evolve as needed.

Mutkoski noted that there many tough issues still to be addressed in the reform of public-information systems. "It's a better approach to focus on the broader architectural framework," he said, suggesting governments go back to square one to consider information delivery that is people-centered. "The focus should be on citizen-centric government. What if they want to use Twitter, what if they want to use Facebook to access their information? Those are things we are going to have to take into account."

Rishab Ghosh, program leader of FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open-Source Software) at UNU-MERIT, said intellectual property laws and monopolies impact interoperability and standards and thus they impact access to knowledge. He talked enthusiastically about the smart-card system developed by the Indian government, noting it "will save billions of dollars," and adding that with interoperability there are cost savings as well. He noted that intellectual property regulations can interfere
with the delivery of information.

"Information technology is now so universal that even the poorest subsistence farmer is impacted, because the Internet is driving and providing a basis for everything that goes on today," he said. "We are all being impacted by Internet standards. Imagine if you to go a city office in Cairo or Sharm El Sheikh and you want to register the birth of your baby or your marriage or something like that, and there's a parking lot there and the government says your car has to be a Ford or you can't
park there. This sort of thing would never happen in other realms of technology or procurement - if it does, it is seen as corrupt practice, but in software it happens all the time. Software has a tendency toward natural monpolies, and there is also a tendency to focus on the engineering of it rather than the social effects. The choices made in the technology has an impact on millions or billions of people today... We should ensure the citizens shouldn't have to buy software from anyone
in particular to be able to get access to that data."

IGF 2009 - Main Session: Emerging Issues: Social Networks

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:46:50Z

Current laws don't seem to scale well to handle Web 2.0 issues

Session description: Discussion was centered on the development of social media (social networks, user-generated content sites, micro-blogging, collaboration tools, etc.) in order to explore whether these developments require to new or modified policy approaches. Key issues explored include privacy and data protection, rules applicable to user-generated content and copyrighted material, and freedom of expression and illegal content. The session also addressed the importance of the “terms of service” of large platforms, how they are developed and their relationship with emerging business models that are based on behavioral analysis.

Participants in the discussion included: Sunil Abraham, director of policy, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore; Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founder of the Global Network Initiative; Grace Bomu, manager, Kenya-Heartstrings and Fanartics Theatre Company, Kenya; Sergio Suiama, prosecutor, State of São Paulo, Brazil; Rachel O'Connell, VP of people networks and chief safety officer, Bebo.

November 18, 2009 - Sunil Abraham, an Internet policy expert from Bangalore, was a key panelist in this session who introduced the primary concerns tied to social networks today.

"I'm going to raise nine emerging issues about social media," he began, "and I categorize them into four categories: Intellectual property rights, morality laundering, the hegemony of the connected and the hegemony of text."

He noted that intellectual property law is completely outdated and cannot be applied in today's communications environment, saying it is "irrelevant." He added, "To take some examples, the right of the consumer to review, the right of the consumer to privacy, the right of the entrepreneur or enthusiast to make interoperable, complementary or competing products. All these rights used to be protected under the right to reverse-engineer. Issue 2 under IPR: On some corporate-mediated social media platforms, copyright takedown notices from one political party are acted on much more swiftly when compared to similar takedown notices from an opposing party. Issue 3, under IPR: Some rights holders, and in particular news organizations, use copyright takedown notices selectively to purge social media Web sites of content that opposes their editorial viewpoint. Issue 4 under intellectual property rights: The increased use of automated enforcement of copyright by rights holders is seriously undermining freedom of expression on the Internet, as in the case of the baby dancing to Prince's 'Let's Go Crazy.'"

He explained "morality laundering" - saying that, like policy laundering, it is "trying to impose a globally homogenized morality regime." He cited the example of breast-feeding photos on a social network being deleted because they were considered obscene. "Breast-feeding, I may remind you, is still a public activity in many southern countries," he said. "Photographs of public life on a beach in a country where nudism is the norm becomes child pornography in another country."

He said that religious traditions can sometime be reduced to a monoculture on community-managed social media platforms that "depend on editors to determine the truth," adding "That is because upper-crust and upper-class populations have greater access to the Internet. Literate communities will try to maintain their hegemony on the Internet. Community-managed social media platforms that depend on textual citation often ignore the knowledge of the oral communities of the global south."

Session moderator Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, asked Abraham if automated enforcement of social network policies should be outlawed. "I don't think it is possible for us to completely take out machine involvement in moderating content online," Abraham said, "whether it is from a freedom-of-speech perspective or a hate-speech perspective or from an intellectual-property-rights perspective. But I think the process has to become more transparent, so that the public will know what happened and why it happened and that there is due process and the possibility of appeal."

Davies had kicked off the session with a plea that participants try to think ahead in this discussion of social networks. "Our role today in this panel is to look to the future, and our mentors at the UN and at IGF have urged me to motivate, as much as possible, an imagining of the future," he said. "Our role, as we can see on the program, is to look at social networks and social spaces such as micro-blogging and Web 2.0, as we move through to the next - what are the issues that we're likely to confront. So our two goals, if I can suggest a focus, is: What have we brought out of this last few days that tells us something about the way the future will go? Particularly in terms of social interaction. And second, imagine that future."

Sergio Siuama, prosecutor for the State of São Paulo, Brazil, was asked to describe the privacy problem that developed there on Google's social network Orkut. "Social networks are the fourth most popular online activity, ahead of personal e-mail," he said. "Eighty percent of Brazilian Intenet users interact through social network sites. In Brazil as well in India and Pakistan, the most popular social networking service is Google's Orkut. More than 30% of Brazilian users access regularly use Orkut and about 25% of them are children and teenagers." He said many social networks accessed by people globally are transnational. "The most-accessed services in Brazil are provided by companies physically located in the United States," he said.

In 2005 Google set up a branch in São Paulo, but it was not enough to handle the business of 30 million users. Since 2004 Brazilian authorities have been receiving reports of cyberbullying, drug dealing, child pornogrphy and other human rights violations in Orkut's space. In 2006 the federal attorney's office started a collective lawsuit against Google. Google responded with a proactive plan. After two years of litigation, in July 2008, the parties settled on a collective agreement in which Google agreed, among other obligations, to comply with Brazilian legislation, to store traffic data for at least six months, to take down child-abuse images, to develop a proactive system of child-abuse images detection, removal and report to law enforcement, and to establish a customer-service office able to quickly respond to all users' complaints. Some of these obligations were adopted as standards for the whole of Latin America in a document - the memorandum of Montevideo.

Siuama raised several governance issues that arise from this case: Which criteria should be used to define the ability of a country to legislate over and sanction conducts committed on the Internet? Is it legitimate to enforce rules at a local company's office regarding a service operated from another country? What are the basic standards we should expect from ISPs to help cope with human rights violations on the Internet? Is any national law enforcement agency equipped to cope with crimes committed on social networking sites? Will it be necessary to ensure minimum levels of transparency and social accountability of networking services?

Panel member Rachel O'Connell, vice president of people networks and chief safety officer for Bebo, chaired the European Union's Safer Social Networking Cross-Industry Task Force - an effort by 18 social networking companies, including Facebook and Google, working with the European Commission and civil liberties, child welfare, law enforcement and parenting groups.

"We came up with seven principles that relate to education and ensuring that we have prominent and easily accessible safety messages and also addressing reporting abuse and providing people with the technologies and capabilities so they can use the Internet safely," she said. "We are doing a lot of filtering on the back end. We have moderation teams in place. We have very strong links with law enforcement. We look at the legal issues in each of the countries and the markets in which we operate and see how that ties up with being a US-based company. We're also aware of treaties like the multinational legal assistance treaty, in terms of working with law enforcement and investigators."

O'Connell said the industry has probably not been clear enough about how these procedures are implemented. She expects that the principles set out by the task force will make things more clear. "The number of signatories was 18 and now it's up to 23, and part of my role is to encourage companies to become signatories," she said. "It means you need to self-declare how you have implemented the principles and each of the substantive recommendations. These self-declarations are being reviewed by independent researchers, and their report will be released to coincide with Safer Internet Day in February."

She added that U.S. attorneys general have asked social networking companies to begin being more transparent and accountable. "Facebook has an internal auditor to ensure that they are meeting the requirements outlined by the attorneys general, and similarly MySpace has an agreement, so there is an incredible amount of work going on," she said. "That said, there is still a log of work to do, as there always will be. For example, AOL has been working closely with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and are diligent about working with law enforcement in other countries to ensure we can facilitate the investigative process. We also have a filtering process we run on the back end."

Grace Bomu, manager for Kenya-Heartstrings and Fanartics Theatre Company, Kenya, was on hand to talk about the positive influence of social networks. Her creative troupe uses them to do marketing, research and concept development. "From our Facebook page," she explained, "we're able to tell which issues the youth in Kenya are facing, and from those issues, we are able to develop a concept and sell our plays. On our Facebook page, people propose lines, other people propose they be actors, and this has really changed the way we do business. It's the actors who write the script, and our friends help us in writing the script.

"Another way the Internet helps us is using the mobile money payment systems. Our management uses a mobile phone to update the page, to make comments and so on. Friends came up with the idea that they could pay to attend plays using mobile money payment systems."

She said there are some negatives. Anonymous respondents and competitors write negative comments on the troupe's page, politicians sometimes try to use the page to advance their goals, "and we have had problem of balancing what some people call abusive language with what others say is artistic expression."

"We'd say that these tools have really helped news opening up culture, in growth of urban language and also in the contribution of topical issues," she concluded. "Tools are helping us to expand freedom of expression rather than caging it. So what we have done as a company is that we are coming up with - slowly, we are coming up with a code within us that we shall follow in balancing the competing interests."

Rebecca MacKinnon, Open Society Institute fellow and co-founder of the Global Network Initiative, noted that throughout the sessions of IGF-2009 people have been speaking out about the power of social networks as spaces where individual citizens can speak truth to power. "Spaces that help to make governments and other institutions more accountable to individuals," she said. "This is happening all over the world, across a range of political systems. But there are trends that are counteracting the potential of social networks to be a force that can truly help citizens participate in public life. This may be contributing to social networks acting as more opaque extensions of incumbent power in some situations, rather than as transparent conduits between citizens and institutions."

MacKinnon raised four key points. The first is the level of liability governments place on social networking services in regard to user-generated content.

While it is part of the groundrules for IGF that participants are encouraged to avoid singling out people or nations when meting out criticism, it was clear that she was referring to China when she said, "In some jurisdictions, international social networking sites end up being blocked because the sovereign government is not happy with some of the content being posted on the sites. And in some of those jurisdictions, what then ends up happening is that a robust set of domestic social networking sites evolve. And the social networking sites that are hosted domestically are held liable for all the content that their users are posting on the site. And so in order to comply with government requirements and the particular government's definition of what constitutes legal speech, these social networking sites end up having to develop large departments of people whose job it is to police content. international social networking sites that want to act - want to operate in certain jurisdictions have to make a choice, either to be blocked to users in that country because users may post things that the local government objects to, or agree to develop a locally hosted site in the local language which would then be subject to greater local jurisdiction and agree to police it. And there have been some cases where certain - and I have again been asked not to name and shame - but where certain companies have chosen to host locally and comply with government requests for political censorship in that regard. And so this is one challenge that social networking companies around the world are facing, is how to deal with this."

Other points she outlined were:

- Social network users are often not allowed to be anonymous. "There's at least one country where now anybody who uses a social networking site or Web service over a certain size has to register with their national ID number," she explained, "and many human rights groups have expressed concerns about some users who have been traced for political speech. At least one international social networking service decided to disable the local uploading of videos and comments onto its service, so people in that country have to use the international version of the service rather than the local service - so that this particular social networking site would not be in the position of handing people over for speech that might arguably be political."

- Administrators of social networking sites will sometimes perceive that something is going against the terms of service when the content has a much different intent. "There are political activists from a range of countries who found their Facebook accounts frozen because their pattern of activity resembled spamming," she said, "and this had an impact on their ability to conduct political activities. And there have been situations where activists in various countries post images of abuse by authorities against citizens and these are quite graphic and are deemed to be against terms of service. And the people concerned feel that 'if these sites do not let me speak truth to power, then were can I go?' So that's another sort of human-rights issue."

- A new multistakeholder group, the Global Network Initiative, is being co-founded by MacKinnon and others to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy in ICTs. "Our approach recognizes that a lot of these issues are difficult to legislate for because they involve very nuanced contextual situations that differ greatly," she said. "Companies do feel there is a need to have some kind of assistance in doing the right thing. How can social networks fulfill their potential and serve their users so they feel they can use these services without becoming victims of oppression in various ways? The Global Network Initiative combines companies who have signed on as well as human rights groups, socially responsible investment funds and some academics to help companies proactively figure out how to anticipate free-expression issues in order to avoid problems and assist in making choices about how to structure businesses."

Pavan Duggal spoke from the floor of the session about the formation of a dynamic coalition on social networks, which came together after a session on legal issues and social media earlier in the day. "These issues not only relate to data protection and privacy," he said. "They also relate to the issue of jurisdiction and ownership, storage, retention and transmission of user-generated content. Do we have the right to be anonymous? Do we have a right to oblivion? Can there be a right to delete in the context of social media? Is there a right of purging children-generated content? Can there be a right to forget and to forgive in the context of information? We also discussed how the deadly cocktail mix of social media and cloud computing is venturing us into a wild, wild west as far as jurisprudential rules and principles are concerned. Which country, what data, which server, which law would apply, which would be effective remedy, which would be the relevant court and how would the ultimate adjudication be done?"

He said it is expected that national governments will try to legislate in this area. "While the Internet has made geography history, the fact still remains that national governments will try to legislate," he said. "It is time that respective stakeholders must come together, not just the players, the users, but also the industry, the government, the lawmakers, law enforcement."

For the UN video, click here

For the UN transcript, click here

For the original article, click here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/emerging-issues-social-networks