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India faces Twitter backlash over Internet clampdown
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/in-reuters-com-devidutta-tripathy-satarupa-bhattacharjya-aug-24-2012-india-faces-twitter-backlash
<b>The Indian government faced an angry backlash from Twitter users on Thursday after ordering Internet service providers to block about 20 accounts that officials said had spread scare-mongering material that threatened national security.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Written by Devidutta Tripathy and Satarupa Bhattacharjya, this post was <a class="external-link" href="http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/23/net-us-india-internet-clampdown-idINBRE87M0LG20120823">published</a> in Reuters on August 24, 2012. (Additional reporting by Ross Colvin, Annie Banerji and David Lalmalsawma and Andrew Quinn in Washington; Writing by Ross Colvin; Editing by John Chalmers, Andrew Osborn, Gary Hill). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The backlash came as New Delhi turned up the heat on Twitter, threatening "appropriate and suitable action" if it failed to remove the accounts as soon as possible. Several Indian newspapers said this could mean a total ban on access to Twitter in India but government officials would not confirm to Reuters that such a drastic step was being considered.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Twitter, which does not have an office in India, declined to comment. There are about 16 million Twitter users in the South Asian country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government has found itself on the defensive this week over what critics see as a clumsy clampdown on social media websites - including Google, YouTube and Facebook - that has raised questions about freedom of information in the world's largest democracy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Dear GOI (Government of India), Keep your Hands Off My Internet. Else face protest" tweeted one user, @Old_Monk60.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India blocked access to more than 300 Web pages after threatening mobile phone text messages and doctored website images fuelled rumors that Muslims, a large minority in the predominantly Hindu country, were planning revenge attacks for violence in the northeastern state of Assam, where 80 people have been killed and 300,000 have been displaced since July.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Fearing for their lives, tens of thousands of migrants fled Mumbai, Bangalore and other cities last week. The exodus highlighted underlying tensions in a country with a history of ethnic and religious violence.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">According to documents obtained by Reuters, the government has targeted Indian journalists, Britain's Daily Telegraph, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera television in its clampdown on Internet postings it says could inflame communal tensions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The directives to Internet service providers listed dozens of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter pages. A random sampling of the YouTube postings revealed genuine news footage spliced together with fear-mongering propaganda.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In Washington, the State Department urged New Delhi to balance its security push with respect for basic rights including freedom of speech.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"As the Indian government seeks to preserve security we are urging them also to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nuland said Washington stood ready to consult with U.S. companies as they discuss the issue with the Indian government, although it was not now directly involved.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"The unique characteristics of the online environment need to be respected even as they work through whether there are things these companies can do to help calm the environment," she said.</p>
<p><b>Indian Journalists Targeted</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government says Google and Facebook have largely cooperated while Twitter has been much slower to respond.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Every company, whether it's an entertainment company, or a construction company, or a social media company, has to operate within the laws of the given country," said Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the Ministry of Communications.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Twitter has been instructed to remove 28 pages containing "objectionable content," an interior ministry official said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"If they do not remove the pages, the Indian government will take appropriate and suitable action," he added.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government has ordered Internet service providers to block the Twitter accounts of veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta and television anchor Shiv Aroor. Some appeared to have begun complying with the order on Thursday as Twitter users reported difficulties in accessing their pages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"It is a political decision, because of my criticism of the government," said Gupta, who was an official in the previous government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government's actions triggered a storm of criticism from Twitter users, with the hashtags #Emergency2012 and #GOIBlocks among the top trending topics on Twitter in India on Thursday. Some compared the situation with the state of emergency imposed by the government in 1975, when some journalists were jailed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet and Society, which analyzed the 300 banning orders, found that they contained "numerous mistakes and inconsistencies." Some of the banned websites belonged to people trying to debunk the rumors, for example, it said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"This isn't about political censorship. This is about the government not knowing how to do online regulation properly," said CIS program manager Pranesh Prakash.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India's parliament last year passed a law that obliges Internet companies to remove a range of objectionable content when requested to do so, a move criticized at the time by rights groups and social media companies.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/in-reuters-com-devidutta-tripathy-satarupa-bhattacharjya-aug-24-2012-india-faces-twitter-backlash'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/in-reuters-com-devidutta-tripathy-satarupa-bhattacharjya-aug-24-2012-india-faces-twitter-backlash</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-08-27T06:56:37ZNews ItemIndia Dismisses Charges of Internet Censorship
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/learning-english-voanews-com-india-dismisses-charges-of-internet-censorship
<b>Read, listen and learn English with this story. Double-click on any word to find the definition in the Merriam-Webster Learner's Dictionary.</b>
<hr />
<p>This is the <a class="external-link" href="http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/india-dismisses-charges-of-internet-censorwhip/1495735.html">VOA Special English Technology Report</a>. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government in India is defending itself against charges of Internet censorship. The move comes after the government last week asked companies like Facebook and Twitter to block more than three hundred websites.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Officials accused the websites of posting edited images and videos of earthquake victims. They said the websites falsely claimed that the images were Muslim victims caught in recent ethnic conflict in India’s northeastern Assam state and Burma. A number of the images were reportedly uploaded from Pakistan.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Officials said the panic that resulted caused thousands of Hindu immigrants to flee the area. They feared that Muslims would answer the false reports with attacks of their own. Cyber law expert, lawyer Pawan Duggal says this is the first time the Internet and mobile-phone technology have been used to create fear in a community.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">PAWAN DUGGAL: “India has to wake up to the need for putting cyber security as the number-one priority for the nation. Unfortunately, India does not even have a national cyber-security policy. The nation does not have any plan of action, should this kind of emergency happen again. India needs to have its own cyber army of cyber warriors.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On Friday, India’s Communication and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal dismissed charges that the government is trying to censor social media. But he said the misuse of social media has to be prevented.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pranesh Prakash is program manager at the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society. He says some of the web pages that have been blocked included official news websites.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">PRANESH PRAKASH: “I am not questioning the motivations of the government which in this current case seemed to be above board. We found that most of the material that they have complained about is actually stuff that is communal. But I do feel that the government went overboard in doing so, that it has also curbed legitimate reportage.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">He says some of the websites were uploaded by people trying to let others know that the images were false.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government in India has called on social media companies to come up with a plan to keep offensive material off the web. Last year, it passed a law that requires companies to remove so-called “objectionable content” when requested to do so.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A Google Transparency report says that last year India topped the list of countries that make such requests. Supporters of online freedom have expressed concern that India may be restricting web freedom.<br /> <br /> About one hundred million people in India use the Internet - the third-largest number of net users in the world. About seven hundred million people have mobile phones.<br /> <br /> And that's the VOA Special English Technology Report. I'm Steve Ember.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/learning-english-voanews-com-india-dismisses-charges-of-internet-censorship'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/learning-english-voanews-com-india-dismisses-charges-of-internet-censorship</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-08-26T05:29:15ZNews ItemIndia Debates Misuse of Social Media
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-voanews-com-aug-21-2012-anjana-pasricha-india-debates-misuse-of-social-media
<b>India has blocked more than 250 websites after provocative online content spread panic among people from the country's northeast, prompting some of them to flee Indian cities. The crackdown has sparked a debate about how the country will cope with misuse of social media. </b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Anjana Pasricha's article was originally published by <a class="external-link" href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/08/22/2012082200496.html">Voice of America</a> on August 21, 2012 and re-posted in the <a class="external-link" href="http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2012/08/22/2012082200496.html">Chosunilbo</a> on September 4, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Officials say the websites that were blocked had posted edited images and videos of victims of earthquakes and claimed they were those of Muslim victims caught in recent ethnic strife in India's northeastern Assam state and Burma.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As the images went viral, rumors began about reprisal attacks against Hindu migrants from the northeast working in other parts of India. Hate text messages warning of violence circulated widely. Worried about their safety, thousands of the migrants fled Indian cities last week to return to Assam.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Taken aback by the mass exodus, the government says the "unity and integrity of the country is at stake."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde says that "elements" had used social networking sites to whip up communal sentiments. Shinde says a number of the sites had been uploaded from Pakistan. Shinde adds that the government has gathered a lot of evidence through the investigation, whether from Facebook communication or text messaging.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Officials have also blamed social networking sites such as Twitter, Yahoo and Facebook for not screening objectionable content.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Cyber specialists say the government needs to go beyond the blame game and learn how to manage misuse of social media on the massive scale witnessed last week. About 100 million people in India use the Internet, the third-largest number of net users in the world. About 700 million people have mobile phones.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Cyber law expert, lawyer Pawan Duggal says this is the first time the Internet and mobile-phone technology have been used to incite fear in a community.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"India has to wake up to the need of putting cyber security as the number-one priority for the nation," Duggal noted. "Unfortunately, India does not even have a cyber-security policy. The nation does not have any plan of action, should such an emergency happen again. India needs to have its own cyber army of cyber warriors."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government has been involved in a dispute with web companies such as Google and Facebook for several months and has called for them to devise a voluntary framework to keep offensive material off the web. India routinely asks these companies to remove what it calls "objectionable content," which has led to fears India may be diluting web freedom.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sunil Abraham heads the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore, an advocacy group for net freedom. He says the government's recent crackdown on hundreds of websites is warranted, but says it needs to be more sophisticated and aggressive in handling threats and rumors emanating from the internet.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Social media websites and other Internet intermediaries should have been asked by the government to run banner advertising or some other form of messaging that revealed the lack of truth in the rumors that were circulating," Abraham explained. "The best way to deal with misinformation is to produce more accurate and more credible information. By just blocking access to fraudulent information, you do not fully undermine the power of rumors because by the time the government had decided to act the photographs and videos had already gone viral. And even though the websites are blocked these images will continue to circulate."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The exodus of northeast migrants from Indian cities has slowed in recent days as India has moved to block multimedia and bulk text messaging, and panic has subsided after repeated assurances of safety by the government.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-voanews-com-aug-21-2012-anjana-pasricha-india-debates-misuse-of-social-media'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-voanews-com-aug-21-2012-anjana-pasricha-india-debates-misuse-of-social-media</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-09-04T12:13:21ZNews ItemIndia Blocks News Website Pages for 'Spreading Fear' over Assam Violence
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-ibi-times-co-uk-gianluca-mezzofiore-aug-24-2012-india-blocks-news-website-pages-for-spreading-fear-over-assam-violence
<b>Access to more than 300 internet web pages including some published by Telegraph, Times of India and Al-Jazeera blocked.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This article by Gianluca Mezzofiore was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/377157/20120824/india-blocks-more-300-internet-pages-news.htm">published</a> in International Business Times on August 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Indian government has blocked more than 300 internet web pages including ones published by the Daily Telegraph, Australia's ABC and Al-Jazeera claiming they contained <a href="http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/376629/20120823/india-threatens-block-twitter-over-ethnic-violence.htm" target="_blank">"incendiary" material</a> likely to spread panic.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Internet experts said the move might be illegal as the Indian government interfered with hundreds of website, including some Twitter accounts, blogs and links to certain stories.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Internet posts, phone text messages and fake video clips have allegedly spread rumours that Muslims were poised to attack the Assamese population in Chennai, Mumbai and Pune. More than 10,000 Assamese workers fled to their native state in northeastern India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The content, bound to fuel tension between Muslim migrants and Assamese workers, included images that falsely portrayed the relief effort for the 2010 Tibetan earthquake disaster as Burmese Buddhists walking among their Muslim victims.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The mass exodus from southern cities followed clashes in Assam between the Bodo tribe and Muslims. At least 80 people were killed and hundreds of thousands were displaced.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Telegraph reported that India blocked its pages including a photo-gallery of Reuters and AFP news pictures that documented "attacks by Burma's Buddhist Rakhine community on villages which had been occupied by Rohingya Muslims, who had migrated from Bangladesh several decades earlier".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Among other news outlets blocked were The Times of India, the Dainik Bhaskar and FirstPost.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"The government has gone overboard and many of its efforts are legally questionable," Pranesh Prakash, who studies internet governance and freedom of speech at the Centre for Internet and Society, said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"The government's highest priority should have been to counter the rumours and it did a really bad job of that."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Victoria Nuland, spokeswoman for the US State Department, said it was urging the Indian government "to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world" while addressing its security concerns.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-ibi-times-co-uk-gianluca-mezzofiore-aug-24-2012-india-blocks-news-website-pages-for-spreading-fear-over-assam-violence'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-ibi-times-co-uk-gianluca-mezzofiore-aug-24-2012-india-blocks-news-website-pages-for-spreading-fear-over-assam-violence</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-08-27T04:53:08ZNews ItemIndia blocks more than 250 Web sites for inciting hate, panic
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-washington-post-rama-lakshmi-august-20-2012-india-blocks-more-than-250-web-sites-for-inciting-hate-panic
<b>Nearly 80 people have been killed and 400,000 displaced in fighting between Muslims and India’s Hindu Bodo tribespeople in Assam, a northeastern state of India, in recent weeks. The violence has prompted many northeasterners living in major cities to flee, fearing reprisals.</b>
<hr />
<p>The article by Rama Lakshmi was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/india-blocks-more-than-250-web-sites-for-inciting-hate-panic/2012/08/20/aee0b846-eadf-11e1-866f-60a00f604425_story.html">published in the Washington Post</a> on August 20, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in it.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India blocked about 250 Web sites and social networking sites Monday, accusing them of spreading inflammatory content that <a class="external-link" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/india-says-websites-in-pakistan-to-blame-for-spreading-panic-among-northeast-indians/2012/08/19/3c793960-e9d4-11e1-9739-eef99c5fb285_story.html">triggered panic</a> among thousands of workers and students from the country’s eight northeastern states last week.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government’s blame list ranged from Facebook to fundamentalist Pakistani sites, Twitter to text messages, and Google to YouTube videos. Authorities also barred the sending of text messages to more than five people at a time for two weeks.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Thousands of people from northeastern India fled several cities in the south and west of the country last week after text messages circulated warning that they faced reprisal attacks from Muslims over recent ethnic clashes in the northeastern state of Assam.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government said a number of Web sites had deliberately tried to inflame passions, hosting <a class="external-link" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/exodus-shows-alienation-of-indias-northeast/2012/08/17/63bae21e-e88d-11e1-a3d2-2a05679928ef_story.html">morphed videos of violence</a> against Muslims in Burma and asserting that they were filmed in Assam. The images went viral and provoked riots by Muslim residents of Mumbai just over a week ago.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"We have blocked a number of sites. We have also identified a number of sites which were uploaded from Pakistan," Home Secretary R. K. Singh told reporters in New Delhi on Monday.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik has asked India for evidence about the alleged Pakistani Web sites, which Singh said he would share.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although some analysts said the curbs were justified because the sites posed a threat to public order, others said the actions were a knee-jerk response from a weak government unable to effectively assuage the concerns of its frightened citizens.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"This is a government that is trying to hide its incompetence by blaming everybody but unwilling to look at itself for failure to protect its citizens," said a government official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Others said that by cracking down on Web sites and social media, the government was dodging the deeper issue of the racism and alienation felt by many people from the northeastern states, who are routinely denigrated by their fellow Indians for supposedly being more Chinese or Southeast Asian in appearance.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But India’s <a class="external-link" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/facebook-google-tell-india-they-wont-screen-for-derogatory-content/2011/12/06/gIQAUo59YO_blog.html">relationship with Internet freedom</a> has become increasingly troubled.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the past year, the government has locked horns with Google, Yahoo and Facebook, as well as with local activists and bloggers, over censorship and content screening. Analysts then accused the government of trying to silence middle-class critics at the height of a national <a class="external-link" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/india-blocks-more-than-250-web-sites-for-inciting-hate-panic/2012/08/20/aee0b846-eadf-11e1-866f-60a00f604425_story.html">anti-corruption movement</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government has been holding public meetings on <a class="external-link" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/indias-new-internet-rules-criticized/2011/07/27/gIQA1zS2mI_story.html">proposed rules</a> to prohibit Web sites and service providers from hosting information that could be regarded as “harmful,” “blasphemous” or “insulting.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Last year, India topped the list of countries that routinely ask Internet companies to remove content, according to the Google Transparency Report.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Although Internet penetration is still low in India, the country has the third-largest number of Web users in the world, with more than 100 million people accessing the Internet. A <a class="external-link" href="http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2012/8/In_India_1_in_4_Online_Minutes_are_Spent_on_Social_Networking_Sites">new report</a> says that Indians spend one in every four minutes online visiting social networking sites.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some free-speech activists fear the events of last week may have provided the government the justification it was seeking to increase Web censorship.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“I have fears that the present situation should not cause a disproportionate response which affects freedom of speech online,” said Apar Gupta, a lawyer and advocate for free speech online. “Historically, a national security argument is very tough to dislodge the competing interests of freedom of speech.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Other advocates of Internet freedom say the government is justified in the crackdown but could have opted for a more nuanced approach.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“A blanket ban does not necessarily lead to a reduction in the circulation of rumors because people become more vulnerable in a communication vacuum,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Center for Internet and Society, an advocacy group based in the southern city of Bangalore, which experienced a mass exodus of frightened northeasterners last week.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Abraham said the government sent out broad instructions to Web sites to block all hate speech, without giving specific definitions or examples. “The government could have done this in a more sophisticated manner, like putting up banner notices on Facebook and Twitter; blocking text messages that had certain key words; or warning the sites to proactively dismantle some content.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Indian Department of Electronics and Information Technology <a class="external-link" href="http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=86355">said in a statement</a> Monday that it had been working with international social networking sites on the issue but that “a lot more and quicker action is expected from them to address such a sensitive issue.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A Google India official said that “content intended to incite violence is prohibited on YouTube, and we act quickly to remove such material flagged by our users.”</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-washington-post-rama-lakshmi-august-20-2012-india-blocks-more-than-250-web-sites-for-inciting-hate-panic'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-washington-post-rama-lakshmi-august-20-2012-india-blocks-more-than-250-web-sites-for-inciting-hate-panic</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-08-22T04:38:26ZNews ItemIndia Blocks Facebook, Twitter, Mass Texts in Response to Unrest
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-pbs-org-aug-28-2012-simon-roughneen-india-blocks-facebook-twitter-mass-texts-in-response-to-unrest
<b>The Indian government has gone on the offensive against Internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, demanding hundreds of pages be removed or blocked after political unrest erupted in various parts of the country.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This post by Simon Roughneen was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/08/india-blocks-facebook-twitter-mass-texts-in-response-to-unrest241.html">posted</a> in Media Shift on August 28, 2012. Nishant Shah is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On August 15, India's independence day, Indian <a href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-08-16/news/33232891_1_northeast-strict-action-rumours">northeasterners began fleeing</a> Bangalore, the country's southern IT hub and 5th largest city, after text messages said to threaten Assamese people and other northeasterners were sent around.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Authorities restricted text messages so they could be sent to only five recipients to stop bulk sending, which was followed by a government backlash against social media and news sites; more than 300 pages have been blocked in recent days.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Exodus</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The scene during the exodus was reminiscent of an old newsreel from World War II Europe, or, more aptly, from the separation of India and Pakistan in the late 1940s when around 25 million people took flight amid chaos and bloodshed as the contours of the new states were drawn up after British withdrawal.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the platform at a Bangalore train station were hundreds of people from Assam state and other areas of India's northeast, a remote part of the country almost 2,000 miles away. The region is mostly surrounded by Bangladesh, Bhutan, China and Burma and is linked to the rest of India only by a narrow strip of land nicknamed the chicken-neck.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In July, <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Assam-remains-tense-2-more-bodies-found/articleshow/15790126.cms">fighting in the northeast's Assam state</a> between local ethnic groups and Muslims -- which some Indians say are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh -- killed 80 people and forced 400,000 more from their homes, most of them Muslims. On August 11, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/c7ab28d4-e454-11e1-affe-00144feab49a.html">a march in Mumbai</a> , India's financial capital, ended up in a riot, with two killed and dozens injured, when Muslims there protested attacks on Muslims in the northeast and on Muslim Rohingya in Burma.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The SMS scare in Bangalore came next, but who sent what and why has never been clearly established, though three men were <a href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/man-held-in-bangalore-sent-messages-to-20-000-probe/991361/">subsequently arrested</a> in Bangalore on suspicion of mass-forwarding threatening text messages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nonetheless, the scare, real or hyped, was enough to prompt panic among the 300,000 or so northeasterners who study and work in Bangalore. Interviewees at the city's rail station, waiting for a train to Guwahati in Assam state, a two-and-a-half-day journey, <a href="http://www.simonroughneen.com/asia/south-asia/india-south-asia/thousands-of-indian-northeasterners-flee-bangalore-after-text-message-scare-christian-science-monitor/#more-6511">said they hadn't received or even seen any messages</a>, but the rumor mill went into overdrive and their parents in the northeast urged them to come home, temporarily at least.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A lack of confidence in police, perceived racism against northeasterners -- some of whom appear east or southeast Asian and are sometimes called "chinki" by other Indians -- as well as political discord ahead of elections next year <a href="http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?282077">all contributed</a> to the exodus.</p>
<h2>Government Reacts</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Indian government urged the northeasterners to stay put, as the exodus spread to Pune, Chennai and other large cities in the south and west where northeasterners work. Text messages were limited to five recipients to stop bulk messages spreading fear, a bar later raised to 20 recipients. India has around 750 million cell phone subscribers, the world's second biggest market after China, and the government's nationwide restriction seemed an over-reaction given that the exodus was confined to a few cities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In a country of 1.2 billion people -- the world's fourth biggest economy measured in purchasing power parity terms -- the government is worried about a recent economic slowdown. Growth is at its lowest since 2003, and foreign investors are complaining out loud about <a href="http://www.simonroughneen.com/business-economics/hows-business-in-india-watch-bangalore-christian-science-monitor/#more-6519">hazy rules and red tape</a>. India feels it needs to nip any political unrest in the bud with foreign investment dropping by 78 percent year-on-year, according to June figures.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Apparently with public order in mind, the Indian government began blocking websites and pages said to contain inflammatory content, even as the exodus slowed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant Shah of the Bangalore-based <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/">Centre for Internet and Society</a> said that the government is trying to figure out how best to react to the transition from an era when news and information was carried via broadcast and print.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"In the older forms of governance, which were imagined through a broadcast model, the government was at the center of the information wheel, managing and mediating what information reached different parts of the country. In the [peer-to-peer] world, where the government no longer has that control, it is now trying different ways by which it can reinforce its authority and centrality to the information ecosystem. Which means that there is going to be a series of failures and models that don't work," Shah told PBS MediaShift in an email.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Overdoing It?</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, for a country that has long styled itself as the world's biggest democracy, and is home to some of the world's biggest selling English language newspapers, the last few days have seen the government take a forceful line against Internet giants such as Google and Facebook that some feel threatens freedom of speech.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The text messages were said to be from some of India's 170 million or so Muslim population, the world's third largest after Indonesia and Pakistan -- and the Indian government at first sought to blame Pakistan for fomenting the exodus by whipping up anger among India's Muslims.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Following the text restrictions, Indian authorities blocked what they describe as "incendiary" and "hate-mongering" content on websites in Pakistan and Bangladesh that they say spurred the northeast fighting -- including images of the 2010 Tibet earthquake passed off as images of Burmese Buddhists after attacking Burmese Muslims -- and asked Google and Facebook to remove the content.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, news reports on the exodus, as well as other coverage of Muslim-Buddhist clashes in Burma, were blocked. Among those affected were Doha-based news agency Al-Jazeera and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). And stories on sectarian fighting in Arakan in western Burma -- where Buddhist Arakanese have clashed with Muslim Rohingya, with the flare-up catching the attention of Islamist groups elsewhere, including India -- were blocked in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">ABC <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/abc-hit-as-india-blocks-media/story-e6frg6so-1226457697028">said on Friday</a> content that "in relation to the particular blocked ABC, we are surprised by the action and we stand by the reporting."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">An April 2011 law says that the government must give 48 hours before blocking pages, as well as an explanation for the block in each individual case, though this can be sidestepped in an emergency. "Every company, whether it's an entertainment company, or a construction company, or a social media company, has to operate within the laws of the given country," said Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the Ministry of Communications, speaking about the recent restrictions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There's more to the back-story than just the 2011 IT law, however. Prior to the recent exodus from Bangalore and the government reaction, Google and Facebook were facing charges for allegedly hosting offensive material.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A Google spokesman, speaking by telephone from Singapore about the Indian government's recent blocks, said that the company abides by the law of the land, in India and elsewhere. "We also comply with valid legal requests from authorities wherever possible, consistent with our longstanding policy," he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">All told, 80 million to 100 million Indians are online, and India has the world's third biggest number of <a href="http://www.socialbakers.com/facebook-statistics/">Facebook users</a>, at 53 million. But, that just makes up just 4.5 percent of the country's population.</p>
<table class="invisible">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="@PM0India.png" src="http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/assets_c/2012/08/@PM0India-thumb-300x393-5300.png" /><br />Some commentators see the government as oversensitive. For example, using the pushback to put a block on an account parodying the country's prime minister.</td>
<td>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Twitter has 16 million accounts in the country. By Friday, a stand-off between New Delhi and Twitter saw around 20 Twitter handles blocked by Indian ISPs, on the orders of the government, with threats that the government could block Twitter completely.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The hashtag <a href="https://twitter.com/#%21/search/%20%23GOIblocks">#GOIblocks</a> gets about 10-12 tweets per minute -- going by a quick scroll-through -- from users protesting the government's measures. However, caught up in the dragnet so far are accounts with little apparently to do with the Bangalore exodus. The Indian opposition said the blacklist is partisan, while other commentators see the government as oversensitive, using the pushback to put a block on an account (<a href="https://twitter.com/@PM0India">@PM0India</a>) parodying the country's prime minister, for example.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Adding to the irony, though it is not clear whether this was by accident or design -- the Twitter account of <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Twitter-apologizes-restores-ministers-account/articleshow/15643487.cms">Milind Deora</a>, the country's minister of state for communications and IT, and a vocal proponent of the recent blocks, was taken down by Twitter for 12 hours before being restored -- along with an apology by Twitter on Saturday.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>This story has been altered to correct the date of India's independence day</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i><a href="http://www.simonroughneen.com/">Simon Roughneen</a></i><i> </i><i>is an Irish journalist usually based in southeast Asia. He writes for the</i><i> </i><i>The Irrawaddy,</i><i> </i><i>Christian Science Monitor</i><i> </i><i>and others. He is on twitter @simonroughneen and you can</i><i> </i><i><a href="https://plus.google.com/106019217146969702755/about">Circle him on Google+</a>.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-pbs-org-aug-28-2012-simon-roughneen-india-blocks-facebook-twitter-mass-texts-in-response-to-unrest'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-pbs-org-aug-28-2012-simon-roughneen-india-blocks-facebook-twitter-mass-texts-in-response-to-unrest</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-09-03T02:46:42ZNews ItemIndia Bans Mass SMS to Counter Panic
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/blogs-wsj-com-aug-17-2012-shreya-shah-india-bans-mass-sms-to-counter-public
<b>Last year social networking was credited with helping to organize revolutions across the Middle East and with getting normally apathetic middle-class Indians onto the streets to protest corruption.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This article by Shreya Shah was <a class="external-link" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/08/17/indian-bans-mass-sms-to-counter-panic/">published</a> in the Wall Street Journal on August 17, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But in recent days, India has seen a darker side of social networking, as doctored videos of Muslims being attacked and text messages warning of retaliation by Muslims went viral in the wake of <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443570904577546271721787692.html?KEYWORDS=assam+riots">riots in the northeastern state of Assam</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The messages have caused panic among thousands of Indians and spurred attacks and clashes in two cities. In an attempt to calm the situation, India banned the ability to send mass text messages on Friday afternoon, the home ministry press office confirmed. The ban will stay in effect for two weeks.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In remarks to Parliament on Friday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, “The unity and integrity of our country is being threatened by certain elements.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The riots in Assam saw clashes between Bodo tribals and Muslim immigrants, beginning in late July, which led to dozens of deaths and displaced tens of thousands of people. On Friday, Abdul Khaleque, press secretary to the chief minister of Assam, told India Real Time that the death toll had risen to 78 as sporadic clashes continued. Of the 400,000 people that had fled their homes, approximately 115,000 had returned home.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As India has struggled this month to bring calm to Assam, flare-ups started taking place in the western city of Pune, while in Bangalore, thousands of northeastern workers began <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/08/16/bangalore-urges-northeastern-workers-to-remain/">fleeing the city</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mobile phone messages saying that northeasterners had been killed in Bangalore have been circulating since Sunday, said Dilip Kanti, a 24-year-old law student from Mizoram who has lived in the city in the southern state of Karnataka for six years.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“The messages warned that we should leave the city before the day of Eid,” he added. Monday, Aug. 20, is an official holiday for Eid, the festival that marks the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Karnataka state government and the police have said that this is a hoax message and that they are investigating the source of these messages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The messages appear to be intended to panic northeasterners, send large numbers of them back to their home state, and foster fear of Muslims. Those developments could set the stage for sectarian riots, always a concern in a country that has seen such clashes break out frequently.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The home minister has said an inquiry is underway. But so far officials have not shared information about the source of these messages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Presently, Indian companies that send mass text messages need to register to do so. But there’s no bar on individual users sending mass messages. A<a href="http://www.cnngo.com/mumbai/life/travel-e-ticketing-agencies-exempted-new-sms-caps-953755"> limit of 100 messages</a>per user per day was imposed last year in an attempt to reduce spam and later increased to 200, but this was <a href="http://www.medianama.com/2012/07/223-implications-of-delhi-high-courts-removal-of-the-200-sms-per-day-limit-in-india/">overturned by the courts</a> in July.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Text messages are the “most potent weapon of rumor,” said <a href="http://www.jsgp.edu.in/JSGPFaculty/ShivVisvanathan.aspx">Shiv Visvanathan</a>, a professor at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy in Haryana. “They can multiply a few thousand times in a minute.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India has been aware of the danger of high-tech rumor-mongering. When the verdict on the contested religious site of the <a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/tag/babri-masjid-verdict">Babri Masjid</a> in Uttar Pradesh state was due in 2010, the Indian government temporarily banned the ability to send mass text messages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But this time, with a new home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde, who has only been in the job for a little more than two weeks, India was slower to act. It wasn’t till Friday afternoon – after the messages had been circulating for nearly a week – that India banned mass text messaging.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But by Wednesday, students and workers from the northeast who were living in Bangalore, where these messages circulated, were rushing to the train station to head home. On Thursday alone, two special trains were scheduled to take 6,000 people back to Guwahati, the capital of Assam.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some of them had already experienced personal run-ins with Muslims upset about the riots in Assam. A 21-year-old student from the state of Nagaland, who didn’t want his name used, said that he is “sick of receiving these messages with rumors.” Apart from the messages, he said that he had been threatened twice in Bangalore by Muslims in the last five days but did not want to return to Nagaland and miss classes. His mother, on the other hand, is fearful for his safety and is forcing him to come back. His roommates have already left. “I will stay till Ramadan and if the situation doesn’t get better I will have no option but to leave,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The messages have gained potency from the fact that there have been some attacks on northeasterners in parts of India; these attacks too seem to have been intentionally instigated online.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Videos were doctored to show Muslims being tortured purportedly by ethnic Assamese, Pune police inspector Prasad Hasabnis told India Real Time.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“These incited the youth,” he added.</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th><img src="http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-UF266_ismsba_D_20120817073659.jpg" /></th>
<td>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Four students from the northeastern state of Manipur were <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article3765708.ece">attacked in Pune</a> by young Muslim men in three separate incidents in the last week as a result, he said. In <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443537404577583143397317210.html">Mumbai</a>, meanwhile, two people were killed and 65 injured after a protest over the suffering of Muslims in Assam turned violent.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A group called the Bhagat Singh Kranti Sena (Bhagat Singh’s Revolution Army) has been spreading some of the rumors, said Laurence Liang, a researcher with the Alternate Law Forum, a Bangalore-based human rights group that also advocates free speech.</p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mr. Liang said the group put up a post on Facebook that remained up until Wednesday. It said that a fatwa has been issued by the Muslims against people from the northeast and provided telephone numbers that didn’t work, he added. The Alternate Law Forum complained about the post to Facebook and it has since been taken down, he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Technology is a double-edged sword,” says Mr. Liang. A few people use it to “rip up a frenzy of emotion by spreading rumors,” he says. He added that it didn’t help that “people in the United States and the United Kingdom, sitting in the safety of their homes, reply provocatively on social media, unaware of the consequences they unleash.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Of course, some people are trying to use Twitter and Facebook to counter the rumors.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">American Enterprise Institute resident fellow <a href="http://twitter.com/dhume01">Sadanand Dhume</a> tweeted on Friday that a video purporting to show violence in Assam was actually footage from Indonesia.</p>
<p>“I lived in Indonesia so recognized the policeman’s uniform, batik sarong & writing on baseball cap. Must be many more fake videos out there,” he said. (Mr. Dhume is an opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal in India.)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And in a message on Facebook, Walter Fernandes, head of the North-Eastern Social Research Centre, said northeastern and Muslim associations were meeting in Bangalore to figure out how to quell the rumors, and that people shouldn’t give in to panic. Muslim leaders have promised to speak about the situation and the need to protect people from the northeast in their sermons, Mr. Fernandes wrote.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Indian government last year attempted to censor social networking site like Facebook, arguing inflammatory content on the site could lead to violence in India. Facebook, Google and several other Internet firms are presently <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304537904577277263704300998.html">on trial in India</a> for failing to remove offensive material from their sites in response to complaints. This month’s developments could help the government make a stronger case for censoring these sites.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But Pranesh Prakash, of the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society, says that greater regulation will not solve the problem. What he says is needed are proactive statements by the government and rigorous fact-checking by the media, especially regional news channels.</p>
<p>The only way of “countering rumors is by fact,” he said.</p>
<p><i>– Preetika Rana contributed to this post.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/blogs-wsj-com-aug-17-2012-shreya-shah-india-bans-mass-sms-to-counter-public'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/blogs-wsj-com-aug-17-2012-shreya-shah-india-bans-mass-sms-to-counter-public</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial mediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-08-27T07:29:59ZNews Itemi4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access
<b>Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.</b>
<h3 align="left">Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks</h3>
<h3 align="left">Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?<br /></h3>
<p align="justify"><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/uploads/nishantshah1.gif/image_preview" alt="Nishant Shah" class="image-left" title="Nishant Shah" />A
call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has
long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of
circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However,
given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and
interests that are represented there, governance, which is
non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more
effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed
notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in
place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations.
However, there is also another form of governance - governance as
provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols
of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the
physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind
us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of
warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is
a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a
participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns
and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these
signs are present and garner the attention of the user.</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?</strong> </p>
<p align="justify">The
question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's
activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have
more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are
the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world.
When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and
educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk
to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people
where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be
sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we
also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for
safety online, it is a question of education and training and
some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with
your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact,
adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go
and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?</strong> </p>
<p align="justify">The
main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is
the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The
questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the
responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human
world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original
and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still
work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and
'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How
do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish
looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and
open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these
new models of trust and friendship.</p>
<p align="justify"><strong>How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?</strong></p>
<p align="justify">I
am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the
'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each
other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already
includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and
expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking
sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent
debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to
ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively
towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard.
Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact
that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world. </p>
<p align="justify">What
perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the
community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech
which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish
behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in
different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better
self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive
than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand
and the maintenance of law and order on the other.</p>
<p align="justify"><a class="external-link" href="http://www.i4donline.net/articles/current-article.asp?Title=netgov-Speak:-Lead-up-to-IGF-2008&articleid=2169&typ=Coulum">Link to original article on i4donline.net</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access</a>
</p>
No publishernishantCyberspaceDigital NativesPublic AccountabilityCyberculturesCommunitiesDigital subjectivitiesDigital Pluralism2011-09-22T12:51:57ZBlog EntryHow ISPs block websites and why it doesn’t help
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-com-aug-24-2012-gopal-sathe-how-isps-block-websites-and-why-it-doesnt-help
<b>Banning websites is ineffective against malicious users as workarounds are easy and well known.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Gopal Sathe's article was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2012/08/23210529/How-ISPs-block-websites-and-wh.html?atype=tp">published</a> by LiveMint on August 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India blocked 245 web pages for provocative content on Monday in an effort to prevent the spread of hate messages and lessen communal tensions in the country, and suggested via an official release on the website of the Press Information Bureau that more could follow.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As was widely reported in the days that followed, most websites blocked were not related to the ethnic clashes in Assam.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pranesh Prakash, programme manager with the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, analysed the sites which were listed by the government. In his analysis, 33% of all blocked addresses were on Facebook, 27.8% on YouTube, 9.7% on Twitter and the rest were spread over a number of different websites including Wikipedia, <i>Firspost.com</i> and <i>TimesofIndia.Indiatimes.com.</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prakash says, “I don’t believe that the decision to block sites was politically motivated, but I do believe that in trying to prevent harm, the government has gone overboard.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">He also writes in his analysis, “Even though many of the items on that list do deserve (in my opinion) to be removed [...] the people and companies hosting the material should have been asked to remove it, instead of ordering the ISPs to block them.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prakash also pointed out, “There are numerous egregious mistakes. Even people and posts debunking rumours have been blocked, and it is clear that the list was not compiled with sufficient care.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Of course, India’s overall record on Internet censorship isn’t great, with the current laws encouraging Internet service providers (ISPs) to take down content without investigating individual cases properly. And that is not even taking into consideration official government orders, such as this decision to block websites.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The process of blocking content for an ISP is very simple. After all, any content that is coming from a website to your computer has to travel through the ISP, giving it ample opportunity to observe and censor banned content.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Think of it like this—you’re on an island, with no way to reach the mainland (Internet) where all the websites are. The ISP builds a bridge connecting you to the mainland, and charges you to let cars (data) from the sites come to you, by opening the road. Each web page has a unique ID, like a licence plate. If the government tells the ISP to block a specific page, it’s added to the blacklist, and isn’t allowed on the bridge. The government could also block a full domain, such as <i>Facebook.com</i>, which would be like blocking all cars with DL plates, instead of specific numbers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">New Delhi based cyber security consultant Dominic K. says, “The content is still there and can be accessed from outside India, so these measures are really very ineffective. People can use proxies or a virtual private network (VPN) to circumvent these measures with ease, by appearing to be a different site; so banning sites does nothing to deter malicious users.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Proxies are websites that load blocked sites for you—if the proxy is not using the ISP doing the block, they can still load the content from the blocked site and present it to the users, since the blocklists simply block websites, and not their content.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">VPNs work in a similar fashion, creating a virtual presence for the user outside of their own country. This can be done to circumvent blocks and access region-specific content, but is also a perfectly legitimate tool, and can increase your security greatly.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It’s a pretty crude system but it’s used around the world. In Australia, for example, the government has a page that directly lists their web censorship activities. It wants to block material that includes child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act. However, as noted on the same page, these measures can be easily circumvented. Since the content remains on the Internet, and is only blocked, it can be accessed by “any technically competent user”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">China, meanwhile, is frequently criticized for what is called, tongue-in-cheek, “the great firewall of China”. Reporters without Borders, a French organization that works for freedom of the press, has a list of countries that are “enemies of the Internet”. China, Iran, North Korea and Burma are some of the worst offenders, but Australia, India, Egypt, France and South Korea are also on the watchlist as “countries under surveillance”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Saudi Arabia and the UAE publish detailed information on their filtering practices but other countries such as China return connection errors, and fake “file not found” errors.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is a long history of Internet censorhip in India, and a perception that the laws have been used for political ends. Net censorship has been around for a while—in 1999, VSNL blocked access to Pakistani newspapers. Later, in 2006 the government wanted to block certain separatist groups of the Yahoo! Groups platform. While the government issued specific pages for the ban, initially, the whole Yahoo! Groups domain was blocked by ISPs. In 2007, Orkut was told to remove “defamatory” pages created by users.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Cartoon pornography website <i>Savitabhabi.com</i> was also blocked in 2009, while several blogging services such as Typepad were blocked last year for a few weeks, and then the block was lifted, with no explanations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Like Australia, in the UK too, child pornography is filtered by the government, though users there have to opt-in for this filtering. Other countries such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden also see such content being filtered. The Indian IT Act also notes various kinds of illegal content which is not permissible, such as child pornography and hate speech.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Other countries, such as the US, also have aggressive Internet censorship of copyrighted content. Prakash says, “Internet censorship is not restricted to India alone. Every country in the world has been doing this in different ways. The United States, for example, has even seized domains in copyright cases, which were legally hosted in other countries. With regards to political censorship, which some feel is a concern now, I don’t think that the Indian government is doing that. I believe that they are sincerely trying to address a serious issue, but people are going overboard.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">He adds, “The biggest concern is that there is no transparency about what is being blocked, or why, and this leaves things open for active misuse in the future.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In Google’s 2011 <i>Transparency Report</i>, released in June this year, India did not feature very favourably. According to Google, the number of content removal requests the company received increased by 49% from 2010. There were five court orders from India ordering the Internet giant to remove content and there were 96 other requests by Indian government agencies for 246 individual items.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In comparison, the US made only 77 requests in the same period. They also revealed that 70% of the content removal requests from India were related to defamation. National security and religious offence attracted far fewer removal requests. Google received only one request from Indian agencies from July to December 2011 for removal of pornographic content.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our government might not be politically motivated in this instance—however, the possibility for abuse is high, and what’s more, the measures that are being taken are limited at best. Instead of ordering ISPs to block content directly, the government should be working with the content owners and platforms offering the content to have it taken down properly. Instead, we get crude measures which do nothing to deter malicious users, and only serve to inconvenience the general users.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-com-aug-24-2012-gopal-sathe-how-isps-block-websites-and-why-it-doesnt-help'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-com-aug-24-2012-gopal-sathe-how-isps-block-websites-and-why-it-doesnt-help</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-08-25T06:56:41ZNews ItemHaphazard censorship? Leaked list of blocked websites in India
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-ibnlive-in-com-haphazard-censorship-leaked-list-of-blocked-sites
<b>An analysis of a leaked list of the websites blocked by Indian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on directions from the Department of Telecom bring to light the inconsistencies in India's online censorship efforts. </b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Published in <a class="external-link" href="http://ibnlive.in.com/news/haphazard-censorship-leaked-list-of-blocked-sites/284592-11.html">IBNLive on August 23, 2012</a>. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), analysed the 309 specific items that were asked to be censored from August 18, till August 21, 2012 by the Indian government following the recent incidents of communal violence and the mass exodus of North East Indians from Bangalore.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"It is clear that the list was not compiled with sufficient care," Prakash writes in a post on the CIS website that reveals several egregious errors in the censorship process.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While the government put on its censor gear to apparently stop rumours from spreading, Prakash discovered that "people and posts debunking rumours have been blocked." Also there are some items on the list that do not even exist online.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The 309 items that were ordered to be blocked include URLs, Twitter accounts, img tags, blog posts, blogs, and a few websites.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prakash, a graduate of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, also raises the questions on the legal standing of the government's actions. "The blocking of many of the items on that list are legally questionable and morally indefensible, even while a some of the items ought, in my estimation, to be removed," he says.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Indian ISPs are also known to go overboard in their efforts to comply with any government order. There have been numerous incidents in the past when ISPs were asked to block a specific URL and they ended up blocking entire domains. The latest round of censorship is also no different. There have been reports of Airtel blocking the entire YouTube short URL youtu.be in some cities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS hasn't published the complete list of the blocked items given "the sensitivity of the issue" but has posted a list of domains from which specific items have been asked to be blocked. The list follows:</p>
<ul>
<li>ABC.net.au</li>
<li>AlJazeera.com</li>
<li>AllVoices.com</li>
<li>WN.com</li>
<li>AtjehCyber.net</li>
<li>BDCBurma.org</li>
<li>Bhaskar.com</li>
<li>Blogspot.com</li>
<li>Blogspot.in</li>
<li>Catholic.org</li>
<li>CentreRight.in</li>
<li>ColumnPK.com</li>
<li>Defence.pk</li>
<li>EthioMuslimsMedia.com</li>
<li>Facebook.com</li>
<li>Farazahmed.com</li>
<li>Firstpost.com</li>
<li>HaindavaKerelam.com</li>
<li>HiddenHarmonies.org</li>
<li>HinduJagruti.org</li>
<li>Hotklix.com</li>
<li>HumanRights-Iran.ir</li>
<li>Intichat.com</li>
<li>Irrawady.org</li>
<li>IslamabadTimesOnline.com</li>
<li>Issuu.com</li>
<li>JafriaNews.com</li>
<li>JihadWatch.org</li>
<li>KavkazCenter</li>
<li>MwmJawan.com</li>
<li>My.Opera.com</li>
<li>Njuice.com</li>
<li>OnIslam.net</li>
<li>PakAlertPress.com</li>
<li>Plus.Google.com</li>
<li>Reddit.com</li>
<li>Rina.in</li>
<li>SandeepWeb.com</li>
<li>SEAYouthSaySo.com</li>
<li>Sheikyermami.com</li>
<li>StormFront.org</li>
<li>Telegraph.co.uk</li>
<li>TheDailyNewsEgypt.com</li>
<li>TheFaultLines.com</li>
<li>ThePetitionSite.com</li>
<li>TheUnity.org</li>
<li>TimesofIndia.Indiatimes.com</li>
<li>TimesOfUmmah.com</li>
<li>Tribune.com.pk</li>
<li>Twitter.com</li>
<li>TwoCircles.net</li>
<li>Typepad.com</li>
<li>Vidiov.info</li>
<li>Wikipedia.org</li>
<li>Wordpress.com</li>
<li>YouTube.com</li>
<li>YouTu.be</li>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-ibnlive-in-com-haphazard-censorship-leaked-list-of-blocked-sites'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-ibnlive-in-com-haphazard-censorship-leaked-list-of-blocked-sites</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-08-23T06:18:45ZNews ItemHacktivists deface BSNL website
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-india-times-december-13-2012-kim-arora-hacktivists-deface-bsnl-website
<b>The Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) website, www.bsnl.co.in, was hacked and defaced on Thursday afternoon.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Kim Arora was <a class="external-link" href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/telecom/Hacktivists-deface-BSNL-website/articleshow/17603936.cms">published</a> in the Times of India on December 13, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A message on the home page said the attack was carried out by the hacktivist group, Anonymous India, as a protest against section 66 A of the <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/IT-Act">IT Act</a> and in support of cartoonist Aseem Trivedi, on an indefinite hunger strike at Jantar Mantar since Dec 8 for the same. The website was restored around 7 pm.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Trivedi said he had received a call from Anonymous around 1.30 in the afternoon informing him that the website has been defaced. On being asked if such a form of protest was valid, Trivedi said, "When the government doesn't pay heed to people's protests against its laws and arrests innocent people for Facebook posts, then such a protest is absolutely valid."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For most of the afternoon and early evening, the BSNL website wasn't available directly. A cached version of the BSNL home page showed an image of cartoonist Trivedi with text that read "Hacked by Anonymous India. support <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Aseem-trivedi">Aseem trivedi</a> (cartoonist) and alok dixit on the hunger strike. remove IT Act 66a databases of all 250 bsnl site has been d Hacked by Anonymous India (sic)". While this message was repeated over and over on the page, it ended with the line "Proof are (sic) here" followed by a link to a page containing the passwords to BSNL databases. BSNL officials were unaware of the attack until Thursday evening.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Late in the evening, Anonymous India tweeted from their account @opindia_revenge: "BSNL Websites hacked, passwords and database leaked... Anonymous India demands withdrawal of Sec 66A of IT Act." <br /><br /> In an open letter to the Government of India posted on alternate media website Kafila in June this year, Anonymous had explained they only carried out <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Distributed-Denial-of-Service">Distributed Denial of Service</a> (DDoS) attacks on Indian government websites, which is different from the act of hacking per se.</p>
<p class="callout" style="text-align: justify; ">Contrary views too exist. Sunil Abraham, executive director, <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Centre-for-Internet-and-Society">Centre for Internet and Society</a>, says the attack was unwarranted. "Speech regulation in India is not a lost cause, the Minister is holding consultations, MPs are raising the issue in Parliament, courts have been approached and there is massive public outcry on social media. Therefore I would request Anonymous India to desist from defacing websites," said Abraham. A group of MPs, including Baijayant Jay Panda from Odisha, are scheduled to present a motion in Parliament on Friday morning for the amendment of section 66A of the IT Act.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Last month, two young girls were arrested in Palghar, Maharashtra, for criticizing on Facebook the bandh that followed the death of Shiv Sena supremo Balasaheb Thackeray. Before that, Karti Chidambaram, son of finance minister P Chidambaram, took a man to court for commenting on his financial assets on Twitter. In both cases, the complainant 'used' section 66 A of the IT Act. The section and the Act have since come in for wide debate regarding freedom of speech.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-india-times-december-13-2012-kim-arora-hacktivists-deface-bsnl-website'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-india-times-december-13-2012-kim-arora-hacktivists-deface-bsnl-website</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaIT ActSocial MediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityCensorship2012-12-14T05:20:56ZNews ItemGovt vs Tweeple: Has clampdown hit free speech?
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-ndtv-com-aug-23-2012-govt-vs-tweeple-has-clampdown-hit-free-speech
<b>Has the Government crossed the line by ordering the blocking of several Twitter accounts, many belonging to prominent journalists? The debate was featured in NDTV on August 23, 2012.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sunil Abraham spoke to Sonia Singh of NDTV. Sunil said that "we should focus on designing of the censorship regime in the country and the lack of compliance with the principles of natural justice".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Watch the full video on NDTV <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/india-decides-9/govt-vs-tweeple-has-clampdown-hit-free-speech/243830?vod-mostpopular">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-ndtv-com-aug-23-2012-govt-vs-tweeple-has-clampdown-hit-free-speech'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-ndtv-com-aug-23-2012-govt-vs-tweeple-has-clampdown-hit-free-speech</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-08-24T12:46:27ZNews ItemGovt tweaks enforcement of IT Act after spate of arrests
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/livemint-politics-november-29-2012-surabhi-agarwal-govt-tweaks-enforcement-of-it-act-after-spate-of-arrests
<b>The government on Thursday tweaked the law to make it tougher for citizens to be arrested for online comments that are deemed offensive after recent arrests came in for heavy criticism by Internet activists, the media and other groups.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Surabhi Agarwal's article was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/Politics/hJLTj0OG2oXS1W64jE20bL/Govt-tries-to-tighten-application-of-cyber-law.html">published in LiveMint</a> on November 29, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This took place just before the Supreme Court was to hear a public interest litigation seeking an amendment to the Information Technology (IT) Act.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Complaints under the controversial Section 66A of the IT Act, which criminalizes “causing annoyance or inconvenience” online or electronically, can be registered only with the permission of an officer of or above the rank of deputy commissioner of police, and inspector general in metro cities, said a senior government official.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government, however, has not amended the terms in the section that are said to be vague and subject to interpretation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The public interest litigation against Section 66A filed by student Shreya Singhal came up in chief justice <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Altamas%20Kabir">Altamas Kabir</a>’s court on Thursday. The matter will be heard on Friday.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Two girls near Mumbai were arrested last week for criticizing on <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Facebook">Facebook</a> the shutdown in the city for Shiv Sena chief <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Bal%20Thackeray">Bal Thackeray</a>’s funeral. Earlier in November, a businessman in Puducherry was arrested for comments made on <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Twitter">Twitter</a> against finance minister <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/P.%20Chidambaram">P. Chidambaram</a>’s son <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Karti%20Chidambaram">Karti Chidambaram</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">According to people present at the meeting of the cyber regulatory advisory committee on Thursday, the Union government will issue guidelines to states with respect to the compliance of the new enforcement rules soon. The people didn’t want to be named. An official said the move was not related to the case.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Pranesh%20Prakash">Pranesh Prakash</a>, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society think tank, said that while the change in the law is a step in the right direction and will eliminate a lot of frivolous complaints, more needs to be done to make the legislation specific.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Chief justice Kabir said the apex court was considering taking suo motu cognisance of recent incidents.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Singhal contended in her plea that “the phraseology of section 66A of the IT Act, 2000, is so wide and vague and incapable of being judged on objective standards, that it is susceptible to wanton abuse and, hence, falls foul of Article 14, 19 (1)(a) and Article 21 of the Constitution.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">She submitted that “unless there is judicial sanction as a prerequisite to the setting into motion the criminal law with respect to freedom of speech and expression, the law as it stands is highly susceptible to abuse and for muzzling free speech in the country.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The PIL was argued by Mukul Rohatgi, who said in his opening remarks that Section 66A was vague. Terms such as “offensive” and “annoyance” should be clearly defined as the section is part of criminal law, he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Senior advocate Harish Salve, who was also present during the hearing, said India guaranteed the right to “annoy” and there was no need to have a separate law.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Salve, who is in the process of filing an intervention on behalf of some technology companies, added that the section needed to be narrowed to specifically cater to private messages sent electronically and not social media communications.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">He said the existing law of defamation should suffice and could be extended to include electronic communications. According to a lawyer who is part of the team representing Singhal, the petition also demanded that the law be made non-cognisable so that the police can’t make an arrest without an order from a magistrate.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“There has been a lot of misuse and abuse of the law recently and we want it to be struck down absolutely and also the court to issue guidelines,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Apart from the incident at Palghar in Thane district involving the two girls, Singhal’s PIL referred to an April incident in which a professor of chemistry from Jadavpur University in West Bengal, <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Ambikesh%20Mahapatra">Ambikesh Mahapatra</a>, was arrested for posting a cartoon concerning chief minister <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Mamata%20Banerjee">Mamata Banerjee</a> on a social networking site.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">She also referred to the Puducherry case as well as the May arrests of two <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Air%20India">Air India</a> Ltd employees, <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/V.%20Jaganatharao">V. Jaganatharao</a> and <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Mayank%20Sharma">Mayank Sharma</a>, by the Mumbai Police under the IT Act for posting content on Facebook and <a href="http://www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Orkut">Orkut</a> against a trade union leader and some politicians.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Singhal has sought guidelines from the apex court to “reconcile Section 41 and 156 (1) of the Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) with Article 19 (1)(a) of the Constitution” and that offences under the Indian Penal Code and any other legislation, if they involve the freedom of speech and expression, be treated as a non-cognizable offences for the purposes of Sections 41 and 156 (1).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Section 41 of CPC empowers the police to arrest any person without an order from a magistrate and without a warrant in the event that the offence involved is a cognizable offence. Section 156 (1) empowers the investigation by the police into a cognizable offence without an order from a magistrate.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government official present at the cyber regulatory advisory committee said the expressions used in Section 66A had been taken from different statutes around the world, including the UK and the US.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“There has been a broad consensus that the parameters of the law concerned might be in order but from a procedural standpoint there might be difficulty,” the official said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prakash said that while some of the terms in the section may be taken from legislation overseas, the penalty imposed under the Indian law is far more stringent at three years of imprisonment than, for instance, six months under the UK law. “Criminal offences can’t be put at the same level as something which causes insult.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The cyber regulatory advisory committee meeting was attended by minister for communications and information technolgy Kapil Sibal, and secretaries of the department of telecommunications and information technology, besides representatives of technology companies such as Google and Facebook, industry associations and civil society.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The official also said that the situation will be reviewed every three to four months based on “ground realities”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A government official said on condition of anonymity that the decision to revive the cyber regulatory advisory committee had been taken at a meeting in August. Section 66A was put on the agenda since it was the subject of much debate, he said. The meeting, however, was not a pre-emptive measure ahead of the PIL that was taken up in the Supreme Court. The official also said that the government will spell out its position in court in favour of the legislation.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/livemint-politics-november-29-2012-surabhi-agarwal-govt-tweaks-enforcement-of-it-act-after-spate-of-arrests'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/livemint-politics-november-29-2012-surabhi-agarwal-govt-tweaks-enforcement-of-it-act-after-spate-of-arrests</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial MediaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorshipInformation Technology2012-11-30T08:27:01ZNews ItemGovt plans inter-ministerial panel on Internet policy
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-com-sep-19-2012-surabhi-agarwal-govt-plans-inter-ministerial-panel-on-internet-policy
<b>The government may set up an inter-ministerial panel to improve coordination among the various arms of the government on Internet-related issues such as governance, commerce and security, according to a senior government official who didn’t want to be named.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Surabhi Agarwal's article was <a class="external-link" href="http://origin-www.livemint.com/Politics/RfSpWTiWQ1KWC6yY8LqhfO/Govt-plans-interministerial-panel-on-Internet-policy.html">originally published</a> in LiveMint on September 19, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The panel will have representation from government departments including information technology, telecom, home, external affairs and commerce among others. The proposal is being considered because there are multiple stakeholders involved, said the official. The panel will be most likely be headed by the department of electronics and information technology, which is currently the policymaking body on the Internet.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over the past year, the government has been criticized over several Internet-related issues, all of them to do with censorship. It received flak recently for the way it sought to contain the spread of hate messages over the Internet that had led to communal violence and a panic exodus by people from the north-eastern states in some cities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Moreover, with the underlying aim of having a bigger say in global policymaking pertaining to the Internet, the government had proposed the establishment of the United Nations Committee on Internet Related Policy (UN-CIRP). The agency’s mandate will include developing and establishing international public policies relating to the Internet; coordinating and overseeing bodies responsible for the technical and operational functioning of the Internet; facilitating negotiation of treaties; undertaking arbitration and dispute resolution; and crisis management, among others.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The government has said that the intent behind proposing such a body was not to control the Internet but to develop a mechanism for globally acceptable and harmonized policy making. The move though has largely been construed as an effort by governments to regulate the Internet.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Currently, the Internet is largely governed by the not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). However, the government says ICANN is dominated mostly by the US, explaining the need for a body such as UN-CIRP.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another government official confirmed that an inter-ministerial panel is currently being “mulled” over. This official, who also did not want to be identified, said the Internet governance policy is increasing in importance and there was a need to discuss whether the current global policymaking structure would be relevant in the next five years.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“We need to firm up the country’s stand at international forums of the Internet and an inter-ministerial committee will aid in bringing some kind of clarity,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Any proposal for better coordination between different wings of the government would be welcome, said <a href="http://origin-www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Sunil%20Abraham">Sunil Abraham</a>, executive director of Bangalore-based research organization Centre for Internet and Society.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“The thumb rule with governance, be it international or national, is that coordination policy formulation bodies is a good idea, but we can’t damn or praise them over the process,” he said. “We have to see what coordination results out of the body.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rajya Sabha member of Parliament <a href="http://origin-www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Rajeev%20Chandrasekhar">Rajeev Chandrasekhar</a>, who wrote to Prime Minister <a href="http://origin-www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Manmohan%20Singh">Manmohan Singh</a> opposing UN-CIRP, had said that India’s proposal was made without much discussion and stakeholder consultation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There wasn’t enough clarity about what the government trying to regulate through the body, Abraham said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Is it to regulate citizens or industry or government activity or for regulation around IP (intellectual property), competition, data protection, crime or tax, we don’t know,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The problem with UN-CIRP is that India would be supported by countries that are against free access to the Internet such as Cuba, China and Russia to name a few, <a href="http://origin-www.livemint.com/Search/Link/Keyword/Naresh%20Ajwani">Naresh Ajwani</a>, a member of the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNIC) said on Wednesday on the sidelines of a meet in Delhi on the issue.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, the government feels that not only will UN-CIRP lead to India having a bigger role in global policymaking for the Internet, it will also help in dealing with crises better as it will lead to enhanced cooperation between nations.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Photo: Aniruddha Chowdhury/Mint</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-com-sep-19-2012-surabhi-agarwal-govt-plans-inter-ministerial-panel-on-internet-policy'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-com-sep-19-2012-surabhi-agarwal-govt-plans-inter-ministerial-panel-on-internet-policy</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet Governance2012-09-25T10:28:08ZNews ItemGovt orders blocking of 300 specific URLs including 16 Twitter accounts
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-aug-24-2012-govt-orders-blocking-of-300-specific-urls-including-16-twitter-accounts
<b>The government stepped up its efforts to stop what it feels is an online campaign of misinformation and rumour mongering in the wake of lower Assam riots and ordered blocking of 16 Twitter accounts, including two belonging to journalists, considered sympathetic to the right in India.</b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/internet/Govt-orders-blocking-of-300-specific-URLs-including-16-Twitter-accounts/articleshow/15623828.cms">Times of India</a> on August 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">The <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/department-of-telecommunications">department of telecommunications</a> (DoT) ordered blocking of the accounts on August 20. The blocked accounts include those maintained by a columnist and a journalist working for a TV channel. Twitter accounts @sanghparivar, @drpraveentogadia and @i_panchajanya are also mentioned. <br /> <br /> The 16 Twitter accounts are part of a list containing over 300 specific URLs that internet service providers (ISPs) in India have been told to block. The list is dominated by URLs belonging to <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Facebook">Facebook</a> and Youtube. <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Indian-Government">Indian government</a> allegedly found 102 URLs on Facebook and 85 URLs on <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/YouTube">YouTube</a> where communally sensitive content was posted. According to a blogpost at <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Centre-for-Internet-and-Society">Centre for Internet and Society</a> (CIS), a non-profit organization that got hold of the list on Wednesday, almost "all of the blocked items have content that are related to communal issues and rioting". <br /> <br /> At the same time, Pranesh Paraksh, a CIS official, noted on the blog that it was unclear if the government exercised its powers responsibly in this case. "The blocking of many of the items on the list are legally questionable and morally indefensible, even while a large number of the items ought to be removed," he wrote.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">According to the leaked list, Indian government also blocked 30 Twitter URLs, 3 <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Wikipedia">Wikipedia</a> URLs, 11 Blogger URLs and 8 <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Wordpress">Wordpress</a> URLs. Some URLs belong to Pakistani websites. The list also contained URLs belonging to several mainstream media websites, including The Telegraph and Al Jazeera. <br /> <br /> The blocking of Twitter accounts was partial due to technical challenges. The accounts have been blocked with the help of ISPs and not Twitter. Accessing them from India shows web users a message, saying "This website/URL has been blocked until further notice either pursuant to Court orders or on the Directions issued by the Department of Telecommunications". Also, the block works only if the accounts are accessed using HTTP and not HTTPS protocol. Twitter allows users to force HTTPS, which is a secure protocol and doesn't let ISPs see the content that a user is accessing. <br /> <br /> Due to the partial block, accounts remained active. When Nirupama Rao, India's ambassador to the US, talked on Twitter about a discussion on a news channel on the subject of social media and government's current policy, one of the "blocked" accounts tweeted back to her saying, "@NMenonRao Is that why UPA Govt has blocked my Twitter handle? Is that the reason? A reply would help." Following the Twitter profile ban, which was reported around midnight on Wednesday, several Twitter users in India started hashtag #Emergency2012. A few hours later, #Emergency2012 and #GOIBlocks were among the top trending topics on Twitter for India.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-aug-24-2012-govt-orders-blocking-of-300-specific-urls-including-16-twitter-accounts'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-aug-24-2012-govt-orders-blocking-of-300-specific-urls-including-16-twitter-accounts</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaFreedom of Speech and ExpressionPublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCensorship2012-08-24T13:29:40ZNews Item