Centre for Internet and Society

Uttarakhand Notifications

praskrishna — 2013-08-09T09:45:55Z

Enclosed is the list of notifications pertaining to disability received from the Uttarakhand government.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/uttarakhand-schemes.zip

Kerala (Govt.) Notifications

praskrishna — 2013-08-09T09:34:03Z

Given below are the notifications issued by the Kerala government:

The zip files below contain the following:

Citizen Charter Handbook
Notification of Rules issued by the Social Welfare Department
Letter from the State Commissionerate for Persons with Disabilities

Click on the links below to download your files:

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/kerala-govt-notifications

Kerala Notifications (Word Files)

praskrishna — 2013-08-09T09:26:38Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/kerala-word-notifications.zip

Kerala Notifications (PDF)

praskrishna — 2013-08-09T09:06:18Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/kerala-pdf-notification.zip

Odisha (Govt.) Notifications

praskrishna — 2013-08-09T08:47:13Z

List of government notifications published by the state government is below:

Notification regarding Deputy Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities to assist the State Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities in discharging of his/her functions.
Notification on 'Banishree' - A scheme of scholarship for students with special needs.
Notification to reconstitute and rename the District Rehabilitation Centre, Bhubaneswar as State Institute of Disability Rehabilitation, Bhubaneswar and to function as nodal agency for disability rehabilitation in the state.
Notification on members of the State Co-ordination Committee constituted in Women & Child Development Department.
Guidelines for establishment, recognition and grant-in-aid to institutions imparting education to children with disabilities.
Notification on amendment of the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation), Odisha Rules, 2003.
Extension of revised scale of pay under Revised Scale of Pay Rules, 2008 to the staff of special schools for the blind, deaf and mentally retarded run by voluntary organizations in the state recognized under Women & Child Development Department.
Notification regarding the Director for welfare of Persons with Disabilities is declared as Head of Women & Child Department.

Click to download the zip files:

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/odisha-govt-notifications

Odisha Notifications (Word Files)

praskrishna — 2013-08-09T08:09:16Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/odisha-notifications-word.zip

Odisha Notifications PDFs

praskrishna — 2013-08-09T08:06:57Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/odisha-notifications.zip

Punjab (Govt.) Schemes

praskrishna — 2013-08-09T07:15:36Z

List of schemes published by the state government of Punjab can be viewed in the below file.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/punjab-schemes.pdf

India’s Indigenous Languages Drive Wikipedia’s Growth

praskrishna — 2013-08-09T09:58:05Z

Despite accommodating the world’s second largest English-speaking population behind the United States, it is India’s indigenous language speakers that are creating and consuming the content that is driving Wikipedia’s growth on the subcontinent.

Note: We have published only portions where CIS has been mentioned and T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge has been quoted. The complete post by Mahesh Sharma was published in TechCrunch on August 6, 2013, you can read it here.

The Wikimedia Foundation last year issued a ~~$40,000~~ $440,000 grant to the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), which, along with the local Wikimedia chapter, has trained almost 2,500 Indians how to edit and create content in their local languages.

Last September, CIS targeted ten tongues — Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Odia, Punjabi and Telugu — and started working with India’s Wikimedia chapter, responsible for coordinating the local volunteer efforts, to boost the amount of local language content being created on a range of websites including, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and WikiCommons.

CIS said that between September 2012 and April 2013 the number of page views increased by almost four million.

While the program has had an impact, director T. Vishnu Vardhan admitted there were some ominous findings. After CIS stopped supporting the Assamese Wikipedia in January 2013, the 20 active editors all but left the site.

“The decline over the last three months also alerts us to the possibility of building dependencies on the program, which is a concern that we need to address going forward,” Vishnu said. ”We need to ensure this community and new people are sustained, that we engage them keep and them interested by showing them the excitement of being part of open knowledge building.”

Ultimately, Vardhan hopes this capacity building exercise will spark a self-fulfilling cycle of local Wikipedia content production and consumption. These reach of these tools is growing as last month, mobile operator Aircel and Wikimedia India announced that subscribers could freely access m.wikipedia.org, available in 19 Indian languages, from their mobile phones

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/techcrunch-august-6-2013-mahesh-sharma-indias-indigenous-languages-drive-wikipedias-growth

Memeâ€™s the word now

praskrishna — 2013-08-08T04:27:57Z

Politicians are always seen doing things. Even if they are not doing something, they are talking about doing things. And so on oodles of internet memes and on Tumblr sites, especially, they are shown "doing things".

The article by Padmaparna Ghosh was published in the Times of India on August 4, 2013. Nishant Shah is quoted.

Whether it is our former president, Pratibha Patil, "frolicking on a Goa beach" fully covered from head to toe in a sari, or Mayawati "copying Keanu Reeves from Matrix" or Rahul Gandhi "telepathically trying to solve the country's problems", political humour is finding new expression on websites like Tumblr. (Tumblr is a microblogging platform that uses pictures and media and is often used to quickly propagate humour based on themes.) Two such sites -- on Rahul Gandhi's achievements (which opens a blank site) and on Narendra Modi's plans (which displays a button, 'Get Details' that can never be clicked, because it keeps slipping away) -- also went viral on social media sites recently.

The popularity of these satirical sites, including 'fake news' sites that run spoofs of the news, is a positive sign, say many, of political engagement in the ranks of the young, urban and connected of the country, a demographic often accused of being disinterested in politics. And in an election year humour is likely to mushroom online. "Humour will play a big role in this election. It provides the public ability to say what they want. I feel that for a sliver of urban media, there will be that other option (the funnies), which wasn't there five years ago," says Anuvab Pal, playwright and stand-up comic.

Yet the value of news satire sites, memes and Tumblrs go beyond just the joke. They may also be critiques of politics, policy issues and debates, and function as veiled messages, all smartly packaged in pop-culture nuggets. Memes (a term that has found new life on the net and which the dictionary defines as 'an idea, style, or usage that spreads with repetition from person to person within a culture') are not just photos with text on them. They also transfer ideas and ideologies. And as recent popular movements across the world have shown, forms of protest are not just limited to rallies on roads.

"The disillusionment with electoral politics that the youth globally seem to be experiencing is one of the key reasons why they are coming online to express their dissatisfaction. This is their form of political engagement. They are showing us that they do have a vision of their future, they know the kind of world they want to build, the ways in which they would like to engineer their societies, but they are not necessarily going to put their faith in the structures of old-fashioned politics," says Nishant Shah of the Centre for Internet and Society.

Irreverence, subversion and criticism have always been a part of cybercultures. Shah agrees that while satire and parodies have always existed online, easier discovery of content thanks to social media, and an atmosphere of censorship in some cases, have increased the visibility and popularity of memes. The Narendra Modi Plans site was initially taken down after getting 60,000 hits in 20 hours. It's back online now. Still, compared to other forms of censorship the internet is still a relatively safe medium for people to voice their discontentment. Shah points out that "it protects people from persecution, from those who abuse power, just because they are questioned. So these instances become even more critical in countries like India, where literalness can land somebody in trouble. Attempts at censorship are only going to lead to more people realizing that the battles to be fought are information battles."

As the last US elections proved memes have become more popular than ever. Whether it was Romney's "binders full of women" or Clint Eastwood's "empty chair", political campaigns themselves adopted and ran with the memes for greater resonance with their constituencies. Of course, the US has a much livelier culture of parody and public debates that lend themselves easily to the mockumentary style of internet engagement. Satirists here say that while India is far from emulating America's parody culture it is undoubtedly moving in that direction. Says Pal: "We are just about getting comfortable with English. Irony in a new language can sometimes be just too many layers, like a double negative. It is also generational. But the new generation is an ironic one. And honestly, if you want to govern a billion people, you should be prepared for the fact that someone will make a meme out of you."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-august-4-2013-padmaparna-ghosh-memea-s-the-word-now

e-DIRAP Google+ Hangout on Open Government

praskrishna — 2013-08-08T04:20:31Z

The e-DIRAP Hangout on Open Government was held on Thursday, July 25, 2013. The Hangout brought together nine professionals from Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia and the Philippines to discuss open government initiatives in their respective countries, the challenges they face, and open source tools for open government.

Watch the Video below

The following panelists participated in the hangout. Sunil Abraham was one of them:

Danny Butt, Research Fellow in Participatory Public Space, University of Melbourne, Australia
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society, India
Venkatesh Hariharan, Director, Knowledge Commons, India (previously, Head of Public Policy at Google India)
Maryati Abdullah, National Coordinator, Publish What You Pay, Indonesia (also Steering Committee Member of Open Government Partnership)
Yanuar Nugroho, Director and Expert Adviser to the Head of the President's Delivery Unit for Development Monitoring and Oversight (UKP4), Indonesia -- to be confirmed
Tomoaki Watanabe, Executive Research Fellow, Centre for Global Communications, International University of Japan (also Executive Director of Common Sphere - the host of Creative Commons Japan, and Co-founder of Open Knowledge Foundation Japan)
Shita Laksmi, Program Manager, Southeast Asia Technology and Transparency Initiative, Hivos Regional Office Southeast Asia
Alvin B. Marcelo, Co-chair, Asia eHealth Information Network

Moderator: Khairil Yusof, Co-founder, Sinar Project, Malaysia (also e-DIRAP team member)
e-DIRAP Hangout Coordinator: Christine Apikul

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/e-dirap-google-hangout-on-open-government

Facebook: Limiting access to social media can restrict freedom of speech

praskrishna — 2013-08-08T04:07:38Z

In its counter-affidavit to the PIL in the Delhi high court, Facebook has argued that limiting access to social media can limit an individual's freedom of speech and expression.

Kim Arora's article was published in the Times of India on August 1, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

The PIL, among other things, deals with the issue of minors accessing Facebook services, arguing that under the Indian Contract Act 1872, minors can't enter into a contract. The PIL will be heard next on Friday.

Last year, the UN Human Rights Council had passed a resolution declaring access to Internet as a human right. Facebook has argued making a similar point for access to social media. "The Internet is increasingly becoming a platform for citizens including minors to interact and voice their opinions and, therefore, a meaningful interpretation of the right to freedom of speech and expression would include the freedom to access social media," the counter-affidavit says.

"It can be argued that in a technologically mediated society, social media and communication infrastructure is essential to exercise freedom of expression," says Sunil Abraham, director, Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society.

Cyber lawyer Pavan Duggal sees it as "hyperbole". "The issue still remains that a minor doesn't have the capacity to act under the Contract Act," he says. Lawyers say that if a contract is entered into for free service in exchange of personal information, it is a "consideration" (like cash or kind) under the Indian Contract Act 1872. The Act says, "All agreements are contracts if they are made by the free consent of parties competent to contract, for a lawful consideration and with a lawful object, and are not hereby expressly declared to be void." It then lists minors as incompetent to contract, and says, "The agreement, if any party is minor, is void ab initio." However, Abraham points out that "It is not an offence to enter a void contract."

To weed out fake profiles and children's profiles, the PIL, filed by former RSS ideologue K N Govindacharya, argues that "obligation is cast upon Facebook and other social networking sites to verify the authenticity of each and every subscribers (sic) which is mandatory for Mobile companies in telecommunication sector.

Mumbai-based professor of law Saurav Datta feels this sort of authentication could have serious privacy implications. "There is no way they can verify users without impinging on their privacy. The goal of the PIL is wrong. We need to protect children, not keep people out," says Datta.

Abraham says that a possible way to deal with this can be on the lines of Canadian privacy law where a privacy commissioner can raise such concerns with the service provider directly.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-aug-1-2013-kim-arora-facebook-limiting-access-to-social-media-can-restrict-freedom-of-speech

Beyond Property Rights: Thinking About Moral Definitions of Openness

praskrishna — 2013-08-07T09:43:35Z

It is hard for Westerners to realize just how much we take for granted about intellectual property, and in particular, how much the property owner’s perspective--be it a corporation, government or creative artist--is embedded in our view of the world as the natural order of things.

This blog post by David Eaves was published in TECH President on August 6, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

While sharing and copying technologies are disrupting some of the ways we understanding “content,” when you visit a non-Western country like India, the spectrum of choices become broader. There is less timidity wrestling with questions like: should poor farmers pay inflated prices for patented genetically-engineered seeds? How long should patents be given for life-saving medicines that cost more than many make in a year? Should Indian universities spend millions on academic journals and articles? In the United States or other rich countries we may weigh both sides of these questions--the rights of the owner vs. the moral rights of the user--but there’s no question people elsewhere, such as in India, weigh them different given the questions of life and death or of poverty and development.

Consequently, conversations about open knowledge outside the supposedly settled lands of the “rich” often stretch beyond permission-based “fair use” and “creative commons” approaches. There is a desire to explore potential moral rights to use “content” in addition to just property rights that may be granted under statutes.

A couple of months ago I sat down in Bangalore with Sunil Abraham, the founder and executive director of the Center for Internet & Society (CIS) there, to talk about the center, and his views on the role of technology and openness in politics and society. One part of our conversation led to this WeGov column on “I Paid a Bribe” and the challenge of fighting corruption in India using technology. Here I want to reflect further on how Sunil and his counterparts may be radically challenging how we should think about open information more generally.

As we talked, Sunil outlined how people and organizations were using “open” methodologies to advance social movements or create counter power. To explain his view he sketched out the following “map” of IP rights and freedoms to show people use and view the different “permissions” (some legal, some illegal).

As a high-level overview this map offers a general list of the tools at the disposal of citizens interested in playing with intellectual property, particularly as they pursue social justice issues.

At the top of the chart are the various forms of “permissions” that a property owner may (or may not) grant you. Thus at the far left sits the most restrictive IP regime and, as you move right, the user gets more and more freedoms (or, if you take the perspective of property owners, property loses more and more of its formal legal protections and a different notion, of “moral rights,” arises).

The second row divides the permissions and the actors along what Sunil believes is one of the most important permissions - the requirement to attribute (or the freedom not to).

Finally, at the bottom, I’ve placed various actors along the spectrum to both show where they might be positioned in the access debate and/or how they use these tools to advance their aims. Thus someone like Lawrence Lessig, the intellectual father of Creative Commons, might support many uses of information as long as the owner gives permission; whereas groups like the Pirate Party or the Yes Men edge further out into uses that may not appear legitimate to a property owner.

Particularly interesting is Sunil’s decision to include non-legal “permissions” such as ignoring the property holders rights in his spectrum of openness. He sees this as the position of the Pirate Party, which he suggests advocates that people should have the right to do what they want with intellectual property even if they don’t have permission, with the exception, interestingly, of ignoring attribution.

He also includes two even more radical “permissions” – counterfeiting, that is claiming that you created the work – and false attribution – assigning your work to someone else! Sunil sees Anonymous as often using the former and the Yes Men as using the latter. “They (the Yes Men) are playing with the attribution layer,” he says, by conducting actions such as their fake DOW press release about the Bhopal disaster.

Pushing the identity envelope
To Sunil, the big dividing line is less about legal vs. illegal but around this issue of attribution. “This is the most exciting area because this (the non-attribution area) is where you escape surveillance,” he declares.

“All the modern day regulation over IP is trying to pin an individual against their actions and then trying to attach responsibility so as to prosecute them,” Sunil says. “All that is circumvented when you play with the attribution layer.”

This matters a great deal for individuals and organizations trying to create counter power – particularly against the state or large corporate interests. In this regard Sunil is actually linking the tools (or permissions) along the open spectrum to civil disobedience. Of course, such “permissions” are also used by states all the time, such as pretending that a covert action was the responsibility of someone else, or simply denying responsibility for some action.

This, in turn, has some interesting implications.

The first is, that it allows Sunil to weave together a number of groups that might not normally be seen as connected because he can map their strategies or tools against a common axis. Thus Lawrence Lessig, the Yes Man, companies and journalists can all be organized based on what “permissions” they believe are legitimate. For example, journalists and new publishers are often seen as fairly pro-copyright (it protects their work) but they are quite happy to ignore the proprietary rights of a government or corporate document and publish its contents, if they believe that action is in the public interest. Hence their position on the spectrum as “willing to ignore proprietary rights.” (Leave aside government arguments that publishing such documents is “stealing” when, at least in the US, they are technically already not subject to copyright.) However, a credible newspaper or journalist would never knowingly attribute a quote or document to a different person. Attribution remains sacred, even when legal proprietary rights are not.

It also tests the notions of who is actually an IP radical. As Sunil notes: “The more you move to the right the more radical you are. Because everywhere on the left you actually have to educate people about the law, which is currently unfair to the user, before you even introduce them to the alternatives. You aren’t even challenging the injustice in the law! On the right you are operating at a level that is liberated from identity and accountability. You are hacking identity.”

Sunil is thus justifying how the use of “illegal” permissions may actually be a form of civil disobedience that can be recognized as legitimate. This is something journalists confront regularly as well. Many are willing to publish “illegally” obtained leaked documents when they believe that may serve the public good. What is ethical is not always legal and so there position on this chart is more nuanced than one might initially suspect.

This is not to say that Sunil doesn’t believe in the effectiveness of legal approaches. For him this map represents a more complete range of choices an activist can choose from as they try to develop their strategy.

“So what you do, and the specific change you are trying to precipitate, you’ll have to determine what strategy you need. Sometimes working within the left hand group is sufficient. Having a non-derivative, non-commercial license to enable students to access academic works, in India, is good enough… But then, to do what the Yes Men did to DOW Chemicals? You have to be over on the right side.”

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/tech-president-august-6-2013-david-eaves-beyond-property-rights-thinking-about-moral-definitions-openness

Token disclosures?

praskrishna — 2013-08-07T09:30:39Z

Snowden’s Xkeyscore expose makes a mockery of Twitter’s transparency revelations.

The article by Deepa Kurup was published in the Hindu on August 4, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

This week, roughly around the same time, two ‘revelations’ made headlines in the world of technology. The first, the U.S. National Security Agency’s top secret web surveillance programme, codenamed Xkeyscore, another expose from the house of Edward Snowden & Co.; and second, microblogging site Twitter’s third biannual Transparency Report for the first half of 2013.

The former exposed a global surveillance net, cast far and wide to freely (no formal authorisation required) access and mine emails, chats and browsing histories of millions. The content of the latter report not only pales in comparison but also raises fundamental questions on just how much goes on beyond the arguably modest claims made on Twitter’s transparency charts.

Documents published by The Guardian have the NSA claiming that the “widest-reaching” system mining intelligence from the web had, over a month in 2012, retrieved and stored no less than 41 billion records on its Xkeyscore servers. These mind-boggling numbers make a mockery of Twitter’s few hundred access request disclosures, advocates of online privacy and freedom point out. Then, it is hardly surprising that a large chunk of global requests came from the U.S. government: no less than 902 of the total 1,157 requests, accounting for 78 per cent. A far second is Japan at 8 per cent followed by the U.K.

India References

Interestingly, both Twitter’s report and the NSA’s Xkeyscore document have India references. While a map titled 'Where is Xkeyscore' in the training manual released showing India as one of 150 sites (hosting a total of 700 servers) indicates that India's very much on the global surveillance radar of the United States government; the fact that the India is a new entrant on Twitter's ‘Country Withheld Content Tool’ means that the government here is also making active interventions in microblogging content. This is very much in line with stances the Indian government has taken over the last year, swinging indecisively between asking internet firms to pre-screen content and asking service providers to take down what it finds offensive.

India, A Bit-Player

The Twitter report states that over the last six months it has seen an increase in the number of requests received (and eventual withholding of content) in five new countries: India, Brazil, Japan, Netherlands and Russia. In terms of numbers, India is still very much a bit player in the game given it falls under the ‘less than 10 category, a list where the number of requests for user information made by the government during this period is fewer than 10. It appears from the report that Twitter did not honour any of these requests, indicating that either the requests were too broad or failed to identify individual accounts.

In the same period, Twitter received two requests from India to remove content, one from the “government/law enforcement agency” and the other through a court order. In all, three tweets were removed by Twitter. No details on the nature of content removed were available.

Transparency Trends

A late entrant to transparency initiatives, Twitter's bi-annual reports have been applauded by privacy activists as an initiative that at least attempted to offer a glimpse into the otherwise opaque medium/industry. According to 'Who Has Your Back' an initiative by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which tracks which corporate helps protect your data from the government, only a third of the 18 internet majors publish Transparency Reports – in fact, Facebook, WordPress and Tumblr all don't publish.

This article by Deepa Kurup was published in the Hindu on August 4, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

While it's definitely good that Twitter's providing data for India, post-Edward Snowden and his revealing PRISM leaks, netizens would question to what extent this data is representative of the magnitude or extent of user data tracking. Do governments like the U.S. need to approach Twitter (or other internet service providers) at all to access detailed user activity logs, content and metadata?

Secret Orders Excluded

Twitter makes it clear that its current report does not include "secret orders" or FISA disclosures. In another blog related to the Transparency Report, Jeremy Kessel, Manager, Legal Policy at Twitter Inc, writes that since 2012, Twitter's seen an uptick in requests to withhold content from two to seven countries. He writes that while Twitter wants to publish “numbers of national security requests – including FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) disclosures – separately from non-secret requests.” It claims it has “insisted” that the United States government allow for increased transparency into “secret orders”. “We believe it’s important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests – including FISA disclosures – separately from non-secret requests." Unfortunately, we are still not able to include such metrics, Twitter states.

'Not the Whole Truth'

In the absence of these metrics, Sunil Abraham, director of Centre for Internet and Society, feels transparency reports “may not tell us the whole truth”. The Xkeyscore revelations then may explain why the U.S. government has made only 902 information requests. “A rogramme like XKeyScore potentially allows them to capture the very same data without having to approach Twitter. This is the very same imperative behind the CMS project in India. Governments across the world want to automate private sector involvement in blanket surveillance measures so that it wont serve as a check on their unbridled appetite for data”

He warns that there's a likely “race to the bottom”, given that an unintended consequence of transparency may be that governments, rather than being shamed into respect for free speech and privacy, would be emboldened by the scale of surveillance and censorship in the so-called democracies such as the US and EU members that are on top of the global blanket surveillance game.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-august-4-2013-deepa-kurup-token-disclosures

Crypto Night

praskrishna — 2013-08-06T06:04:05Z

Challenging government snooping at an all-night cryptography party.

This article by Rahul M was published in the Caravan on August 1, 2013. Pranesh Prakash and Bernadette Langle are quoted.

Satyakam Goswami sat in a conference hall in the Institute of Informatics & Communication in Delhi University's South Campus, furiously typing code into his laptop. He typed the string “/var/log/tor#”, into a Linux terminal, then turned to me and said, “I am one step away, man.” It was around midnight on a muggy July Saturday, and Goswami had been here for six hours. He resumed typing—and cursing under his breath in Telugu as he realised that the online instructions he was following weren’t helping.

Around him, the room bustled with the activity of around 25 other people, all participants at a Cryptoparty, a cryptography event at which programmers and non-programmers meet to share information and expertise on tools that can help thwart government spying.

Goswami was one of the organisers of the event, which was led by Bernadette Längle, a German ‘hacktivist’ who is a member of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), Europe’s largest association of hackers. Längle was one of the organisers of the CCC’s Chaos Communication Congress in 2012, an international hackers’ meet held in Hamburg that year. While processing participant applications for the Congress, she came across a group that wanted to organise what they called a “Cryptoparty” at the meet. “I thought Cryptoparty would be a bunch of guys coming together, learning crypto and having a party,” she told me. Only at the event did she realise that Cryptoparties are rather more political affairs, at which participants experiment with ways of combating governmental intrusions into privacy and freedom.

After she graduated, Längle decided she wanted to travel. “I hadn’t been to America or Asia, and I don’t think I want to enter America,” she said. “I thought India might be a good point to start.” While she was exploring her options, she met Goswami online. “I first met Bernadette on an IRC channel, ‘hasgeek’, where she expressed her interest to come to India,” Goswami said. “I suggested that she write a proposal to CIS [the Centre for Internet and Society, in Bangalore].” Längle applied, and was accepted to work with the organisation for six months.

When Längle was teaching a one-week course on email cryptography at a CIS event, a participant suggested to her that she organise a Cryptoparty in the city. “I thought I was travelling anyway, and I can make a Cryptoparty everywhere I go,” Längle said. This led to the Bangalore Cryptoparty on 30 June, followed by the Delhi edition on 6 July. Längle then held a Cryptoparty in Dharamsala in the second week of July, and plans to hold another in Mumbai in October. At each of these, she gave tutorials on specific aspects of cryptography, such as the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption and decryption program, which Edward Snowden used to communicate with The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald during their now-famous collaboration. Participants would then experiment with these tools, sending emails and messages to each other using secure channels. The Delhi edition, which saw around 70 participants, continued late into the night, with the last exhausted stragglers shutting off their gadgets and heading home at 4 am.

I met Längle again the day after the Delhi event; with her was Pranesh Prakash, policy director at CIS, who is a commentator on issues related to surveillance and privacy. Both agreed that the Indian government’s Central Monitoring System programme, as well as Edward Snowden’s recent leaks, had resulted in a greater interest in cryptography in the country in recent months. “Without the PRISM stuff, there wouldn’t have been so many people attending,” Längle said. “People are concerned about that.” Prakash believes that the NSA leaks have served as a loud wake-up call about a longstanding state of affairs. “It’s this I-told-you-so moment for lots of people right now,” he said. “This isn’t the first time there have been revelations about the NSA spying beyond their authority. These revelations have been happening at least since 2006.”

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/caravan-magazine-august-1-2013-rahul-m-crypto-night