Centre for Internet and Society

National Conference on Intellectual Property Rights and Public Interest

praskrishna — 2017-04-12T14:01:27Z

Indian Law Institute organized a conference on intellectual property rights on April 7 and 8 in New Delhi. Maggie Huang took part in the conference.

The Intellectual Property Rights regime was developed to protect the interest of producers of knowledge. It was aimed at rewarding creativity and inventiveness. It was also claimed by many that the nature of intellectual property was that of a ‘social contract’, one in which the state agrees to secure and protect the rights of individuals in consideration that the individual will reveal his/her creations. The regime of IPR provides access to important creations or source of knowledge to the public along with incentivising the creator by providing monopoly or more aptly ‘limited monopoly’ rights to commercially exploit their creations. The ‘limited monopoly’ right is for a temporary period and after the expiration of the temporary period, it falls into the public domain. The interesting part of the IPR regime is that the creator in exchange of the exclusive rights shares the knowledge or know how behind the creation of the work which the public could freely use to develop further innovations after the ‘limited monopoly’ term is over. The ‘limited’ prefixed to the monopoly word triggers the controversy, with many claiming public interest predominance over private rights and vice-versa. The Novartis v. Union of India case and the more recent The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of Oxford University v. Rameswari Photocopy Services case has brought this controversy to the fore in India. The new national IP Policy in India in 2016 also touched upon the area by declaring that the main aim of the policy is to push IPRs as a marketable financial asset, promote innovation and entrepreneurship while protecting public interest. In this light, this conference seeks to address the question whether IPR is based on public interest leading to public rights predominance over private rights or knowledge as a form of private property to be protected under IPR regime ergo public rights are nothing but exceptions. The conference aims to realize the IPR model apposite for countries like India.

For conference topics, see here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/national-conference-on-intellectual-property-rights-and-public-interest

Identities Research

praskrishna — 2017-04-12T13:54:53Z

Caribou Digital organized an identity research event in Bengaluru at TERI on April 6, 2017. A total of 16 participants attended the event. Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash represented CIS at the event.

The Identities research project explores user experiences of identity technology, brought to you by Caribou Digital, Omidyar Network and the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIITB). The need for user-centered research in “digital identity” arose out of concerns around top-down identity systems and lack of insights on how these are being understood and used, particularly amongst lower income populations. For more information on the event and viewing the episode videos click here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/identities-research

Mobile Accessibility Practices

praskrishna — 2017-04-11T14:50:48Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/files/mobile-accessibility-practices.pdf

Privacy, what? Bengaluru police leaks 46,000 phone numbers on Twitter

praskrishna — 2017-04-07T02:57:49Z

Bengaluru police made the biggest goof up of all time by releasing private information of people who called 100 to complain since April 2015 and was seemingly unapologetic about the breach of privacy.

The article by Neha Vashishth was published by India Today on April 6, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

We all love our privacy, don't we?

We put various locking apps and hide our private pictures on Facebook, Twitter etc and only share what we want the world to see. But sometimes even after our countless efforts, we end up losing our information on the internet. After all, a breach of privacy is the greatest nightmare one can have.

Bengaluru police goofed up too when it came to handling privacy concerns of Bengaluru citizens. The police department posted phone numbers of thousands of citizens on their Twitter handle (@BCPCR) who called 100 and complained against harassment, quarrels, and gambling etc.

The police posted over 46,000 tweets online since April 2015 sharing information of people who called on 100 along with the app known as 'Suraksha' to lodge complaints. The account was made private as soon as the matter escalated.

The police was unapologetic regarding the matter and said that the tweets were auto-generated from their twitter handle @BCPCR.

Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society said the "police officer who ordered to create such an account should be held responsible if any harm comes to a complainant."

This not only created a major breach of privacy of complainants but also risked their lives. This incident only proves that privacy and sensitivity of the matter has vanished in today's time.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-today-neha-vashishth-april-6-2017-privacy-what-bengaluru-police-leaks-phone-numbers-on-twitter

India’s National ID Program May Be Turning The Country Into A Surveillance State

praskrishna — 2017-04-07T12:49:30Z

For seven years, India’s government has been scanning the irises and fingerprints of its citizens into a massive database. The once voluntary program was intended to fix the country’s corrupt welfare schemes, but critics worry about its Orwellian overtones.

The blog post by Pranav Dixit was published by BuzzFeedNews on April 4, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

An abridged version of the blog post containing Sunil Abraham's quotes are reproduced below:

“You can’t change your fingerprints”

Sunil Abraham, the CIS director, calls himself a “technological critic” of the Aadhaar platform. For years, he’s been warning of the security risks associated with a centralized repository of the demographic and biometric details of a billion or so people.

“Aadhaar is a sitting duck,” Abraham told BuzzFeed News. That’s not an unreasonable assessment considering that India’s track record for protecting people’s private data is far from stellar. Earlier this year, for example, a security researcher discovered a website that was leaking the Aadhaar demographic data of more than 500,000 minors. The website was subsequently shut down, but the incident raised questions about Aadhaar’s security protocols — particularly those around data shared with third parties.

Abraham’s concerns are not without global precedent. In 2012, Ecuadorian police jailed blogger Paul Moreno for breaking into the country’s online national identity database and registering himself as Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. In April 2016, hackers posted a database containing names, national IDs, addresses, and birth dates of more than 50 million Turkish citizens, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; later that month, Mexico’s entire voter database — over 87 million national IDs, addresses, and more — was leaked onto Amazon’s cloud servers by as-yet-untraced sources; and in the Philippines, more than 55 million voters had their private information — including fingerprints — released on the Dark Web.

“When this database is hacked — and it will be — it will be because someone breaches the computer security that protects the computers actually using the data.”

“What is the price that we pay as a nation if our database of over a billion people — complete with all 10 fingerprints and iris scans — leaks?” Abraham asked. The consequences, he said, will be permanent. Unlike a password, which you can reset at any time, your biometrics, if compromised, are the ultimate privacy breach. “You can’t change your fingerprints.”

The UIDAI claims that the Aadhaar database is protected using the “highest available public key cryptography encryption (PKI-2048 and AES-256)” and would take “billions of years” to crack.

“Encryption like this doesn’t typically get broken, it gets circumvented,” security researcher Troy Hunt told BuzzFeed News. “For example, the web application that sits in front of it is compromised and data is retrieved after decryption.” Or alternatively, he said, the encryption key itself is compromised. “Naturally, governments will offer all sorts of assurances on these things, but the simple, immutable fact is that once large volumes are centralized like this, there is a heightened risk of security incidents and of the data consequently being lost or exposed,” he added.

Cryptographer and cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier echoed Hunt’s assessment. “When this database is hacked — and it will be — it will be because someone breaches the computer security that protects the computers actually using the data,” he said. “They will go around the encryption.”

Nilekani — who did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ requests for comment — recently dismissed concerns around the project’s privacy implications as “hand-waving.” In an interview with the Economic Times, he repeatedly stressed how secure Aadhaar’s “advanced encryption technology” was. “I can categorically say that it’s the most secure system in India and among the most secure systems in the world,” he said.

Abraham is unconvinced by such assurances. He believes Aadhaar fundamentally changes the equation between a citizen and a state. “There’s a big difference between you identifying yourself to the government, and the government identifying who you are,” he said.

Aadhaar’s opponents say the program’s implementation has left India’s poorest people with no choice but to use it. “If you link people’s food subsidies, wages, bank accounts, and other crucial things to Aadhaar, you hit them where it hurts the most,” Ramanathan argued. “You leave them with no choice but to sign up.”

“Can you imagine if the United States passed a law that said that every person who wished to get food stamps would need their fingerprints registered in a government-owned database?” a journalist turned Aadhaar activist who did not wished to be named told BuzzFeed News. “Imagine what a scandal that would be.”

For Nilekani, such criticism is just overstatement and drama. “I think this so-called anti-Aadhaar lobby is really just a small bunch of liberal elites who are in some echo chamber,” he said during a recent interview with Indian business news channel ET Now. “The reality is that a billion people are using Aadhaar. A lot of the accusations are just delusional. Aadhaar is not a system for surveillance. [The critics] live in a bubble and are not connected to reality.”

Abraham laughed off Nilekani’s comments. “The Unique Identification Authority of India will become the monopoly provider of identification and authentication services in India,” he said. “That sounds like a centrally planned communist state to me. I don’t know which left liberal elites he’s talking about.”

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/buzzfeednews-pranav-dixit-april-4-2017-indias-national-id-program-may-be-turning-the-country-into-a-surveillance-state

NGOs, individuals urge state CMs to curb Internet shutdown

praskrishna — 2017-04-07T02:43:39Z

Amid rising instances of Internet curbs, a group of individuals and organisations have urged the chief ministers of 12 states to only restrict specific online content rather than resort to complete shutdown.

The article was published in the Times of India on April 4, 2017.

SFLC.in, a Delhi-based not-for-profit organisation, along with various Internet-related firms have sent letters in this regard to the chief ministers of these states impacted by Internet shutdowns.

The letters have been written to the chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Maharashtra, J&K, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat and Haryana.

"The Internet shutdowns are imposed using state power under Section 144 by these specific states and not by the Union Government. The central government is bound to follow the process under Section 69 IT act.

"These letters to the chief ministers of all 12 states, which have been affected by Internet shutdowns till date, are an effort by us to address the source of the problem," SFLC.in President and Legal Director Mishi Choudhary told .

As per Internet Shutdown tracker of SFLC, there have been 28 incidents of Internet closure in Jammu & Kashmir, 9 cases each in Gujarat and Haryana, 8 in Rajasthan, 3 Nagaland, 2 cases each in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Manipur and 1 incident each in Maharashtra, Jharkhand, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh since 2012.

As per the tracker, far India has experienced a record number of 66 such incidents since 2012, with the number increasing more than two-fold from 14 in 2015 to 31 in 2016.

The letters sent to the chief ministers urge them to "take requisite action that would prohibit the issuance of orders that make Internet services entirely inaccessible for a particular area, and rather recommend that Section 69A and the procedure established by the rules therein be applied to limit the restriction to certain specific online content."

The signatories of the letters include the Centre for Internet and Society, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Internet Democracy Project, IT for Change and Society for Knowledge Commons, individuals like Anivar Aravind (Executive Director, Indic Project), IIT Bombay professor Kannan Moudgalya and others.

"We are hopeful that our efforts will make the government take in account the enormous effects of Internet shutdowns on the social-economic condition of our citizens and understand their plight," Choudhary said. PRS MKJ

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-april-4-2017-ngos-individuals-urge-state-cms-to-curb-internet-shutdown

Bengaluru cops' twitter handle in ethical storm

praskrishna — 2017-04-07T02:38:24Z

The city's privacy activists are among the most strident in trying to prevent the Union government from gaining unprecedented access to citizens' personal information through Aadhaar. But in their own backyard, Bengaluru police have been publishing on Twitter the phone numbers of thousands of citizens reporting various crimes such as gambling on the streets, random quarrels and harassment of women.

The article by Umesh Yadav was published in the Times of India on April 6, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

The police control room has put out more than 46,000 tweets since April 2015 containing the numbers of complainants calling the emergency number 100. The phone numbers of citizens reaching the control room through Bengaluru police's new emergency mobile application, Suraksha, too are being published through this handle.

Thankfully, the Twitter handle, @BCPCR, had a mere 66 followers as on the evening of April 5, nearly 30 per cent of which were various police stations in the city. On Wednesday evening, the police closed the account for public view.

ET has screenshots of tweets from the account. A senior police officer at Bengaluru police's Command Control was unapologetic for the breach of privacy. The tweets are generated automatically and meant to `show' the number of calls received by the control room and the number of people using the new app, he said.

On the matter of compromising the safety of the complainants, the officer said, "It is obvious that the accused will know who registered the complaint and privacy does not matter here."

Expectedly, privacy and law experts are indignant.

"This is horrible and unpardonable," said Supreme Court advocate KV Dhananjay. "The fact that the police did not consider it necessary to ask for permission before broadcasting someone's identity shows how insensitive the Police Commissioner's office has become to the privacy concern of our society." Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society and who has been at the forefront of the campaign against any potential misuse of Aadhaar, too said the "police officer who ordered to create such an account should be held responsible if any harm comes to a complainant."

Complainants ET spoke with were startled about the abuse of their privacy. Gowda, a complainant, who had informed the police control room about the sale of cigarettes within 100 metres of a school, had specifically requested the police to not disclose his identity.

"(This is why) it is better to keep quiet when you see lawbreakers," he said on hearing that Bengaluru police had published his phone number on Twitter.

"This is injustice and this is the reason why people are scared to inform the police of crimes. If the accused send people to beat me, what should I do?" Dhanusha had called the control room about some teenagers who were teasing girls at a bus stop. The police arrived and took the boys in. She, too, is now worried. "If the accused get my number, they are going to harass me. The police do not have any right to display our phone numbers in public."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-april-6-2017-umesh-yadav-bengaluru-cops-twitter-handle-in-ethical-storm

Get an Aadhaar card if you don't have one

praskrishna — 2017-04-04T15:39:05Z

The Aadhaar number has been made compulsory for filing tax return. With both the government and private parties insisting on it for various activities despite the Supreme Court's assertion that is not mandatory, you need to get one at the earliest.

The article by Priya Nair and Sanjay Kumar Singh was published in the Business Standard on March 27, 2017. Udbhav Tiwari was quoted.

Until now the need for an Aadhaar card arose if someone wanted to avail of the LPG subsidy, or if senior citizens wanted to enjoy a concession on train tickets. This 12-digit number, which is a proof of identity, is largely used by the government to distribute cash benefits and other subsidies under its welfare schemes. Since submitting the Aadhaar card at the time of opening a bank account, investing in a mutual fund, etc is optional (you can submit another proof of identity), many people have still not bothered to get one. That ambivalent attitude will now have to change.

This year onwards all those filing income tax returns will have to furnish their Aadhaar number. There is a field in the income tax return form for Aadhaar number. Don’t forget to fill it this year. If you do not have an Aadhaar number, you will have to submit the enrolment number of your application for Aadhaar. "In case of failure to intimate the Aadhaar number, the PAN allotted to the person shall be deemed invalid and the other provisions of the Income Tax Act shall apply, as if the person has not applied for allotment of PAN," says Amarpal Chadha, tax partner, people advisory services, EY India.

Experts say that this step has been taken to deal with the problem of duplicate permanent account numbers (PAN) and to control black money. Says Kuldip Kumar, partner and leader-personal tax at PwC India: “Many people have more than one PAN, even though there is a penalty under the Income Tax Act for doing so. The government is linking PAN to Aadhaar to deal with this problem. This step will also help control black money. Whether you invest in stocks, shares, or do any other high-value transaction, over a period of time the tax department will be able to see all this information at the click of a button." Other experts also agree that this step will create an audit trail for various transactions. “Linking of Aadhaar and PAN will throw up any discrepancies in reported transactions and provide a ready database to the revenue authorities for necessary action,” says Vikas Vasal, partner, Grant Thornton India.

Interim problems
This measure is expected to create a slew of problems for people. Many individuals may still not have an Aadhaar card. They should apply for one post-haste. Everyone needs to check if their Aadhaar and PAN details match. If there are discrepancies between the two, get either your Aadhaar or PAN details updated so that you do not face problems at the time of filing returns. Details on how to update the Aadhaar and PAN are available on the web sites of UID and the IT department respectively (see box).

Non-Resident Indians (NRI) and foreign nationals may also need to obtain an Aadhaar number now. Many NRIs have an income (before claiming any deduction) that exceeds the basic exemption limit of Rs 2.5 lakh, and hence file a tax return in India. Foreign nationals who have spent time in India and earned an income also need to file a tax return. Indian residents who have been sent by their companies to work abroad will also have to scramble for the card. "March is about to end and tax returns will have to be filed by the end of July. Persons who have to file a tax return but are abroad will face a challenge getting the Aadhaar card made in time since you have to be physically present in India for this purpose,’’ says Kumar. The government may possibly grant some leeway to such people.

Even though the Supreme Court has said that Aadhaar is not mandatory, there are several instances where the authorities are insisting on it. Those applying for domicile proof and those who want to get their property registered are being asked to provide this number. Some telecom providers also insist on it before giving a connection. Schools are asking for it from students. You need it to appear for competitive exams like IIT JEE. Online providers of financial products insist on Aadhaar since it makes KYC easier. With the government moving strongly towards making Aadhaar compulsory, one can't escape complying with this regulation.

Risks of an Aadhaar-centric system
There are several risks associated with Aadhaar, whose basic purpose is authentication and authorisation. The first problem arises from the fact that it is easily accessible to miscreants. Aadhaar numbers of thousands of people have been uploaded on the Internet. "Since the Aadhaar number has to be given at so many places, it can be misused to pull information about people from the centralised database. In the case of credit and debit cards, we are told not to shares these numbers publicly as the number is the first thing required for carrying out a transaction. That is not the case with Aadhaar. UID's position is that you should treat your Aadhaar number carefully. But the fact is that the Aadhaar number is not used carefully either by consumers or businesses. It is a fairly public number. With Aadhaar too much power is being vested in a number that is quite public,’’ says Udbhav Tiwari, policy officer, Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru.

Second, Aadhaar has a centralised database, and all centralised databases are vulnerable to hacking. Third, biometrics are not a very secure form of authentication. "Fingerprints are easy to forge. The UID says that the device (used to check the fingerprint) should not remember the biometrics but should only transfer it to UID which will verify the information. But miscreants could use a device that captures your biometrics," says Tiwari.

Other documents used for identification like PAN and passport are not easy to duplicate because of their security features. PAN, for instance, has a hologram. The power of the passport lies not in the passport number but in the document. Without the passport one cannot travel internationally. But in case of Aadhaar one can go on the Internet and print a new Aadhaar card. “If somebody has managed to capture my fingerprint and has my Aadhaar number, he can use it wherever Aadhaar is required,’’ says Tiwari.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-march-27-2017-priya-nair-and-sanjay-kumar-singh-get-an-aadhaar-card-if-you-dont-have-one

The Aadhaar of all things

praskrishna — 2017-04-03T15:46:23Z

From a severely critical stand against Aadhaar in 2014, the Modi-led BJP in power has made a sharp U-turn to bulldoze its way into having every Indian scanned, tagged and labelled. A timeline of the country’s chequered date with the unique identification project.

The article by Shriya Mohan was published in the Hindu Businessline on March 31, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

You’ve probably read the WhatsApp joke about a post-Aadhaar scenario in 2020 India. A man orders pizza over phone. He is asked for his Aadhaar number first. He then orders a family-size seafood pizza, only to be reminded by the attendant about his high blood pressure and cholesterol levels (thanks to his Aadhaar history visible to everybody “on the system”) and is advised to order the low-fat Hokkien Mee pizza instead, based on his recent search history on Hokkien cuisine. As if this isn’t creepy enough, the pizza guy refuses a card payment, citing the man’s maxed-out credit cards, advises against ATM withdrawal owing to his massive overdraft and even decides to hold off the free cola offer given his dire health situation. When the man turns livid, he is told to mind his language, given that in 2007 he was already imprisoned for verbally abusing a policeman!

2020 is two and a half years away, and the WhatsApp scenario appears less incredulous by the day.

By the government’s latest estimate, 112,01,12,468 Aadhaar cards have been issued since January 2009, when the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) was set up under the Planning Commission. So if you are an adult Indian resident without an Aadhaar card, you are in a two per cent minority (98 per cent adults are covered).

Last week, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the 12-digit number would be the single monolith identity for all Indians in the coming years, replacing every other identity card. The government is serious because each week a new scheme is added to the three dozen schemes in which Aadhaar has been made mandatory. All the 84 schemes under the direct subsidy benefit transfer programme are expected to follow suit.

Here are just a few instances in which you should be ready to whip out your Aadhaar card — a free midday meal at a government school, access to Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan, LPG subsidy and foodgrains under the public distribution system, six scholarship schemes for students with disabilities, getting your EPF pensions, booking a train ticket online, getting a backward caste quota or benefit, and, according to the most recent directive in the Finance Bill, filing your tax returns.

Why did a dispensation so critical of Aadhaar in 2014 make a sharp U-turn to bulldoze its way into having every single Indian citizen scanned, tagged and labelled?

The earliest felt need for an identification project can be traced to the Kargil Review Committee, instituted by the Vajpayee Government in 1999, in the wake of the Indo-Pak war. The Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam-led panel had recommended a citizenship database for the identification of legitimate Indian citizens living in border areas.

As outlined in a Scroll article, this quickly expanded to include all Indians under the Multipurpose National Identity Card project, which was pilot tested in a few villages. The Citizenship Act was also amended to give a legislative backing to the scheme, which built on the Bharatiya Janata Party’s general stance against illegal immigrants.

The search for identity

The Citizenship Act was amended in 2004 by the incumbent Congress government to make way for the National Population Register (NPR), a database of the identities of all Indian residents, maintained by the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India.

Eventually, in 2009, Aadhaar, or UIDAI, surfaced as a 12-digit identification number that served as proof of identity and address — meaning, it applies to all residents whether they are citizens or not, unlike with the NPR. Aadhaar, which means ‘basis’ in Hindi, is intended to be an all-encompassing substratum of identities that can provide “instant access to services like banking, mobile phone connections and other government and non-government services”. The United Progressive Alliance government managed to link it to its Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT) system for subsidies provided to targeted groups.

As the main Opposition party, the BJP had felt that the Aadhaar number ought to have been given only to Indian citizens, and not all residents, which, in its view, would include millions of illegal immigrants.

Nandan Nilekani, the former CEO of IT giant Infosys, was appointed UIDAI chairman in July 2009. The first Aadhaar number was issued in September 2010, and then the pace accelerated: 100 million by November 2011, 200 million by February 2012 and 500 million by end of 2013. “We felt speed was strategic. Doing and scaling things quickly was critical. If you move very quickly it doesn’t give opposition the time to consolidate,” Nilekani told Forbes India in a 2013 interview.

Here’s the part most of us forget: The largest opposition that Nilekani was referring to at that time was the BJP.

“The people who thought of themselves as having given birth to IT in this country refused to listen to a common man like me. Even the SC has demanded answers,” Narendra Modi, then Gujarat chief minister, had said and alleged that the Aadhaar programme was a bundle of lies to loot the country’s treasury.

As the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, days ahead of delivering the party’s biggest-ever victory, he had tweeted: “On Aadhaar, neither the Team that I met nor PM could answer my Qs on security threat it can pose. There is no vision, only political gimmick.” Recently, when Aadhaar enrolments had crossed the billion mark, this tweet was dug out prominently.

The U-turn

So, what changed? How did the Aadhaar’s primary opposition become it’s key crusader?

There were two meetings that supposedly changed the destiny of the Aadhaar project. In the first week of June 2014, as Nilekani was vacating his government-allotted Lutyen’s bungalow as UIDAI chief, he met Modi and Jaitley and persuaded the new regime to persist with Aadhaar. The more important meeting was with Vijay Madan, the UIDAI director general and mission director. According to a Governance Now article, when the UID team spoke of the potential savings from plugging subsidy leakages, and weeding out “ghost beneficiaries”, Modi asked them to give a precise estimate. The figure was “up to ₹50,000 crore a year” or a good 9.4 per cent of India’s ₹5,31,177-crore fiscal deficit.

Modi in his keenness to showcase the arrival of “acche din” immediately sought a 100-crore enrolment target at the ‘earliest’, putting paid to speculations that the new government would shelve the UIDAI project. A funding of ₹2,039.64 crore was formalised in the 2014-2015 Budget presented a week later, to create the infrastructure to enrol 30 crore people to add to the 70 crore already enrolled. The UIDAI targeted the 1-billion mark by the end of that fiscal.

Money bill to beat legal hurdles

It was in November 2012 that the SC admitted a PIL filed by retired Karnataka High Court judge KS Puttaswamy and advocate Parvesh Khanna, questioning the government’s decision to issue Aadhaar even as the National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010 was pending before the Rajya Sabha since December 3, 2010. They argued that there was no legislative backing for obtaining personal information. Also, the proposed law was rejected by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance.

The PIL argued that linking the Aadhaar number with food security, LPG subsidy, the Employees’ Provident Fund and other direct benefit transfers made the enrolment mandatory, thereby falsifying the government’s claim that it was voluntary. Several other PILs too voiced similar privacy concerns.

Currently, there are two legal strictures governing the validity of Aadhaar: the apex court order of October 15, 2015, limiting the card’s voluntary use to six schemes (PDS, MGNREGA, LPG, NEPS and social assistance programmes) and prohibiting the government from making it mandatory for receiving any benefits or services; and the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Act, 2016, which is under challenge today. Both strictures have distinct operational status, but petitioners argue that recent government directives making Aadhaar mandatory are leading them to wonder whether the SC’s interim order is overshadowed by the Aadhaar Act or if the government is defying the court.

On March 3, 2016, in a surprise move, to put all dissent to rest, the Aadhaar Act was introduced as a Money Bill in Parliament to give it legislative backing. Things moved pretty fast thereon. On March 11, the Aadhaar Act 2016 was passed in the Lok Sabha. On March 26, the Act was notified. Accusing the BJP-led NDA government of showing “utter contempt” for the Rajya Sabha by taking the Money Bill route, senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh challenged it in the Supreme Court in April. He likened the use of the Money Bill, which was passed overruling amendments moved in the Rajya Sabha, to “knocking a nail in the coffin of the Upper House”.

The government’s move took many, including Aadhaar advocates, by surprise. “We need to separate Aadhaar as identity from its specific functionality for which it’s used,” says Praveen Chakravarty, a senior fellow at the IDFC institute and a former member of Nilekani’s core team. He believes that just as a voter ID alone isn’t enough to vote, seeing the ownership of an Aadhaar card as key for any transaction is “fear-mongering”. Its use will still involve a process of checks and balances.

But can’t thumb prints be replicated with Fevicol?

“Sure, there could be failures, as there are with any system. But this is a far more foolproof method than any we’ve had before. Internationally also, biometric is to authenticate a higher level of security.”

The argument for privacy

“Aadhaar has the potential to improve welfare service delivery. But it has to be achieved in an inclusive manner befitting a truly liberal society and not through coercion,” says Chakravarty.

His only misgiving is with the use of the Money Bill to introduce the Aadhaar, without any right to privacy. “It should have gone through the process of debate in Parliament. Then it wouldn’t have been passed without a strong right to privacy safeguard,” he says, pointing that even a junior UIDAI officer can access the data of anybody he/she chooses.

“Aadhaar inverts the idea of transparency. It makes people transparent but the State opaque,” says legal expert Usha Ramanathan, a legal expert and anti-Aadhaar crusader.

The use of Aadhar as verification at every instance can help piece together very detailed information about citizens. These include banking transactions, online purchases, travel itineraries, mobile phone usage, location history and practically anything that can be electronically recorded and verified with an Aadhaar.

In February this year, the UIDAI filed a police case against Axis Bank and others for alleged unauthorised authentication and impersonation attempts by illegally storing Aadhaar biometrics.

The latest outcry over breached privacy involved a screenshot of cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s personal details that went viral on Twitter. The UIDAI blacklisted the agency that revealed Dhoni’s Aadhaar details after his wife complained to the IT Minister. A recent Scroll report shows the UIDAI received 1,390 similar complaints but took no action.

There are legitimate fears such an information database might eventually be misused, for instance in racial profiling or revealing voting preferences.

In January this year, Hyderabad-based ECIL developed a biometric-enabled mobile terminal for instant authentication of a voter “to prevent rigging of votes”. Till August 2015, the Election Commission was working on seeding Aadhaar data with that of voter ID card, in an attempt to weed out fake voters. However, the poll panel stopped this exercise after the SC ruled that Aadhaar be made compulsory only for PDS and LPG distribution.

Nilekani, in an interview to BLink, insisted that the Aadhaar has more privacy regulations than any other service in the world. He also pointed out that all election commission data is already online, and anyone can look up any voter’s name, date of birth, gender and address.

Additionally, social media profiles too are shared publicly of our own volition.

Concurring with this view, Chakravarty says, “It is surprising that we’re perfectly okay with giving all our life information to a 32-year-old named Mark Zuckerberg. However, this is voluntary. Whether we fully know consequences or not is another matter altogether.”

With the Finance Bill requiring all PAN cards to be linked to Aadhaar, there is added concern over privacy. Sunil Abraham, founder of the Centre for Internet and Society, says Aadhaar runs the risk of being used fraudulently. “If I want to get you in trouble, I can make a large purchase of gold against your Aadhaar number, which is linked to your PAN,” he explains.

He advocates for a system where different government departments don’t store Aadhaar numbers in their databases but instead use a token issued by UIADI kiosks. This would prevent proliferation of the number.

Technical glitches

In February this year, Modi claimed in the Lok Sabha that plugging leakages through Aadhaar had saved the government ₹14,000 crore. And that nearly four crore fake ration cards have been seized till date.

One method of establishing a fake ration card is if the owner has not availed himself of his ration. Ever since Aadhaar’s biometric identification has been linked to point-of-sale (POS) machines at ration shops, residents have had to queue up with a prayer on their lips. A lot could go wrong — the biometric might not recognise them or, worse, there could be a network failure, forcing everyone to return home empty-handed. In both instances, while ration shop owners should ideally mark such transactions under ‘Transactions with “N” response from Aadhaar’, they invariably mark them under “Household yet to take ration”, implying that the beneficiary has chosen not to take home her share.

The February 2017 data for 22 ration shops across Delhi, accessed on the Department of Food & Supplies website, shows that none have a single beneficiary marked under “N”. At a Delhi Cantonment outlet, of the 1,038 registered beneficiaries only 168 have been marked “Y”, or ‘Yes’, showing they have taken their rations. Another 871 have been marked “Household yet to take ration” and none have been marked ‘N’ to indicate glitches in the Aadhaar authentication.

As Amrita Johri of citizens’ action group Satark Nagrik Sangathan explains, “Aadhaar relies on internet and electricity. This might seem like a problem only of rural areas. But we don’t have to go far. In South Delhi’s East Mehraam Nagar, there is a ration shop with no mobile signal and no network. Officials said we have to show that Aadhaar is a success, so the shop’s POS machine was finally hung on a jamun tree to get it to work.”

She questions the government’s reluctance to acknowledge the many instances of failure in the project.

Frighteningly, three consecutive failed attempts could lead to the card being placed in an abeyance list and possibly invalidated.

Top performers and laggards

Delhi is rated one of the better performing States/union territories, while Rajasthan has one of the worst records with the maximum number of biometric and network failures.

According to the government’s 2017 monthly estimates, 27 per cent of the residents whose Aadhaar cards have been seeded to the PDS were denied rations owing to biometric or network failure. This figure would be higher if the unseeded cards are also taken into account.

Nikhil Dey, founder of Rajasthan’s Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) says his organisation is fighting with its back against a wall.

“Nearly 73 lakh households get their monthly rations in this State, where a little over a crore households are eligible to receive them. We’re not even talking about exclusions here,” says Dey. Besides network failure, there are many instances of the old and sick who are unable to visit the shop to physically verify themselves.

“Back-up options such as OTP (one-time password) or facial recognition only work in theory,” says Dey. He alleges that shop owners often fudge the OTP system by punching in their own numbers and stealing the quotas of genuine beneficiaries.

He too believes that several names have been struck off as dead to project that the Aadhaar has weeded out a high number of fake social security pension ers.

Nilekani applauds Andhra Pradesh for its progress in the Aadhaar project by investing in infrastructure to eliminate technical glitches. J Satyanarayana, the UIDAI’s part-time chairperson, told BLink in an email interview that Aadhaar has led to transparency and efficiency in nearly all government schemes in AP.

During March 2017, 42.29 lakh (93.02 per cent) pensioners received their payment through Aadhaar-based biometric authentication, he says, adding that real-time monitoring systems are in place.

“The entire PDS (rations) is linked to Aadhaar,” he says. As many as 1.21 crore (87.39 per cent) card holders collected their ration this month, and 95.94 lakh received wages (totalling ₹5,283 crore under MNREGA through Aadhaar-enabled systems, he informs.

Neighbouring Telangana too is known for its 99 per cent Aadhaar enrollment, leading to an impressive 80 per cent of its population accessing the PDS.

BP Acharya, special chief secretary in Telangana’s planning department says, “Aadhaar’s use can perhaps be most seen in Telangana’s speedy clearances, investment promotion, creating licences and clearances for shops and establishments.”

Telangana took the Aadhaar database project one step further through its Citizen 360 programme. In August 2014, months after the State was newly formed, it conducted one of the largest household surveys in a single day, covering one crore households. This data was integrated with the Aadhaar database and now links different benefits on the same platform. Now the Aadhaar identity is linked to other details such as the holder’s driving licence and even crime record.

The UIDAI holds out AP and Telangana as shining examples of Aadhaar’s efficiency when backed by the right network and infrastructure. But for the lakhs of biometric factory rejects who are denied their rights, Aadhaar can only mean a mass experiment gone horribly wrong.

Aadhaar Timeline

2006

The ministry of communications and information technology approves the ‘Unique ID for Below Poverty Line (BPL) families’ project under the chairmanship of Arvind Virmani, then principal advisor, Planning Commission

2008

Empowered group of ministers formed by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decides to collate two schemes — the National Population Register under the Citizenship Act, 1955 and the UID project — to conceive Aadhaar.

2009

Planning Commission issues a notification to constitute the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI).

Government appoints Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani as the first chairman of UIDAI, with the rank and status of a cabinet minister.

2012

Former Karnataka high court judge justice K Puttaswamy files a public interest litigation before the Supreme Court (SC) declaring that Aadhaar violates an individual’s right to privacy and that the scheme lacks legislative backing.

2014

In an interim order, the SC restrains the UIDAI from transferring biometric information with an Aadhaar number to any other agency without the individual’s consent in writing.

2015

Three-judge bench of the apex court rules the unique identity number is not mandatory to avail of benefits from government programmes, restricting the use of Aadhaar to beneficiaries of the public distribution system and subsidies on cooking gas and kerosene, and refers the question on privacy to a larger constitution bench.

Centre moves SC seeking a review and modification of the August 11 interim order. A five-judge constitution bench modifies the same and extends the use of Aadhaar to Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Jan Dhan Yojana, pensions and the Employees’ Provident Fund scheme.

2016

Finance minister Arun Jaitley announces in the budget speech that the government will offer statutory backing for Aadhaar. The Lok Sabha passes the Aadhaar (Targeted Delivery of Financial and Other Subsidies, Benefits and Services) Bill, 2016 as a Money Bill, rejecting Rajya Sabha recommendations.

2017

Aadhaar is made mandatory for three dozen schemes with 84 more expected under direct benefit transfers, including midday meal scheme and universal education.

SC again rules that Aadhaar cannot be made mandatory for welfare schemes.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindu-businessline-shriya-mohan-the-aadhaar-of-all-things

March 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-05-20T12:47:11Z

Welcome to March 2017 newsletter of the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS).

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
CIS submitted comments on the draft Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules for the consideration of the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, Government of India. Anubha Sinha in a blog post has identified the various kinds of IP in an app and explained the protections available under Indian IPR law. CIS-A2K is conducting a Wiki internship project for students of New Law College, Pune under the guidance of Prof.Dr.Mukund Sarda, Dean and Principal of New Law College. In an Op-ed published in the Hindu, Sunil Abraham has stated that though biometrics may be appropriate for targeted surveillance by the state, it is wholly inappropriate for everyday transactions between state and law abiding citizens. CIS has published a survey that draws upon a range of literature including news articles, academic articles, and presentations and seeks to disaggregate the potential benefits and harms of big data, organising them into several broad categories that reflect the existing scholarly literature. CIS submitted comments on the Information Technology (Security of Prepaid Payment Instruments) Rules, 2017. The comments were in response to the Information Technology (Security of Prepaid Payment Instruments) Rules 2017. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a consultation paper which called for developing a framework for security of digital wallets operating in the country. Ritam Sengupta, Dr. Richard Heeks, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Dr. Christopher Foster have co-authored a paper that presents exploratory research into “data-intensive development” that seeks to inductively identify issues and conceptual frameworks of relevance to big data in developing countries.

CIS in the news:

The 12-digit conundrum (Richa Mishra; Hindu Businessline; March 13, 2017)
EVMs: How transparent is the Indian election process? (Smriti Sharma Vasudeva; The Statesman; March 14, 2017).
Nasscom chief saying full data protection isn’t possible should wake us from our digital slumber (First Post; March 16, 2017).
Privacy concerns multiply for Aadhaar, India’s national biometric identity registry (One World Identity; March 17, 2017).
No ID, no benefits: thousands could lose lifeline under India’s biometric scheme (Guardian; March 21, 2017).
Why We Should All Worry About The Mandatory Imposition Of Aadhaar (Rimin Dutt and Ivan Mehta; Huffington Post; March 24, 2017).
India’s biometric ID scans make sci-fi a reality (Amy Kazmin; Financial Times; March 27, 2017).
क्‍या आधार पर जल्दबाज़ी में है सरकार? (NDTV; March 27, 2017).
Get an Aadhaar card if you don't have one (Priya Nair and Sanjay Kumar Singh; Business Standard; March 27, 2017).
The Aadhaar of all things (Shriya Mohan; Hindu Businessline; March 31, 2017).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Digital native: Lie Me a River (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 19, 2017).
It’s the technology, stupid (Sunil Abraham; Hindu Businessline; March 31, 2017).
How Aadhaar compromises privacy? And how to fix it? (Sunil Abraham; Hindu; March 31, 2017).

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Accessibility & Inclusion
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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

Submission

Comments on the draft Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules (Nirmita Narasimhan; March 29, 2017).

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Access to Knowledge
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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Pervasive Technologies

Blog Entry

Intellectual Property Rights and Mobile Apps (Anubha Sinha; March 6, 2017).

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

"Marathi Bhasha Gaurav Din" celebrations in Maharashtra (Manasa Rao; March 7, 2017).
Women’s History Month: Sambad collaborates with Odia Wikipedia for a Two Day Edit-a-thon (Sailesh Patnaik; March 16, 2017).
Wikisource:Internship Project at New Law College, Pune (Subodh Kulkarni; March 28, 2017).

Events Organized

Women's Day Edit-a-thon (Co-organized by Sterlite Tech Foundation, Jnana Prabhodhini, and CIS-A2K; Pune; March 10, 2017). Subodh Kulkarni was one of the trainers.
Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Environment Management (Organized by CSIBER College and CIS-A2K; Kolhapur; March 30, 2017). Subodh Kulkarni was a trainer.

►Openness

Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Participation in Events

National Consultation on OER for Higher Education (Organized by Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia; New Delhi; March 3, 2017). Anubha Sinha attended the event.
Open Development Book - Authors' Workshop (Organized by International Development Research Centre and Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching; University of Cape Town, South Africa; March 11 - 12, 2017). The workshop gathered the contributers to an upcoming book by IDRC on open development. Elonnai Hickok, Gus Hosein from Privacy International and Sumandro Chattapadhyay are writing a chapter for this book.
Indo - French Perspectives on Digital Studies (Organized by Digital Studies Group; Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; March 15, 2017). Anubha Sinha was a speaker.

Blog Entries

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Internet Governance
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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

►Privacy

Submission

Comments on Information Technology (Security of Prepaid Payment Instruments) Rules, 2017 (Udbhav Tiwari, Pranesh Prakash, Abhay Rana, Amber Sinha and Sunil Abraham; March 23, 2017).

Participation in Events

WISER Lecture : Sumandro Chattapadhyay on Deregulation by Code (Organized by the University of the Witwatersrand; Johannesburg; March 8, 2017). Sumandro Chattapadhyay gave a talk.
Conference on Safety Against Online Child Sexual Abuse (Organized by CID, Telangana and the Department for Women Development and Child Welfare, Telangana; March 16 - 17, 2017). Japreet Grewal was a speaker.
State of Digital Rights in India (Organized by Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi and the Internet Freedom Foundation, in association with Access Now; India International Centre, New Delhi; March 24, 2017). Japreet Grewal and Sumandro Chattapadhyay took part in panel discussions.
Hangout on Technology and Jobs (Organized by Google; March 24, 2017). Vanya Rakesh was a speaker.

Blog Entry

Analysis of Key Provisions of the Aadhaar Act Regulations (Amber Sinha and edited by Elonnai Hickok; March 31, 2017).

►Cyber Security

Upcoming Event

Digital Forensics and Cyber Investigations (CIS; New Delhi; April 7, 2017). IPS officer Dr. Madan M. Oberoi will give a talk.

►Big Data

Blog Entry

Benefits, Harms, Rights and Regulation: A Survey of Literature on Big Data (Amber Sinha, Vanya Rakesh, Vidushi Marda and Geethanjali Jujjavarapu; edited by Sunil Abraham, Elonnai Hickok and Leilah Elmokadem; March 23, 2017).

Participation in Event

The Fintech Disruption - Innovation, Regulation, and Transformation (Organized by Carnegie India; March 28, 2017). Sumandro Chattapadhyay attended the event.

►Freedom of Expression

Event Organized

Essentials of building internet tools for inclusion (Valencia, Spain; March 6, 2017). A talk jointly proposed by Chinmayi SK and Rohini Lakshané was selected for the Internet Freedom Festival.

Participation in Events

From Virtual to Reliable: Exploring Freedom and Facts in the World of WWW (World Wide Web) (Organized by Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands and Adaan Foundation; March 21, 2017). Saikat Datta and Amber Sinha were panelists.
Internet Freedom Festival 2017 (Organized by IFF; Valencia, Spain; March 6 - 10, 2017). Vidushi Marda participated in the event. Vidushi also attended these sessions: Data Protection Law and its Different Manifestations; Using the Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index for Advocacy & Research; The identity we can't change: a new wave of biometric policies around the world and Enabling free speech online by legal defence: the need for skilled lawyers to secure the free flow of information online: Vidushi channeled a discussion about Shreya Singhal v. Union of India as an important case study in understanding how legal defence has been used to secure rights online.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Newspaper Column

Organisational Hurdles in Telecom (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; March 1, 2017 and Organizing India Blogspot; March 2, 2017)

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Research Paper

Exploring Big Data for Development: An Electricity Sector Case Study from India (Ritam Sengupta, Dr. Richard Heeks, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Dr. Christopher Foster; Global Development Institute, University of Manchester; March 29, 2017).

Blog Entry

Evaluating Safety Buttons on Mobile Devices: Preview (Rohini Lakshané and Chinmayi S.K.; March 27, 2017).

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2017-newsletter

WISER Lecture : Sumandro Chattapadhyay on Deregulation by Code

praskrishna — 2017-03-29T11:48:08Z

University of the Witwatersrand organized a talk by Sumandro Chattapadhyay on Derugulation by Code on March 8, 2017 in Johannesburg.

On November 08, 2017, the Government of India initiated a demonetisation process. It involved cancellation of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1,000 currency notes as legal tender, establishing of a time bound process for the notes to be returned to the banks, announcement of specific emergency services (such as hospitals and utilities) for which the canceled notes could still be used, and introduction of a new Rs. 2,000 note. While the purpose of the demonetisation move was publicly articulated in terms of removal of unaccounted wealth held in cash form, the state narrative quickly moved to being primarily focused on promotion of various forms of digital payments, especially mobile-based payments. The notion of a "WhatsApp moment" in Indian banking in particular, and in Asian banking in general, has been in circulation since 2015. Nandan Nilekani, a significant technocrat politician of India who has been CEO of Infosys (a major Indian IT company) and the Chairman of the UID/Aadhaar project, was one of the first persons to take note of this upcoming "revolution". In a lecture given by him on August 21, 2015, he described the technological and market forces, enabled by policy decision, that are going to disrupt the Indian banking landscape.

Sumandro's lecture discussed the linkages between this WhatsApp moment and the demonetisation move, and locate them in the context of institutional and technological changes happening in the Indian banking sector since 2008. The talk focused on the development and proliferation of the Unified Payments Interface - an universal, private-owned, government-backed, mobile-to-mobile payment infrastructure - as the key instrument through which the ongoing deregulation of banking in India is being driven.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/wiser-lecture-sumandro-chattapadhyay-on-deregulation-by-code

Internet Freedom Festival 2017

praskrishna — 2017-03-29T11:24:38Z

The Global Unconference of the Internet Freedom Communities took place at Valencia in Spain from March 6 to 10, 2017. The event was organized by the IFF. Vidushi Marda on behalf of CIS took part in the event.

Vidushi as part of her work with Working Group 1 (WG1) of the Freedom Online Coalition (FOC), organised a workshop along with Mallory Knodel from APC. This workshop was titled "Practical implementations of human rights respecting cybersecurity policy". Participants in the workshop were divided into groups to evaluate the recommendations developed by WG1 in light of existing cyber security policies from around the world. The recommendations can be found here and the accompanying narrative document can be found here.

The session ended up being productive - we received feedback from participants about the effectiveness of the recommendations, and also about aspects of these recommendations that needed revisiting/more work. A more detailed account of the session can be found at the Wiki page.

Vidushi also attended the following sessions:

Data Protection Law and its Different Manifestations
Using the Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index for Advocacy & Research
The identity we can't change: a new wave of biometric policies around the world
Enabling free speech online by legal defence: the need for skilled lawyers to secure the free flow of information online: Vidushi channeled a discussion about Shreya Singhal v. Union of India as an important case study in understanding how legal defence has been used to secure rights online. She specifically spoke about the distinction made in the judgment b/w communications on the internet vs. communications elsewhere.

For more info see here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/internet-freedom-festival-2017

CUSAT Workshop: "Rethinking IPR: Fourth Annual National Workshop for Law Students"

praskrishna — 2017-03-29T10:59:29Z

The workshop was organized by the Inter University Centre for IPR Studies in association with Cochin University of Science and Technology from February 8 to 10, 2017 in Cochin. Pranesh Prakash was the resource person for a copyright workshop for LL.M. students.

Pranesh led and guided student discussion on:

P2P File Sharing - Based on analysis of the Copyright Act I haven't yet written about.
Technological Protection Measures: http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/tpm-copyright-amendment
Benefits of Piracy: http://idl-bnc.idrc.ca/dspace/handle/10625/46491
Misrepresentations of copyright industry: http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/fallacies-lies-and-video-pirates + http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/calling-out-the-bsa-on-bs + http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/2010-special-301
John Doe orders: http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/john-doe-orders-isp-blocking-websites-copyright-1 (3-part series) + http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/delhi-high-court-orders-blocking-of-websites-after-sony-complains-infringement-of-2014-fifa-world-cup-telecast-rights

See the event brochure
See the programme agenda

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/rethinking-ipr-fourth-annual-national-workshop-for-law-students

Rethinking Intellectual Property Rights

praskrishna — 2017-03-29T10:50:44Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/files/rethinking-intellectual-property-rights

Google Hangout on Technology and Jobs

praskrishna — 2017-03-29T10:38:42Z

Vanya Rakesh was a speaker at a Google hangout discussion held on Friday, March 24th, 2017 on "Technology and Jobs" as part of a project that ICRIER is doing with World Bank headquarters and several institutions across the world, titled “Jobs for Development”.

Video

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/google-hangout-on-technology-and-jobs