Centre for Internet and Society

Rothko 2

praskrishna — 2014-03-28T10:55:44Z

Rothko 2

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Rothko 1

praskrishna — 2014-03-28T10:24:53Z

Rothko 1

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Role of the US Tech Companies in Government Surveillance: A Lecture by Christopher Soghoian

praskrishna — 2012-08-26T11:03:19Z

Christopher Soghoian will deliver a lecture on the role US tech companies play in assisting government surveillance at the Centre for Internet & Society office in Bangalore on August 27, 2012, from 5.00 p.m. to 7.00 p.m.

Your internet, phone and web application providers are all, for the most part, in bed with US and other foreign government agencies. They all routinely disclose their customers' communications and other private data to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Worse, firms like Google and Microsoft specifically log data in order to assist the government. How many government requests does your ISP get for its customers' communications each year? How many do they comply with? How many do they fight? How much do they charge for the surveillance assistance they provide? Who knows? Most companies have a strict policy of not discussing such topics.

The differences in the privacy practices of the major players in the telecommunications and internet applications market are significant. Some firms retain identifying data for years, while others retain no data at all; some voluntarily provide the government access to user data, while other companies refuse to voluntarily disclose data without a court order; some companies charge government agencies when they request user data, while others disclose it for free. For an individual, later investigated by the police or intelligence services, the data retention practices adopted by their phone company or email provider can significantly impact their freedom.

Unfortunately, although many companies claim to care about end-user privacy, and some even that they compete on their privacy features, none seem to be willing to compete on the extent to which they assist or resist the government in its surveillance activities. Because information about each firms' practices is not publicly known, consumers cannot vote with their wallets, and pick service providers that best protect their privacy.

This talk will pierce the veil of secrecy surrounding these practices. Based upon a combination of Freedom of Information Act requests, off the record conversations with industry lawyers, and investigative journalism, the practices of many of these firms will be revealed.

Christopher's Personal Experience

In the year 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided Christopher’s home at 2.00 a.m. seizing his personal documents and computers. Two attorneys, Stephen Braga and Jennifer Granick came to his defence. With their expert assistance, Christopher was able to get back his possessions within three weeks, and FBI’s criminal and TSA’s civil investigations were closed without any charges being filed.

Jennifer Granick came to Christopher’s assistance once again (joined by Steve Leckar) in 2010 after the Federal Trade Commission’s Inspector General investigated Christopher for using his government badge to attend a closed-door surveillance industry conference. It was at that event that Christopher recorded an executive from wireless carrier ‘Sprint’ bragging about the eight million times his company had obtained GPS data on its customers for law enforcement agencies in the previous years.

To know more, read Christopher Soghoian’s dissertation titled "The Spies We Trust: Third Party Service Providers and Law Enforcement Surveillance". [PDF, 1056 Kb]

About Christopher Soghoian

Christopher Soghoian is a privacy researcher and activist, working at the intersection of technology, law and policy. He is a Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union and is based in Washington, D.C.

Soghoian completed his Ph.D. at Indiana University in 2012, which focused on the role that third party service providers play in facilitating law enforcement surveillance of their customers. In order to gather data, he has made extensive use of the Freedom of Information Act, sued the Department of Justice pro se, and used several other investigative research methods. His research has appeared in publications including the Berkeley Technology Law Journal and been cited by several federal courts, including the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Between the years, 2009-2010, he was the first ever in-house technologist at the Federal Trade Commission's Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, where he worked on investigations of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Netflix. Prior to joining the FTC, he co-created the Do Not Track privacy anti-tracking mechanism now adopted by all of the major web browsers.

He is a TEDGlobal 2012 Fellow, was an Open Society Foundations Fellow between the years, 2011-2012, and was a Student Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University between 2008 and 2009.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/role-of-us-tech-companies-in-govt-surveillance

Role of the Internet in Fostering Freedom of Expression and Strengthening Activism in India - A Workshop in Delhi

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T07:18:10Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (India) and the Central American Institute for Studies of Social Democracy DEMOS (Guatemala) have the pleasure to invite you to a day-long workshop on the role of the Internet in fostering freedom of expression and strengthening activism in India. The workshop will take place in the Constitution Club in Delhi on 4 March 2011.

With the significant role reported for new technologies in recent revolutions in Tunesia, Egypt, and elsewhere, activists in India, too, have taken a renewed interest in the potential of the Internet to support their struggles for social change and social justice. But what are some of the potential stumble blocks activists in India might run into in their exploration of the Internet's potential? What are the legal restrictions and frameworks activists should be aware of when they use new technologies in their work? And what can we do to create an environment in which the online world unequivocally supports efforts for greater democratisation and social justice offline, rather than thwart them?

It is questions such as these that this workshop seeks to answer, through a mix of panel discussions, unconference sessions, a film screening, and technical and legal clinics in its day-long program.

Our hope is that the workshop will help participants as well as organisers to get a stronger sense of the potential and challenges of online activism in the particular context of India, as well as to start building stronger networks among the activists interested in these issues in the country.

Participation in the workshop is free. However, we would be grateful if you could confirm your attendance by emailing Anja Kovacs at "anja at cisindia dot org", ideally by 2 March.

We hope you will join us to contribute your own insights and experiences as well as to learn from others about this important new arena of activists' work.

Looking forward to welcoming you at the workshop!

The Agenda

9.30-9.45: Welcome and introductions

9.45-10.15:   Introduction to the Internet and freedom of expression
   By Frank La Rue, President of the Central American Institute for Studies of Social Democracy
   and UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression and Opinion

10.15-10.45: Film screening: “Brave New Medium”
   By Delhi-based docu film maker Subasri Krishnan
   The film addresses Internet and censorship in South-East Asia
   while raising pertinent questions about the implications of this lessons for Indian activists,
   and will be screened in the presence of the filmmaker.

10.45-11.30: Unconference: Online challenges and ways forward for Indian activists:
where are we today and what to do next?
Small group discussion sessions, as per the priorities of the participants

11.30-11.50: Tea/Coffee Break

11.50-12.40: Reporting back and plenary discussion: Challenges for freedom of expression on
the Internet in India and abroad: legal framework, ground realities, alternative visions
With national and international activists, lawyers and researchers as additional resource persons

12.40-13.00: Consultation: Can a global “Internet Bill of Rights” help?
With Lisa Horner, Dynamic Coalition on Internet Rights and Principles of the UN Internet
Governance Forum

13.00 - 14.00: Lunch Break (lunch will be provided)

14.00 - 15.30: Parallel sessions:

legal clinic with a representative from Google and human rights lawyers – to answer any legal question regarding freedom of expression online you may have
technical clinic with a representative from Tactical Tech – to explore the significance of terms like
“Tor” and “proxy” and ways in which you can stay safe and secure online at all times.
If you have a laptop, bring it if you intend to attend this session!

15.30 - 16.15: Strategies for the way forward

Moderated by Mr Frank La Rue

16.15-16.30 : Closing remarks

16.30 - 17.00: Tea/Coffee

Followed by a public lecture by Mr. Frank La Rue at 6 pm, at the same venue, on Global Challenges to Freedom of Expression. Entrance free. All welcome.

Information about the Organisers

The Centre for Internet and Society

The Centre for Internet and Society is located in Bangalore, India. It critically engages with concerns of digital pluralism and public accountability in the field of Internet and Society, with particular emphasis on South-South dialogues and exchange. Through multidisciplinary research, intervention, and collaboration, it seeks to explore, understand, and affect the shape and form of the internet, and its relationship with the political, cultural, and social milieu of our times.

DEMOS Institute

The Demos Institute, based in Guatemala, is a research centre that promotes democratic alternatives for Guatemala, under the human rights framework. Within DEMOS, there is a research team which supports the mandate of Frank La Rue, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, in the making of his annual reports before the United Nations Human Rights Council.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/fostering-freedom-of-expression

Rohini training

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T15:15:12Z

Rohini training

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Rohinitraininggroupondigitalsecurity.JPG

Rohini Nilekani

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T05:13:19Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/DP6.jpg

Rohini

praskrishna — 2014-07-16T07:28:34Z

Rohini Lakshane

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Rohini

praskrishna — 2014-08-12T10:18:25Z

Rohini

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Road test

praskrishna — 2013-07-03T05:15:09Z

Road test

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Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security and Privacy

praskrishna — 2014-11-14T01:24:58Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/risky-business.odp

Rising Voices Seeks Micro-Grant Proposals for Citizen Media Outreach

praskrishna — 2011-08-04T10:36:50Z

Rising Voices is seeking project proposals from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or individuals for funding of up to $4,000 USD for digital media outreach projects around the world. Application Deadline: Friday, February 4, 2011 at 11:59 PM GMT.

It has been more than three years since Rising Voices began with a simple mandate: to help bring new voices from underrepresented communities to the global conversation through the use of citizen media. We have been accomplishing that by providing microgrant funding, as well as technical and mentoring support to our grantee communities. Ever since the first microgrant competition was announced in May 2007, we have provided seed funding to 24 projects from around the world to help turn their ideas into reality. The diversity of these grantee projects has made Rising Voices a unique place on the web to have a firsthand look at places around the world, such as Tamatave, Madagascar and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, through the first-person accounts of these new bloggers.

Beginning on January 11th, 2011, Rising Voices is launching the latest round of microgrant funding and is now accepting project proposals from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or individuals for funding of up to $4,000 USD for digital media outreach projects around the world. Ideal applicants will present innovative and detailed proposals to teach citizen media techniques to underrepresented communities that are poorly positioned to discover and take advantage of tools like blogging, video-blogging, or podcasting on their own.

Who is Eligible to Apply

This funding opportunity is open to both NGOs and private individuals. However, if an NGO does not have experienced citizen media trainers on their staff, it is extremely important that they seek collaboration with the local blogging community to find the right trainer(s) with the necessary skills. On the other hand, it would also be highly beneficial for individual applicants to partner with an existing NGO from the communities they plan to serve in order to strengthen the project's impact.

What Kind of Projects May be Funded

Rising Voices seeks project proposals that share our mission of bringing voices from new communities, as well as underrepresented language groups to the online global conversation through the use of citizen media. The projects' primary activities should be to provide citizen media training workshops to the target community, as well as ongoing support and mentoring to the participants. Please see our roster of current and alumni grantee projects for examples of previously funded projects.

Examples of potential projects include:

Distributing flip video cameras to local residents to help map and document environmental issues affecting the area and to propose solutions.
Partnering with a local library with a computer lab to train youth how to record and document the history of their local neighborhood by using mp3 recorders to interview local elders.
Organizing blogging workshop for local artisans to help them market their work online, but also tell the story and history of their handicrafts.
Distributing $10 digital cameras to two different groups in different neighborhoods and create a Flickr group where they interact with each other's photographic perspectives of their city.

Application Process

Interested applicants should complete the online proposal application form (link here), which should also include a detailed budget. If you would like to download the application questions to complete offline in order to upload later, please download the text document here (PDF format). While we welcome and encourage projects from all corners of the global, all applications must be completed in English.

Online Application Form

Rising Voices outreach grants will range from $2,000-4,000 USD. Please be as thoughtful, specific, and realistic as possible when drafting your budgets. Applicants are encouraged to submit budgets for less than the maximum $4,000 USD as smaller grants allow us to fund more projects.

The application deadline is February 4th, 2011 at 11:59 PM GMT. All applicants will receive a confirmation email indicating that we have received your proposal. The proposals will be reviewed by a committee of Global Voices staff and volunteers, as well as members of previous Rising Voices grantees. We will announce the grant recipients by February 28, 2011.

Expectations of Successful Grantees

Successful projects will be prominently featured on the Global Voices networks. Grantees will be required to sign a grant agreement, which will outline accounting, reporting, and other terms and conditions regarding how funds will be distributed. Grantees will also be required to post regular project updates to the Rising Voices website, be in regular communication with Rising Voices staff, as well as actively participate in the Rising Voices community.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments section below or by sending an email to eddie [at] globalvoicesonline [dot] org.

This post is also available in:

Malagasy

Português

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/proposals-for-citizen-media-outreach

Rise of the bot: all you need to know about the latest threat online

praskrishna — 2014-01-31T07:16:36Z

In the last week of December, 2013, former union railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal lodged a police complaint in Chandigarh after witnessing “an unusual rise in his online fan following”. The former minister told the police that his Facebook page had received more than 10,000 likes, within a span of 24 hours. While his allegation that the ‘likes’ were “fabricated” may be true, information technology experts believe a bot was at work.

The article by Danish Raza was published in the Hindustan Times on January 5, 2014. Snehashish Ghosh is quoted.

A bot is a software that mimics human behaviour on the Internet. Bots can be used to create artificial accounts on social media, provide numerous likes on a particular page, send tweets or visit various websites. All this is done without any human involvement.

Bots already constitute a significant percentage of Non Human Traffic (NHT) online, which has, according to some estimates, eclipsed human traffic. Comscore, a US-based Internet technology company noted on its blog that NHT, also known as Artificial Traffic, increased from approximately 6% of the total web traffic in 2011, to 36% in 2012. Last month, a report from Incapsula, a cloud-based security service, which aids the security and performance of websites, stated that more than 60% of web traffic was non-human in 2013. The figure was based on data collected from the 20,000 sites on Incapsula’s network .

Other than bots, NHT on the web includes traffic generated by Internet routers and back end services used by websites to communicate with third parties.

India is not immune to the problem. According to the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report for 2012, there was a 280% increase in bot infections in India between 2011 and 2012. 17% of bot-infected computers, the highest in the world, are in India and 15% of global bot-net spam is generated here. The report also states that 69 Indian cities are prone to bot infections which includes Bhubaneswar, Surat, Cochin, Jaipur, Visakhapatnam, Indore, Kota, Ghaziabad and Mysore.

Bot spotting
How do you spot a bot? When a bot or its friend is at work, the browser directs you to sites other than the ones you intend to visit, you get full-page pop ups and pop unders, and when you quit the browser, it gets relaunched after a few minutes. Chances are your computer is part of a chain of online events which create NHT on the web, the purpose of which may be to attack a site or a server.

Why you should be wary
Malicious traffic, malware, hacking attempts, viruses slow down the Internet and delay legitimate traffic and services. Used to target systems or take down websites, NHT generates fake clicks on advertisements to increase website statistics.

One of the perils of ignoring artificial web traffic is that it gets counted for real impressions for which clients end up paying. For example, a website owner may hire the services of a digital marketing firm to publicise the site. In the guise of increasing page views, the marketing firm can produce a bill for fake impressions, supplementing actual human traffic to the page with bot usage.

“Unless there is a curb on this practice of malicious NHT, one stands at risk of being duped by marketers, agencies and even clients,” said Chiragh Cherian, director, online PR at Perfect Relations, a brand management firm. Recent studies have estimated bot traffic to be between 4 - 31% of total web traffic in the US, which translates to between $650 million and $4.7 billion in wasted marketing spend. According to Miaozhen Systems, a leading Chinese advertising technology company, NHT caused advertisers in China to lose approximately US$ 1.6 billion between July 2012 and June 2013.

How to combat Non-Human Traffic
Most servers have defence mechanisms to tackle spam and cyber attacks. Websites are also now developing mechanisms such as asking for human authentication which is difficult for a bot to execute. “But even personal computers should be equipped with strong Internet security applications such as anti-virus and anti-spyware to prevent hacking and phishing attempts and to prevent being used as slave machines for distributed cyber attacks,” said Chintu Cherian Abraham, a digital media professional. Figures show that we need to watch out where and how we go online. According to Norton Report, 2013, 61% Indians access their social network accounts from unsecured wi-fi connections, while 42% access bank accounts and 44% shop online using unsecured wi-fi connections.

Social media companies are gradually devising mechanisms to filter bots. “When a page and a fan connect on Facebook, we want to ensure that connection involves a real person interested in hearing from a specific page and engaging with that brand’s content. As such, we have recently increased our automated efforts to remove Likes on Pages that may have been gained by means that violate our terms,” mentions Facebook’s site integrity policy.

Agency-client intervention is necessary to ensure that artificial traffic is not presented as real. “It’s also important to make all agencies, advertisers and clients aware of their responsibility to keep the Internet free from malicious NHT,” said Chiragh Cherian.

Government involvement is also needed to control the problem of malicious bots. “A lot needs to be done from the government’s side to tackle bots which can be used to target the country’s critical infrastructure such as banking websites,” said Jiten Jain, a cyber security analyst, adding, “Last year, I highlighted the flaws in HDFC’s net banking website which have been rectified now. They could have been exploited to block the net-banking service.”

Until we have a robust mechanism to filter out bogus traffic from real, it will be difficult to say whether the social media followers of Bansal and other public figures are human or not.

Know your Bots
Not all bots are used with a negative intent. Some help in research and monitoring.

The Malicious
Bots can be effectively used to impersonate and to hack accounts leading to financial losses and intellectual property theft. “Theft of personal details, username and password to operate one’s bank account is a classic example of how bots can lead to financial losses. It is an organised cyber crime,” explained Commander (Retd) Mukesh Saini, former national information security coordinator, Government of India. In May 2013, cyber criminals broke into the Mumbai-based account of the RPG group and siphoned off `2.4 crore. Three people were arrested in the case.

“The rate at which NHT is increasing is alarming,” says Tinu Cherian Abraham. “Any computer connected to the Internet is vulnerable to such attacks. The user will not get to know about it unless he or she has installed an Internet security application.”

Besides bots, computers also generate other kinds of secondary activities, while the user is surfing the Internet. This activity remains in the background and is never seen by the user, unlike the bot-generated pop ups, observes Comscore. For example, your computer might be being used as a channel to reach a server with the intention of hacking it. And you will never know.

The Good
Not all NHT is bad, though. In fact, good bots such as scrapers can be effectively used to conduct research. “Wikipedia can be scraped to investigate the frequency of edits on a Wikipedia page and track the increase in the number of editors,” explained Snehashish Ghosh, policy associate at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society.

Good bots are also used by search engines to track content on websites and enhance their search results. Search bots and other good bots formed 31% of total bots, the Incapsula report noted.

The Social
Apart from malicious and good bots, there are social media bots too. “Extensive analysis is done on social media traffic for monitoring, business lead generation, as well as reputation management. This has amounted to a lot of automated or non-human traffic,” said Abraham.

According to Facebook’s filings published in a Forbes report in February 2012, around 83 million of its users are bogus. “It’s a violation of our policies to use a fake name or operate under a false identity, and we encourage people to report any user they suspect of doing this, either through the report links we provide on the site or through the contact forms in our help centre,” a Facebook spokesperson told HT.

Twitter bots have also made its presence felt on the platform. “Twitter has witnessed very interesting bots which have found appreciation from the community for being funny and creative. The microblogging site cracked down on some harmful bots, but still some of the advanced level bots slip through the net,” said Ghosh.

In August 2012, London-based firm Digital Evaluators, which evaluates social media presence of worldwide companies, released an analysis of Twitter followers of the US Presidential Election candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. 21.9% of Barack Obama’s 17.82 million Twitter followers were found to be bogus.

The Big Brother
Ghosh said that the increase in NHT related to the Internet of things, the concept which enables communication between two or more devices, results in privacy issues. “Take a situation where your mobile device is constantly tracking your location for the purpose of switching on the air conditioner at your home before you reach. Such applications produce huge amounts of personal data and there is no clarity whether this data is being stored,” he said.

“As the new networks link data from products, company assets, or the operating environment, they will generate better information and analysis, which can enhance decision making significantly. Some organisations are starting to deploy these applications in targeted areas, while more radical and demanding uses are still in the conceptual or experimental stages,” noted a McKinsey & Company report on Internet of things.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/hindustan-times-january-5-2014-danish-raza-rise-of-the-bot

RIP: Rahul Cherian, human rights activist, Inclusive Planet co-founder

praskrishna — 2013-03-09T07:13:41Z

RIPRahul Cherian, an expert and policy activist in disability law, intellectual property (IP) law and technology law passed away today at the age of 39, while on a family holiday in Goa.

The blog post was published in Legally India on February 7, 2013

The 1998 NLSIU Bangalore graduate is understood to have succumbed to an infection after several days in intensive care.

Together with fellow NLSIU alumnus Sachin Malhan, Cherian had co-founded Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability and Policy in October 2009, as a non-governmental organisation supporting stakeholders and public bodies about laws and policies affecting persons with disabilities.

As head of policy initiatives at Inclusive Planet, he was involved in drafting the Treaty for the Visually Impaired currently being agreed upon by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in Geneva, aiming to make copyrighted, printed materials more easily available to the visually impaired and others with print disabilities.

Cherian was also a fellow at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a legal expert on the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment’s panel on disability laws, and an advisor to a plethora of government initiatives related to the disability sector.

He was also a partner at IndoJuris Law Offices in Chennai, having acted as managing partner of the firm between 2003 and 2008.

Cherian is survived by his wife Anjana, his parents and his brother and sister.

According to Cherian’s colleague Amba Salelkar, a remembrance meeting will be held on Sunday at 11.00 am at Vidya Sagar, No.1, Ranjith Road, Kotturpuram, Chennai.

Reactions:

@mumbaicentral, who worked with Cherian at Inclusive Planet, tweeted: “He was in Goa for the weekend and he was hospitalized with high grade fever, diagnosed as septicemia. Rahul took the foremost steps to recognition of the rights of this disabled in Indian Policy and legislation. Latest achievement being framing the recommendations on access for the disabled to the Justice Verma Committee. Which have been incorporated in the ordinance too. He will also be remembered for his efforts in amending the copyright act to gain the "right to read" for persons with disabilities.

@latelyontime: “Rahul Cherian, colleague, fellow-writer and role model, inspiration. You shall be missed.”

@juditrius: “Rahul Cherian, disability activist, co-founder of Inclusive Planet & exceptional human being just passed away. He will be very much missed.”

@DaHammerstein: “Premature death of Rahul Cherian, Indian dir. Inclusive Planet , fighter for digital, disability rights, loss for human rights community.”

@SivaThambisetty: “A very dear friend died today. Rahul Cherian @inclusive planet, clever incorrigible #Disability rts in #India have lost a campaign leader.”

@sauravdatta29 tweeted: “Rahul Cherian, one of those lawyers with an abiding commitment to social justice.”

@mtonykurian: “this awesome article by rahul cherian of #disability and #sexuality http://t.co/9S5SeSFc" [Indian Express] and “i lost a mentor, disabled of india lost an expert. sad.”

@chaosbogey: “I met Rahul Cherian maybe five times? but I was a little more in love with him each time...”

@sunilchandy: “Rahul Cherian, a music nut, an enabler, an encourager, a great guy :(“

RIM Offered Security Fixes

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:24:12Z

In India Talks, BlackBerry Maker Said It Could Share Metadata, Notes Show

Research In Motion Ltd. has offered information and tools to help India conduct surveillance of wireless email and messaging services on RIM's popular BlackBerry, say people familiar with the negotiations, illuminating RIM's dealings as it seeks to balance sovereign security concerns with its customers' privacy.

In a series of discussions that intensified this summer, RIM offered to provide crucial information that would help the Indian government track down messages sent via the company's popular and encrypted corporate email service, according to those familiar with the confidential talks and to minutes of meetings reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

In a July 26 meeting, RIM representatives told Indian officials "they have a setup to help the security agencies in tracking the messages in which security agencies are interested," according to an Indian government summary of the meeting.

The Waterloo, Ontario, company has become an industry leader in part on the strength of a secure technology that offers information privacy to customers. But as RIM seeks to expand, it is grappling with how its promise of user confidentiality is encountering resistance from governments around the globe.

RIM's challenge, along with Google Inc.'s face-off with China over censorship issues, illustrates the growing tensions between Western technology giants, who seek to woo millions of emerging-market consumers with increasingly sophisticated technology, and governments that are trying to maintain security in the face of it.

The stakes are high in India, the world's No. 2 wireless market, behind China, with 635 million subscribers. Emerging economies are vital to RIM as its smartphones face competition in North America from Apple Inc.'s iPhone and devices that run on Google's Android software. RIM's new international subscribers for the first time outnumbered new North American subscribers in the quarter that ended Feb. 27, according to brokerage GMP Securities.

Discussions between RIM and India took a public turn Thursday when India's government threatened to block some BlackBerry services from the country's telecommunications networks unless the services could be opened to surveillance by Aug. 31. On Friday, an Indian government official said RIM had assured India it would meet the deadline.

A spokesman for RIM in India declined to comment on negotiations with India. Sachin Pilot, India's Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology said Friday there are promising signs that the company is willing to cooperate, but there's no deal "until I have something in writing."

RIM has come under scrutiny in recent months amid contentious negotiations with countries including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which have also sought to monitor BlackBerry services for threats to national security.

A person familiar with the negotiations in the U.A.E. said officials in the region believed RIM had been holding back from them technological solutions that had been offered to Western governments, specifically in regards to BlackBerry Messenger.

RIM declines to discuss its negotiations with governments and didn't comment on negotiations in India and other countries.

In a statement issued Thursday, RIM outlined its guidelines for how far it is willing to go in helping carriers meet surveillance needs. RIM said it will only help carriers meet strict national-security rules, won't provide more access than its competitors already do and won't alter the security architecture of its corporate email servers in response to government needs.

"RIM maintains a consistent global standard for lawful access requirements that does not include special deals for specific countries," the statement said.

Governments are pressuring RIM to comply with their demands for information in part because unlike other smartphone vendors, it operates its own network of servers, the biggest of which is in Canada, outside their monitoring reach and jurisdiction.

That contrasts with devices such as the iPhone, which don't operate their own email services. Governments generally have laws that allow them to monitor traffic on mobile and computer networks operating within their own countries.

Talks between RIM and various countries have centered mostly on data routed through the company's system for corporate emails, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and its instant-messaging service, BlackBerry Messenger, whose high levels of encryption can prevent government monitors from deciphering content or determining sender or recipient. RIM has said that even it can't decrypt BlackBerry corporate emails.

India's security services argue they need access to selected emails to ward off criminal and terrorist threats. "In terms of our issues of national security, any responsible government would not want to compromise," said Mr. Pilot, the communications minister. "I don't think what we are asking is out of the ordinary vis-à-vis other countries."

Security and technology experts say each country has different surveillance needs, technology infrastructures and laws governing how security forces and police can access data. It is generally Internet service providers and telecommunications carriers that must implement the country's monitoring regime, and the kinds of help RIM gives carriers in doing that varies with each nation, says a person familiar with RIM's operations.

According to minutes taken by the Indian side, the parties discussed whether RIM could provide "metadata" from encrypted corporate emails—information such as the email's sender and recipient and the time sent. "After some persuasion, the [RIM] representative agreed that they can provide the metadata of the message," according to an Indian summary of one discussion.

Cyber-security experts say such metadata would give government intelligence services important leads to locate BlackBerry traffic on corporate email servers, where messages are in decrypted form. It wasn't clear under what circumstances RIM would agree to divulge such information.

In the meetings, RIM also promised to develop tools to help Indian authorities tap into third-party Internet chat services, such as Google's Gmail, that run on its handsets, according to the meeting minutes. It isn't clear whether or how RIM has proposed to help security officials decode BlackBerry Messenger.

RIM also appears to have put itself in a role of educating Indian officials over the operation of its network and on network security in general, suggesting to officials that emails that aren't subject to heavy corporate encryption can be viewed with assistance from local carriers.

Governments that have been reviewing their data-access arrangements with RIM have been sharing information with each other, said an official in the region with knowledge of the Indian negotiations.

The U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, the Middle East's largest economies, upped their ante with RIM weeks before India did. Both countries have been negotiating with RIM for the same kinds of access to data that India wants, but people familiar with talks in the Gulf countries say they have been acrimonious.

Government officials say RIM has taken a condescending attitude to developing countries' security demands, and say they believe the company was holding out on solutions to access information, such as on BlackBerry Messenger, that had been offered to other countries.

"They refuse to listen to us," said a person familiar with the negotiations. "It's like we aren't speaking the same language."

Anger boiled over last month with the U.A.E. announcing a ban on BlackBerry email, Internet and instant-messaging services from Oct. 11, citing a lack of progress in more than three years of negotiations. Saudi Arabia followed with a threatened ban on BlackBerry Messenger.

Tensions were fueled when RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis said in an interview earlier this month with The Wall Street Journal that many of the nations the company deals with aren't tech-savvy and don't understand the Internet. "We work with these countries to educate them," he said.

Negotiations between the U.A.E. and RIM are ongoing. The government says it remains optimistic of a solution. In Saudi Arabia, telecommunications regulators announced earlier this week that RIM had offered them a technical fix that would let them access data from BlackBerry Messenger.

In RIM's home country of Canada, the U.S. and other countries, police and security agents typically must get a court order to gain access to things like the content of emails.

India's regulations in this area are murky. An 1885 law that has been updated over the years allows the government to intercept Internet traffic "on the occurrence of any public emergency." A 2008 law gives bureaucrats in various agencies the authority to order monitoring of any entity's Web traffic, though the matter can be challenged in court.

It remains unclear whether RIM's promise to provide metadata to corporate messages will be enough to satisfy India's concerns. A more drastic solution, says Sunil Abraham of the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society, would be for the government to require RIM to build a BlackBerry data center within India—something that could cost tens of millions of dollars, people familiar with the matter say—and then classify the company as an Indian Internet service provider.

Such a move would put India on stronger legal footing, analysts say, to demand data from RIM as well as companies whose employees use BlackBerrys. Under such a scenario, "the government would be allowed to get a room inside RIM and install whatever machines they want to monitor that traffic," Mr. Abraham said.

It wasn't clear from the government documents summarizing the meetings between RIM and the government whether such an option is being considered. The company would vehemently oppose such a classification, people familiar with the situation say. In the U.A.E, RIM has balked at the government's request that it set up a local data center, people familiar with those negotiations said.

Read the original in Wall Street Journal

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/rim-offered-security-fixes

RightsCon Silicon Valley 2016

praskrishna — 2016-04-06T15:10:21Z

RightsCon is the world’s leading event convened around the issues of the internet and human rights. The annual conference convenes business leaders, visionaries, technologists, legal experts, civil society members, activists, and government representatives from across the globe on issues at the intersection of tech and human rights. The event was organized by RightsCon.

Program

This year, we had three days ofprogrammingplus a day of satellite events (Day Zero satellite events + three full days of main programming), tackling some of today’s most challenging business and policy issues: freedom of expression, online harassment and countering violent extremism, privacy and digital security, encryption, network discrimination and connectivity, human rights, trade and business, transparency reporting, digital inclusion, internet governance, and much more. Click here to see our program schedule.

With 250+ sessions and over 1,000 registered participants, RightsCon 2016 provided unparalleled opportunities to engage with leading speakers and organizations, both in sessions and through private meetings and discussions. It was also home to an array of parties, movie screenings, and social events throughout the week to help participants meet others in the space.

Elonnai Hickok participated in the following panels and meetings at RightsCon held at Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, California from March 30 to April 1, 2016:

1. Beyond CSR: Promoting Strong Human Rights Performance - Centre for Law and Democracy
2. Ranking ICT Companies on Digital Rights; A How to Guide - Ranking Digital Rights
3. Who is an Intermediary? Harmonizing Definitions? - CIS
4. Manila Principles: One Year Later - CIS and EFF
5. Cross Border Data Requests - American University Washington College of Law, University of Kentucky College of Law.
6. Closed door meeting for Ranking Digital Rights
7. GNI meeting on Mutual Legal Assistance

More info on the RightsCon website

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/rightscon-silicon-valley-2016

Centre for Internet and Society

Rothko 2

Rothko 1

Role of the US Tech Companies in Government Surveillance: A Lecture by Christopher Soghoian

Christopher's Personal Experience

About Christopher Soghoian

Role of the Internet in Fostering Freedom of Expression and Strengthening Activism in India - A Workshop in Delhi

The Agenda

Information about the Organisers

Rohini training

Rohini Nilekani

Rohini

Rohini

Road test

Risky Business: Transparency, Technology, Security and Privacy

Rising Voices Seeks Micro-Grant Proposals for Citizen Media Outreach

Who is Eligible to Apply

What Kind of Projects May be Funded

Application Process

Expectations of Successful Grantees

Rise of the bot: all you need to know about the latest threat online

RIP: Rahul Cherian, human rights activist, Inclusive Planet co-founder

Further reading:

RIM Offered Security Fixes

RightsCon Silicon Valley 2016

Program