Centre for Internet and Society

Inclusive Planet

praskrishna — 2013-06-03T07:46:42Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/inclusive-planet

Inclusive Planet

praskrishna — 2013-09-23T07:40:58Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/inclusive-planet.pdf

Inclusive Higher Education

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T06:01:52Z

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

Inclusive Financial Services

praskrishna — 2015-05-03T01:55:21Z

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

Inclusive Disaster and Emergency Management for Persons with Disabilities

praskrishna — 2013-10-04T06:55:59Z

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

Inaugural EPT Award for Open Access

praskrishna — 2011-12-31T10:46:47Z

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

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

establishing OA institutional repositories;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Electronic Publishing Trust for Development

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

What is Open Access?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inaugural EPT Award for Dr. Francis Jayakanth

praskrishna — 2012-02-27T12:24:25Z

Programme

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

Video

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

Inamdar

praskrishna — 2012-02-06T03:58:17Z

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

In Tulu, India's 23rd Regional Wikipedia Goes Live

praskrishna — 2016-08-08T01:27:58Z

In a major boost to ancient Indian languages, Tulu wikipedia has finally gone live.

The article by Naina Chaturvedi was published in Huffington Post on August 7, 2016. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja was quoted.

According to a report in The Hindu, eight years after its launch, Tulu Wikipedia has gone live with over 1,000 articles.

The announcement was made by Katherine Maher, executive director, Wikimedia Foundation, USA, at the Wikiconference India 2016, India's second national Wikipedia meet in half a decade, held in Chandigarh on Friday.

"There are about 200 registered users (editors), out of which around 100 have more than 10 edits. On an average, there are about 8 to 10 active editors," Dr. U.B. Pavanaja from the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru, and one of the mentors of Tulu Wikipedia, told The Hindu.

He further added that, "Vishwanatha Badikana, a Kannada professor, followed by Bharatesha Alasandemajalu, an engineer, are the highest contributors."

The language is spoken by around two million native speakers, mainly in southwest Karnataka and in Kasaragod district, Kerala, The Indian Express reported.

Pavanaja, further explained how this achievement would help create pressure on the government to include Tulu in the Eighth Schedule of Indian Constitution.

"After we became live, we will import articles from the 'incubator' site, build the 'village pump', set up policies, administration structure, info boxes and templates,"IANS quoted Pavanaja saying.

Wikipedia which is available in 22 Indian languages include, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Newari, Odia, Pali, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, now, including Tulu making the count 23.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/huffington-post-august-7-2016-naina-chaturvedi-in-tulu-indias-23-regional-wikipedia-goes-live

In the Right Circle

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T07:40:57Z

I’ve been on Google Plus for a few weeks now. In the beginning, it felt like showing up early at a much-talked-up party. There was a small scatter of people, poking around, examining the place, making preliminary conversation with the few others they knew. Most of the talk was, unsurprisingly, about Google Plus.

Unlike the crash-bang disaster of Google Buzz, its awkward attempt at social networking that alienated most users by publicly exposing their contact list, and then proceeded from error to error, Google Plus has been a low-key, careful affair.

In the first two weeks, Google calibrated entry, depending on its capacity — letting early adopters and "power users" examine the platform and tell them what’s missing, and what works.

Google Plus mimics the real world, where people interact in clusters, and relate outwards in concentric circles of trust, rather than Facebook’s megaphone model. You drag and drop people into different circles, and can either mark individual posts to specific circles and combinations (‘family’ ‘college buddies’, ‘artsy types’), or make them public to everyone. You can catch up on these circles separately, and toggle between your many worlds, or choose to read the great river of updates on your “public" stream. Google Plus shows you a civilised way of arranging your acquaintances, avoiding that playground-level, plaintive, Facebook question: "why am I in your limited profile?"

In concept, Facebook also lets you slice your social world with friend lists, but it’s a tedious labour that few have undertaken. Design is everything — and Facebook was clearly not built for such fine-grained customisation, because everything about its default settings pointed the other way. In fact, its young CEO Mark Zuckerberg seemed to think an attachment to privacy was some faintly embarrassing, vestigial trait — the sooner we accept its obsolescence, the better.

Facebook has a remarkably flat view of friendship. If your Facebook friends are too wide and various, it can make you clam up, conscious of what a few people might think. Most people, as social media scholar danah boyd has noted, tend to focus on a part of their network, mentally blocking out the rest.

"I’d like to have separate interactions with my mother, my friends, my students and my university colleagues without bombarding my colleagues with my vacation pictures or boring my mother with research chatter," says Mallesh Pai, an academic who works on the economics of the internet. "Plus actually lets me do that."

Facebook works with the fiction that there is a single self you present to the world – while, in fact, you are a posse of selves. You might be the naïve seeker in some contexts, the voice of authority in others. In the real world, you read others by their voice and expression, factor in their situations, and modulate your own speech accordingly. But in Facebookland, you talk at an invisible audience. The problem of “collapsed contexts”, and the anxiety of audience is Facebook’s most obvious flaw, and Google Plus has focused squarely on that aspect. It obviously works best for those who are acutely aware of social role-play and judgment. Many people may claim not to care about finessing their personalities to different audiences, or see the point of migrating to a new platform —but once you wrap your head around the rich, real-world aspect of Google Plus, it’s hard to imagine why you’d want to stay on Facebook.

But it’s not just Facebook that Plus directly takes on — Twitter could also take a direct hit. The “following” circle lets you add people you don’t know personally, and see all their public posts. “Sometimes, it’s weird to realise you’re being followed by so many people you don’t know, but like on Twitter, it seems like too much effort to edit the list. Thankfully, there aren’t any spambots on Plus yet,” says Pranesh Prakash, a lawyer and policy advocate at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. There’s no arbitrary 140-character limit, and there are coherent threads of conversation — in fact, the level of visible engagement on Plus makes Twitter look like “a boring RSS reader”, as someone observed.

Apart from the Facebook and Twitter-type uses, Google Plus comes with a standout feature that’s all its own: Hangouts, spontaneous video chatting with up to 10 people. You start a hangout, and anyone may drop in to talk for a bit. “It’s trying to replicate the sort of gathering you have in a coffee shop, just drop in and chat about the news or whatever,” says Pai. It’s so obviously useful that Dell is reportedly considering dropping traditional customer service calls and choosing to hang out with Google instead. Yes, Facebook has recently teamed up with Skype in a self-declared "awesome" move — but Skype still makes you pay for multi-way video conferencing, and doesn’t offer the serendipitous pleasures of Hangout yet.

Then there is Sparks, Google Plus’s attempt to push the right content at you – you pick from a variety of interests, and Google supplies a steady scroll of interesting links. Given how much info the company has on people, Sparks could become eerily spot-on.

In fact, the chief problem with Google Plus may be that it tries to cram in too much, leaving users overwhelmed. The bewildering array of buttons and options may put off some, and right now, it’s difficult to control the signal-to-noise ratio. “It’s definitely not as over-complicated as Google Wave, which nobody could really figure out” says Pai. “And honestly, it would be difficult to imagine the kind of functionality that Plus provides being delivered in any other way.” Then there are some who are sceptical of Circles — saying that greater granularity isn’t going to take away the dilemmas of talking to a group. They predict that once the novelty wears off and Google Plus expands, you’ll be struggling to edit and divide your circles, and to pitch yourself right.

So will Google Plus lure 750 million-plus Facebook and Twitter users away? "Don’t underestimate Facebook’s network benefits," says Prakash. “When I first went online in 1996, the first thing to do was to create an email address. Now the first thing that people do to mark an online entry is to create a Facebook account”.

Besides, Google may not want to supplant Facebook as much as master an arena it has so far sucked at – the social world. As Pranesh Prakash says, “it’s not about competition with Facebook, as much as trying to improve Google’s own services, bring them together into a seamless whole and better understand its users.” Making social life machine-readable would obviously be the next big jackpot for Google, and it appears determined to invest the time, resources and effort to getting it exactly right. As Shimrit Ben-Yair, product manager of the social graph at Google told Wired magazine’s Stephen Levy, Google Plus could be a revolutionary service if it hits the sweet spot between Facebook oversharing and Twitter undersharing.

Besides, most would agree that a spot of vigorous competition would be good for Facebook, which has played fast and loose with privacy policy — changing its defaults, and then reacting to the outcry that follows. "For too long, it was the only game in town. Facebook has innovated more in the three weeks that Plus has been around, than in a lon time," says Pai.

So far, Google Plus has been extra-solicitous of privacy, and adjusted on the fly to field testers’ feedback. It has jumped to attend to mistakes – like responding to complaints that a user’s gender should not be publicly available. When someone pointed out that even limited posts could be reshared by others, that technical hole was immediately plugged. "It’s very heartening to see that they’ve learnt from the mistakes of Facebook and Buzz," says Prakash. Unlike Facebook’s possessiveness about your information and pictures, Google’s Data Liberation policy is explicitly committed to letting you erase all personal traces whenever you want, and free yourself from any product.

But as Prakash cautions, "Google may not have a coherent view of privacy across all its products — for all Google Plus’s delicacy and tact, Google Street View may have different ideas about what is acceptable." There are many who find it unnerving that a revenue-driven, publicly traded company should be the master switch of our information economy. Given Google’s girth and dominance, competitors can’t realistically wrest attention away, after a certain point.

"Google is bigger because it’s better and better because it’s bigger", writes Siva Vaidyanathan in The Googlization of Everything. Google Plus, then, marks another large advance in the company’s stated mission to organise the world’s information. Even Pai admits that “if a new mail application came along, it would have to offer so much more than Google for me to consider shifting – given how Gmail does everything, syncs my calendar, knows my friends." But then again, he says, “Let’s judge Google not on what we think it is, but what it does. Everything that’s too big in a bad way, even those considered invincible, gets stopped eventually. Right now, I’m reading about Murdoch’s undoing with great glee – a few weeks back, who would have imagined that?"

This article by Amulya Gopalakrishnan was published in the Indian Express on July 24, 2011. The original story can be read here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/right-circle

In The Biggest Data Leak, Info Of 13 Crore Aadhaar Card Holders Has Been Compromised And Is Available Online

praskrishna — 2017-05-12T15:59:31Z

The Modi government has been trying to make Aadhaar mandatory for everything from Income Tax return, buying a SIM card, bank transaction, train ticket, air travel, mid-day meal government subsidies etc.

The blog post by Bobins Abraham was published by India Times on May 3, 2017.

While the government claims that the move will increase security and ensure that the benefits are reaching to real people and not syphoned off. But security experts have been pointing out the possibility of security breach in the system resulting in the sensitive biometric data reaching in the hands of those, who could misuse them.

A study by Bengaluru-based think tank, Centre for Internet and Society has once again cemented these concerns. According to its report titled, "Information Security Practices of Aadhaar (or lack thereof): A documentation of the public availability of Aadhaar Numbers with sensitive personal financial information," Aadhaar data of as many as 13.5 crore card holders have already leaked online.

The study revealed that the mass data leak happened due to security flaws in four government websites:

National Social Assistance Programme
National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA)
Daily Online Payment Reports under NREGA (Govt. of Andhra Pradesh)
Chandranna Bima Scheme run by Government of Andhra Pradesh

“Based on the numbers available on the websites looked at, estimated number of Aadhaar numbers leaked through these four portals could be around 130-135 million and the number of bank account numbers leaked at around 100 million from the specific portals we looked at,” the report said.

The report was published even as the government continue to defend Aadhaar in the Supreme Court saying that the move to link Aadhaar with PAN cards was meant to put a stop on the number of individuals in possession of multiple PAN cards by putting a robust identification system in place. Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi said that this will help in curbing money laundering, the flow of black money and controlling the funding of terror.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-times-bobin-abraham-may-3-2017-in-the-biggest-data-leak-info-of-13-crore-aadhaar-card-holders-has-been-compromised-and-is-available-online

In new Facebook features, a comeback for community

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T09:58:34Z

Nearly 750 tweets bombard the web every second. Internet traffic is growing by 40 per cent a year. People post 2.5 billion photos on Facebook every month. Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube. But who owns all that data? Until now, big business was in complete control and used the data to monetise operations. But all that is set to change. With Facebook launching two new features, ‘Groups' and a ‘Download your information,' the community is making a comeback.

More control over data

If Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is to be believed, users now have more control over who sees their data and how much. They can also bundle up their entire social graph (as a zip file) and walk away to another service.

‘Groups' tries to tackle one of Facebook's long-standing problems. On Facebook, everyone, from your boss to your long-lost school friend, is a “friend.” And this means annoying, sometimes embarrassing situations.

An easy way to form small private groups on a social network, as we do in real life, is the “biggest problem in social networking,” Mr. Zuckerberg told journalists after the announcement.

The Groups feature allows you to form small circles of friends. Up to 300 Groups per user are allowed, and the tool also allows Group chat and emails. The groups can be open, closed, or secret, depending on the privacy settings.

Gaurav Mishra, Director (Digital and Social Media), MS&L Group, Asia-Pacific, says this step is important for Facebook, given the rising competition in social networking.

With alternatives on the horizon, such as Diaspora, which is being designed as an open-source, privacy-conscious social network, and Google's plans to integrate social networking elements into its services through ‘Google Me,' Facebook has to take up this “strategic pre-emptive move,” says Mr. Mishra.

But the Groups feature comes with its own baggage. It is not ‘opt in.' A friend can add you to the Group, and you get to decide whether you want to be in it or not. It appears that in the trade-off between giving the user more control and encouraging use, Facebook has chosen the latter.

Users will also have to be prepared for more noise as the new features offer a mirage of secure conversation space that will encourage them to share more personal details.

“The amount of sharing will go up massively and will be completely addictive,” Mr. Zuckerberg predicted.

Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society, says: “Facebook has always taken a more promiscuous approach to configuring our social behaviour online, the primary motivation being the maximisation of user transactions and consequently profits.”

According to him, the logic of adding a user to a group without seeking permission first makes a lot of assumptions, including that you check your account regularly to do early damage control and that your friends follow best security practices.

“I would warn people not to do anything on a Facebook group — open, closed or secret — that they would not do on email.”

Read the original in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/new-facebook-features

In Memoriam of Rahul Cherian

praskrishna — 2013-02-25T01:51:22Z

The Centre for Internet & Society is organising a memorial function for Rahul Cherian who passed away recently while on a family visit to Goa. He had succumbed to an infection. The function will be held on February 28, 2013, from 5 p.m. To 7.00 p.m. at TERI, Bangalore. Dinner will be served right after the event. Lawrence Liang, Reuben Jacob and Gautam John will be speaking at the event.

Rahul Cherian

Rahul was a lawyer, disability policy activist and the founder of the Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability and Policy, and a fellow at CIS. He was a partner at IndoJuris Law Offices in Chennai, having acted as a managing partner of the firm between 2003 and 2008. He was also the co-founder of www.inclusiveplanet.com, the world's largest social network for persons with visual impairment. He was one of the experts who drafted the Treaty for the Visually Impaired currently being negotiated at the World Intellectual Property Organization. His areas of expertise include disability law, intellectual property law and technology law.

Rahul was on the legal expert panel constituted by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment to give input on the new disability law. He was instrumental in conceptualizing and executing a national Right to Read Campaign to bring about changes in copyright law to enable persons with disabilities access copyrighted work on an equal basis with persons without disabilities. He had helped the State of Kerala draft a plan document with a vision to ensure that by the year 2025 persons with disabilities are completely integrated into mainstream society.

Rahul Cherian's collaboration with CIS

Feedback / Submissions

Making Public Libraries Accessible to People with Disabilities (January 23, 2013): Thanks to Rahul's efforts, CIS was one of the 20 disability rights groups that wrote to the Ministry of Culture.
Comments and Feedback on the Draft Twelfth Five Year Plan with respect to Persons with Disabilities (December 28, 2013): CIS was one of the ten organizations representing people with disabilities that sent comments and feedback on the draft twelfth five year plan.

Analysis

An Analysis of the Comments by World Blind Union and the International Publishers Association (March 30, 2012): Rahul provides an analysis of the comments by the World Blind Union and the International Publishers Association after the 23rd session of the Standing Committee of Copyright and Related Rights.

Blog Posts

Linking Commercial Availability and Exceptions in the Treaty for Visually Impaired/Persons with Disabilities (January 23, 2013).
WIPO to Convene a Diplomatic Conference in Morocco to Finalise TVI (December 24, 2012).
The HathiTrust Judgment and its impact on TVI negotiations at WIPO (October 30, 2012).
WIPO General Assemblies Approve Road Map on Treaty for the Visually Impaired (October 11, 2012).
WIPO Treaty for the Visually Impaired — Moving from a Treaty on Paper to a Treaty that is Workable on the Ground (September 28, 2012).
Breaking News on Electronic Accessibility (September 28, 2012).
Ring Side View: Update on WIPO Negotiations on the Treaty for the Visually Impaired (August 13, 2012).
Copyright Amendments – Empowering the Print Disabled (May29, 2012).
Copyright v. Exercise of Fundamental rights (August 6, 2009).

News & Media Coverage

Rahul was quoted in the following:

Disability groups in India welcome progress on treaty for blind persons (The Times of India, December 20, 2012).
US and EU blocking treaty to give blind people access to books (The Guardian, July 30, 2012).
An online community platform for people with different needs (Press Trust of India, December 9, 2010).
Disability rights groups oppose changes to Copyright Act (The Hindu, April 23, 2010).

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/events/in-memoriam-of-rahul-cherian

In India, Prism-like Surveillance Slips Under the Radar

praskrishna — 2013-07-03T09:31:18Z

Prism, the contentious U.S. data-collection surveillance program, has captured the world’s attention ever since whistle-blower Edward Snowden leaked details of global spying to the Guardian and Washington Post.

The article by Anjan Trivedi was published in Time World on June 30, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

However, it turns out India, the world’s largest democracy, is building its own version to monitor internal communications in the name of national security. Yet India’s Central Monitoring System, or CMS, was not shrouded in secrecy — New Delhi announced its intentions to watch over its citizens, however mutedly, in 2011, and rollout is slated for August. And while reports that the American system collected 6.3 billion intelligence reports in India led to a lawsuit at the nation’s Supreme Court, comparable indignation has been conspicuously lacking with the domestic equivalent.

CMS is an ambitious surveillance system that monitors text messages, social-media engagement and phone calls on landlines and cell phones, among other communications. That means 900 million landline and cell-phone users and 125 million Internet users. The project, which is being implemented by the government’s Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), is meant to help national law-enforcement agencies save time and avoid manual intervention, according to the Department of Telecommunications’ annual report. This has been in the works since 2008, when C-DOT started working on a proof-of-concept, according to an older report. The government set aside approximately $150 million for the system as part of its 12th five-year plan, although the Cabinet ultimately approved a higher amount.

Within the internal-security ministry though, the surveillance system remains a relatively “hush-hush” topic, a project official unauthorized to speak to the press tells TIME. In April 2011, the Police Modernisation Division of the Home Affairs Ministry put out a 90-page tender to solicit bidders for communication-interception systems in every state and union territory of India. The system requirements included “live listening, recording, storage, playback, analysis, postprocessing” and voice recognition.

Civil-liberties groups concede that states often need to undertake targeted-monitoring operations. However, the move toward extensive “surveillance capabilities enabled by digital communications,” suggests that governments are now “casting the net wide, enabling intrusions into private lives,” according to Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. This extensive communications surveillance through the likes of Prism and CMS are “out of the realm of judicial authorization and allow unregulated, secret surveillance, eliminating any transparency or accountability on the part of the state,” a recent U.N. report stated.

India is no stranger to censorship and monitoring — tweets, blogs, books or songs are frequently blocked and banned. India ranked second only to the U.S. on Google’s list of user-data requests with 4,750 queries, up 52% from two years back, and removal requests from the government increased by 90% over the previous reporting period. While these were largely made through police or court orders, the new system will not require such a legal process. In recent times, India’s democratically elected government has barred access to certain websites and Twitter handles, restricted the number of outgoing text messages to five per person per day and arrested citizens for liking Facebook posts and tweeting. Historically too, censorship has been India’s preferred means of policing social unrest. “Freedom of expression, while broadly available in theory,” Ganguly tells TIME, “is endangered by abuse of various India laws.”

There is a growing discrepancy and power imbalance between citizens and the state, says Anja Kovacs of the Internet Democracy Project. And, in an environment like India where “no checks and balances [are] in place,” that is troubling. The potential for misuse and misunderstanding, Kovacs believes, is increasing enormously. Currently, India’s laws relevant to interception “disempower citizens by relying heavily on the executive to safeguard individuals’ constitutional rights,” a recent editorial noted. The power imbalance is often noticeable at public protests, as in the case of the New Delhi gang-rape incident in December, when the government shut down public transport near protest grounds and unlawfully detained demonstrators.

With an already sizeable and growing population of Internet users, the government’s worries too are on the rise. Netizens in India are set to triple to 330 million by 2016, according to a recent report. “As [governments] around the world grapple with the power of social media that can enable spontaneous street protests, there appears to be increasing surveillance,” Ganguly explains.

India’s junior minister for telecommunications attempted to explain the benefits of this system during a recent Google+ Hangout session. He acknowledged that CMS is something that “most people may not be aware of” because it’s “slightly technical.” A participant noted that the idea of such an intrusive system was worrying and he did not feel safe. The minister, though, insisted that it would “safeguard your privacy” and national security. Given the high-tech nature of CMS, he noted that telecom companies would no longer be part of the government’s surveillance process. India currently does not have formal privacy legislation to prohibit arbitrary monitoring. The new system comes under the jurisdiction of the Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, which allows for monitoring communication in the “interest of public safety.”

The surveillance system is not only an “abuse of privacy rights and security-agency overreach,” critics say, but also counterproductive in terms of security. In the process of collecting data to monitor criminal activity, the data itself may become a target for terrorists and criminals — a “honeypot,” according to Sunil Abraham, executive director of India’s Centre for Internet and Society. Additionally, the wide-ranging tapping undermines financial markets, Abraham says, by compromising confidentiality, trade secrets and intellectual property. What’s more, vulnerabilities will have to be built into the existing cyberinfrastructure to make way for such a system. Whether the nation’s patchy infrastructure will be able to handle a complex web of surveillance and networks, no one can say. That, Abraham contends, is what attackers will target.

National security has widely been cited as the reason for this system, but no one can say whether it will actually help avert terrorist activity. India’s own 9/11 is a case in point: the Indian government was handed intelligence by foreign agencies about the possibility of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, but did not act. This is a “clear indication that having access to massive amounts of data is not necessarily going to make people safer,” Kovacs tells TIME. However, officers familiar with the new system say it will not increase surveillance or enhance intrusion beyond current levels; it will only strengthen the policy framework of privacy and increase operational efficiency. Spokespersons and officials in the internal-security and telecom departments did not respond to requests or declined to comment.

The government has been cagey about details on implementation and extent. This ability to act however the authorities deems fit “just makes it really easy to slide into authoritarianism, and that is not acceptable for any democratic country,” Kovacs says. Indeed, India has seen that before — almost four decades ago, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency for 19 months, which suspended all civil liberties. Indians complaining about Prism may want to look a little closer to home.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/time-world-anjan-trivedi-june-30-2013-in-india-prison-like-surveillance-slips-under-the-radar

In India, Biometric Data Storage Sparks Demands for Privacy Laws

praskrishna — 2016-03-23T02:27:05Z

In India, calls for strict privacy laws are growing after this week's passage of a measure that allows federal agencies access to biometric data of the nation's citizens, the world's largest such repository.

The article by Anjana Pasricha was published in Voice of America on March 18, 2016. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

The government says the use of biometrics will help cut rampant graft in the distribution of subsidies, but activists and opposition lawmakers warn it could usher in an era of increased state surveillance.

Raghubir Gaur, who works as an electrician in the capital, New Delhi, says he has never collected subsidized rations such as wheat and rice, because “somebody else has been taking the rations I should have gotten.” Now, with a national proof of identity, or "Aadhaar" card in his hands, Gaur says he is confident he will be able to access his designated subsidies.

The Aadhaar card is being used to give welfare benefits to the poor, who often cannot provide any proof identity, allowing corrupt officials to siphon entitlements.

The government says it has saved nearly $2 billion by preventing misuse of the subsidies in the last fiscal year alone.

Critics fear ‘police state’

Civil activists and research groups, however, have dubbed the Aadhaar program “surveillance technology” that constitutes a serious breach of privacy. They point to identity-verification systems in other countries, where cards or identification numbers are used for verification without creating a gigantic central database that documents every last transaction.

Indeed, the Aadhaar database also stores fingerprints and iris scans of every account holder, labeling each with a 12-digit identification number.

Concerns that this could lead to a massive invasion of privacy have been heightened because the new law allows the data to be used “in the interest of national security.”

“From verifying yourself to the ticket conductor on a train to someone who is delivering something at your house, all the way to opening a new bank account, all these transactions get logged against the centralized data base," says Pranesh Prakash of the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore. "So this invades your life completely and thoroughly.”

Some lawyers and privacy advocates say this has made it even more important to support a strong privacy law to ensure the huge government database isn't misused.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has defended the biometrics legislation, saying the data will be accessed only in rare cases that require authorization by a senior official.

“You mark my words, you are midwifing a police state,” said lawmaker Asaduddin Owaisi, just one parliamentarian opposed passage of the legislation and found no comfort in Jaitley's assurances.

Fraud concerns

Despite objections, the bill was passed by legislators who argued that such a move is critical to ensuring subsidies reach intended beneficiaries in a country where millions are poor and illiterate.

Attempts to draft a right to privacy bill to protect individuals against misuse of data by government or private agencies date back to 2010, but have made little headway. The latest push started in 2014.

Citing a cyberattack targeting the U.S. government, in which a hacker gained access to the information of millions of people, research groups have also flagged security concerns around India’s ambitious Aadhaar program.

“If this database gets leaked, the entire identification system collapses because people will be able to authenticate themselves as anyone else. So identity fraud is a great concern,” said Prakash of the Center for Internet and Society.

Nearly one billion biometric identity cards have been issued in India in the last six years.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/voice-of-america-anjana-pasricha-march-18-2016-in-india-biometric-data-storage-sparks-demands-for-privacy-laws