Centre for Internet and Society

Vijayavani

praskrishna — 2014-08-06T09:46:47Z

Vijayavani

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Vijayavani

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T16:29:39Z

Vijayavani

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Vijayavani

praskrishna — 2014-04-11T10:13:49Z

Vijayavani (March 3, 2014)

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Vijayavani

praskrishna — 2015-11-26T15:02:38Z

Vijayavani

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Vijayakarnataka

praskrishna — 2015-12-29T02:50:37Z

Vijaya Karnataka

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Vijaya Vani Coverage

praskrishna — 2013-09-05T06:41:49Z

Vijayavani Coverage

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Vijaya Vani Coverage

praskrishna — 2013-09-05T06:37:35Z

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Vijaya Karnataka

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T07:20:13Z

Vijaya Karnataka Coverage

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Vijaya Karnataka

praskrishna — 2014-12-27T16:34:34Z

Vijaya Karnataka

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Vijaya Karnataka

praskrishna — 2016-12-20T16:42:20Z

Vijaya Karnataka

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Vijay Mallya cries foul after his Twitter and email accounts are hacked

praskrishna — 2016-12-10T13:50:25Z

The attackers said they were able to access over a gigabyte of data from Mallya's email.

The article by Alnoor Peermohamed was published in Business Standard on December 10, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Liquor baron Vijay Mallya on Friday cried foul over his Twitter account being hacked by a group calling itself ‘Legion’. The group is believed to be the same as the one behind the hack of Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter and e-mail servers last week.

Several tweets alleging that Mallya’s e-mail had been compromised and documents related to his offshore investments and bank accounts had been stolen were made from his official Twitter account in early on Friday.

“Outfit called Legion has hacked my e-mail accounts and are blackmailing me!! What a joke,” Mallya tweeted after seemingly taking back control of his account.

The attackers said they were able to access over a gigabyte of data from Mallya’s e-mail and shared a link for the public to gain access to it. They also tweeted the rest of the information on Mallya would be made public in the coming weeks, targeted at bringing him to justice for committing fraud.

The Twitteratti (the general public on the social networking platform), including several of Mallya’s 5.51 million followers, emerged in support of the hackers, who they proclaimed were working in the interest of the Indian people. Mallya has defaulted Rs 7,200 crores in loans and is being investigated for it.

“The e-mail hack is interesting because it’s the same global pattern. People are following Julian Assange’s advice — transparency should be directly proportional to power. What one really means is, public interest should be preserved,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director at Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society.

While a lot of hacks continue to be carried out for monetary gain through extortion, several Internet vigilante groups have cropped up over the past decade, the most famous being WikiLeaks and more recently Anonymous. As India’s politicians, businessmen and the general public increasingly use technology and the Internet, they too are becoming targets for such hackers.

“If Mallya’s email account is hacked and all we get out of it is gossip, then it’s of no use. But if we as a nation ensure that the law is followed, or laws are improved, or corporate governance is evolved, all of that is positive impact of such an event. So hacktivists have to be very responsible when they do this, otherwise they spoil the name of whistleblowers and so on,” added Abraham.

Mallya is currently wanted by Indian law enforcement agencies and has a non-bailable warrant issued against his name by the court. He has currently exiled himself in the UK and refuses to travel to the country unless offered amnesty. While often denying any wrongdoing, the general public perception among Indians is that the billionaire playboy Mallya portrayed himself to be is guilty.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/business-standard-alnoor-peermohamed-december-10-2016-vijay-mallya-cries-foul-after-his-twitter-and-email-accounts-are-hacked

VII NLSIR Symposium

praskrishna — 2014-01-09T07:08:33Z

The National Law School of India Review (NLSIR) - the flagship journal of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore is pleased to announce the seventh NLSIR Symposium on “Bridging the Security-Liberty Divide” scheduled to be held on December 21 and December 22, 2013 at the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC, opposite NLSIU Campus, Nagarhavi) Conference Hall, Bangalore.

This was published by NLSIR on December 20, 2013.

The decade following September 11 has been dubbed “liberty’s lost decade”, not just for the United States of America but for the world at large, marked by increasing tension between State interests in national security and individual liberty. As we continue to grapple with the implications of this clash, one clear winner seems to be emerging, best observed by examining changes in legal systems throughout this decade. The recent upsurge of criticism against NSA activity globally, however, could be seen as indicative of a changing trend. The VIIth NLSIR Symposium seeks to trace this dialogue between competing notions of security and liberty, and hopes to assess and analyse similar developments in India Confirmed speakers for the symposium include renowned legal experts such as Hon’ble Justice Muralidhar, Menaka Guruswamy, Mrinal Satish, Bharat Karnad, Aparna Chandra, Chinmayi Arun, Shyam Diwan, Bhairav Acharya, Roshni, Yug Mohit Chaudhary and Saikat Datta.

This year, the discussions will be divided into four panels:

Session I: Securing Liberty from the State - Redefining Criminal Thresholds in Law
(Forenoon, December 21, 2013, Saturday)

Session II: Intrusive Intelligence - Surveillance Programs and Privacy in India
(Afternoon, December 21, 2013, Saturday)

Session III: Beyond Borders - Extradition, Asylum and Concerns of State Security
(Forenoon, December 22, 2013, Sunday)

Session IV: Connecting the Dots
(Afternoon, December 22, 2013, Sunday)

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/nlsir-december-21-2013-nlsir-symposium

Views | Why the Left may for once be right

praskrishna — 2012-04-25T11:48:50Z

The article by Pramit Bhattacharya was published in LiveMint on April 23, 2012.

India’s information technology (IT) minister, Kapil Sibal appears to be running into rough weather over IT rules framed last year, which curb freedom of expression on the internet. The rules have incensed India’s growing blogging community and piqued at least a few of his fellow parliamentarians.

On the opening day of the upcoming parliamentary session on Tuesday, the Rajya Sabha is set to vote on an annulment motion against the IT rules, moved by P. Rajeeve of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), a rediff.com report said. Ironically, the party that still treats Stalin as a hero (quoting him unfailingly in its political resolutions) has become the first to stand up for internet freedom.
Rajeeve is of course not the only parliamentarian to take exception to the rules. Jayant Choudhry, a member of parliament (MP) from the Rashtriya Lok Dal, was the first to draw attention to the draconian rules late last year, and MPs from other regional parties such as the Samajwadi Party and the Asom Gana Parishad criticized the rules in a parliamentary discussion in December.

Two sets of rules, one governing cyber cafes and the other relating to intermediaries have attracted most criticism. The rules relating to intermediaries such as internet service providers, search engines or interactive websites such as Twitter and Facebook are the most disturbing. Intermediaries are required under the current rules to remove content that anyone objects to, within 36 hours of receiving the complaint, without allowing content creators any scope of defence.

The criteria for deciding objectionable content, laid down in the rules, are subjective and vague. For instance, intermediaries are mandated to remove among other things, ‘grossly harmful’ content, whatever that may mean.

This is a unique form of ‘private censorship’ that will endanger almost all online content. In this age of easily offended sensibilities, it is virtually impossible to write anything that does not “offend” anyone. For instance, even this piece may be termed ‘grossly harmful’ to the CPI(M) party.

However far-fetched this may sound, this has already become a reality. A researcher working with the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) tried out such a strategy with several different intermediaries, and was successful in six out of seven times, always with frivolous and flawed complaints, Pranesh Prakash of CIS wrote in a January blog-post. It has become much easier in India to ban an e-book than a book, Prakash pointed out.

The rules regulating cyber cafes are no better. Cyber cafes are required to keep a log detailing the identity of users and their internet usage, which has negative implications for privacy and personal safety of users, analysis of the rules by PRS legislative research said.

Internet freedom in India has declined over time and is only ‘partly free’, a 2011 report on internet freedom by US-based think tank, Freedom House said. India has joined a growing club of developing nations where, “internet freedom is increasingly undermined by legal harassment, opaque censorship procedures, or expanding surveillance,” the report noted.

The only saving grace is that some of the IT rules are drafted in a language so arcane that anyone will find it hard to decipher them, leave alone implementing them. Sample this: “The intermediary shall not knowingly deploy or install or modify the technical configuration of computer resource or become party to any such act which may change or has the potential to change the normal course of operation of the computer resource than what it is supposed to perform thereby circumventing any law for the time being in force: provided that the intermediary may develop, produce, distribute or employ technological means for the sole purpose of performing the acts of securing the computer resource and information contained therein.”

The first task at hand for Sibal may be to explain to fellow lawmakers what the above rule is supposed to mean, before he defends such rules.

Click for the original, Pranesh Prakash is quoted in this article.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/left-may-for-once-be-right

Views | India’s Net nannies run amok

praskrishna — 2012-08-24T13:50:28Z

To combat hate on the website, India should use the Internet and counter the speech, which might seem hateful.

Salil Tripathi's article was published in Livemint. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Faraz Ahmed Siddiqui is the kind of intrepid blogger and investigative writer who should be receiving awards from grateful governments, because he is doing their work. When some Muslim groups decided to attract the attention of Muslims worldwide by posting images of human tragedy—a pile of dead bodies near Buddhist monks, or a man, aflame, running on a road—and claimed that these were images of Burmese/Buddhist atrocities against Rohingyas, he investigated the source of the images. And he found that while the images were genuine, they weren’t about the Rohingya crisis. (The pile of bodies in one image were Tibetan, and monks were there to perform funeral rites; the man aflame was the Tibetan activist Jamphel Yeshi, who died in Delhi while protesting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to India, and so on).

And what about the Urdu publication Sahafat? As C.M. Naim, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago shows in Outlook magazine (Read article), one particular Shia scholar wrote an entirely false and error-ridden essay in riveting, haunting prose in the Sahafat, claiming that the media and human rights groups don’t care about atrocities Rohingyas in particular, and Muslims in general, face. (That’s patently untrue; the Rohingya crisis has received considerable media attention since late May when the latest crisis erupted: see, for example, my piece here in June:, and this comprehensive report by Human Rights Watch.

But sadly, if you read this column in India and try to read Ahmed’s post, since published in Pakistan’s The Express Tribune, you will find that India’s Net nannies have decided to ban it, according to a leaked list of banned sites. Yesterday, many in India could still see the site, which had less to do with any subversive thinking among Indian Internet service providers, and more to do with plain and simple incompetence and inefficiency. India isn’t China, although the United Progressive Alliance seems keen to take India from information and technology minister Kapil Sibal’s constituency, Chandni Chowk, to China.

The list of proscribed sites, if accurate, includes over 200 sites. That, and the directive to ban sending more than five text messages a day, are of course based on good intentions: rumour-mongering has led to thousands of Indians from the North-East panicking and returning home from cities like Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Pune, and images misrepresented by some websites and publications like Sahafat have partly incited some Muslim groups to protest in Mumbai. Some of the demonstrators desecrated a historic monument, beat up policemen, molested policewomen, and destroyed property.

But the response to vandalism and violence cannot be blocking communications, curbing speech, and banning websites. Forget political speech, think of concern for safety: Imagine your loved ones in a crowded place like Palika Bazar in Delhi, or Churchgate station in Mumbai, and imagine there is a rumour that there are riots in the area. Your first thought will be to reach out to your loved ones, find out where they are, if they are safe, and tell them to come home, or find out where they are and pick them up, or get them to safety. This isn’t far-fetched: I was in Mumbai that Saturday, headed for Kemp’s Corner from Bandra, and a friend sent me a text, saying I should avoid the area around Azad Maidan, because she had heard riots had broken out. If it happened tomorrow, and if Sibal’s censors were half as efficient as they claim to be, I would not have got her message if she had already used up her quota of five texts. Now multiply this thousands of times. People don’t use text messages or instant messages to exchange jokes or flirt, or to sell housing loans, or to incite violence. Sometimes you want your family to make sure the geyser is turned off. People use communication tools to communicate, and tools can’t distinguish between “good” and “bad” messages).

Facetiousness apart, the restriction on messaging is a blunt response, monumentally silly, and the ban on certain sites addresses the wrong problem. (They can resurface with different names faster than Hydra can grow heads.) Sites such as Ahmed’s should get disseminated widely, so that the so-called “masses” can tell truth apart from rumours.

Instead, the government is blocking the messenger. When I lived in Southeast Asia, a human rights activist fighting censorship told me that people believe the spoken word when they can’t trust the written word. In India’s case, social media gets credibility because the state and the mainstream media appear to be losing theirs. Indeed, there are newspapers and there are publications that look like newspapers, and there are broadcast organizations and studios that produce entertainment disguised as news. But they become part of the same undifferentiated mass in the eyes of a generation, which seems to take too seriously Jack Weinberg’s famous remark during the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley in the 1960s: Don’t trust anyone over 30. And the Indian media can regain their credibility if they fight these restrictions, and not speak in the voice of the government, which wants to suppress inconvenient voices.

For the truth is that it is the state’s failure in managing the crisis in Assam, which has led us to this. If the state had been swift in handling the violence in Kokrajhar and reduced tensions promptly, there would not have been a visual extravaganza for the hatemongers to feast upon. But either out of design or incompetence, the Assam government failed to reassure communities, and provided fuel to the fire the malevolent groups wanted to start.

And so that it could appear to be doing something, the government blamed the tools of communication and websites. The implementation of the bans lacks any rationale, as Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore has shown in this excellent, crisp analysis . And the list of websites being blocked is a veritable data dump. The companies expected to implement it are in panic, and are blocking sites beyond what’s expected of them: A lawyer told me this morning that one ISP has blocked the entire Wordpress platform, blocking tens of thousands of blogs, in India—no doubt, at least some of which have pictures of babies or cats.

There is an urgent need of adult supervision. Censorship is always bad, but a case can be made for an extremely temporary ban in the face of imminent danger to impose some restrictions. For example, London’s phone lines were jammed for a few hours in 2005, when bombs were going off in the city, and the city administrators and police were trying to figure out the scale and extent of terrorist attacks. But these were restored promptly, and no websites were blocked. Even after the riots in English cities last summer, the government initially thought of clamping down on instant messaging, but then thought better. (Read a report by theguardian and LSE).

Of course, India is not Britain, but it is not China either (this time for good reason). There can be a case for a limited, time-bound suspension of services, after consultation with key officials and stakeholders (which doesn’t mean the thekedars of various religions, but lawyers and civil liberties experts), and strictly under judicial supervision. To combat hate on the website, use the Internet and counter the speech, which might seem hateful. That means publicising the good work of Ahmed, not banning his page. And with print magazines or newspapers which write irresponsibly, get the Press Council to discipline them: It means Justice Katju should stop worrying about the coverage given to Dev Anand’s death, and instead discipline Sahafat.

And India should remember Benjamin Franklin: A society that’s willing to trade precious liberty for temporary safety, deserves neither liberty, nor safety.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-aug-21-2012-salil-tripathi-indias-net-nannies-run-amok

Vidushi Marda selected for Internet of Rights Fellowship

praskrishna — 2017-05-03T15:48:58Z

Article 19 had put out a call for applications for its Internet of Rights Fellowship in February 2017. Vidushi has been selected to be part of the 2017-2018 cohort.

This fellowship aims to "facilitate stronger considerations for human rights within Internet governance processes and to shape the human rights agenda for the Internet". As a Fellow, Vidushi will be primarily working on AI and ethics. The IEEE is developing a document on "Ethically Aligned Design: A Vision for Prioritizing Human Wellbeing with Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems". The development process includes various committees, my work will focus on:

General Principles Committee: This Committee is currently deliberating on how to ensure that AI/AS can be designed and operated to respect human rights, and how to make AI/AS transparent, and accountable.
Law Committee: Working on the aspects of legal accountability and transparency, closely connected to ethics.
EPIC AI/AS Committee (new): Working on adoption of AI/AS in public services, and focussing on ethical principles guiding such adoption.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/vidushi-marda-selected-for-internet-of-rights-fellowship