Centre for Internet and Society

classroom

praskrishna — 2011-12-06T10:33:27Z

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

Classroom

praskrishna — 2013-03-06T09:07:06Z

Classroom at IIM, Bangalore

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Classroom.png

Clash of the cyberworlds

praskrishna — 2013-01-15T06:57:48Z

In an increasingly digital world, the issue of Internet freedom and governance has become hugely contested. Censorship and denial of access occur across the political spectrum of nations, even in liberal democracies.

The article by Latha Jishnu, Dinsa Sachan and Moyna was published in Down to Earth magazine's January 15, 2013 issue. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

In run-up to the just-concluded World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, there was a frenzied campaign to ensure that governments kept their hands off the Internet. It was feared the International Telecommunications Union, a UN body, was aiming to take control of the Internet. That hasn’t happened. But the outcome in Dubai has highlighted once again the double speak on freedom by countries that claim to espouse it and by corporations interested in protecting their interests, says Latha Jishnu, who warns that the major threat to the Internet freedom comes from the wide-ranging surveillance measures that all governments are quietly adopting. Dinsa Sachan speaks to institutions and officials to highlight the primacy of cyber security for nations, while Moyna tracks landmark cases that will have a bearing on how free the Net remains in India.

For months now a little-known UN agency, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), has been looming large in cyberspace, portrayed as an evil force plotting to take over the Internet and threatening to destroy its freedom by rewriting archaic regulations. ITU, set up in 1865, is primarily a technical body that administers a 24-year-old treaty, International Telecommunication Regulations (ITRs), which are basic principles that govern the technical architecture of the global communication system.

	How did the 193-nation ITU, which regulates radio spectrum, assigns satellite orbits and generally works to improve telecom infrastructure in the developing world, turn into everyone’s favourite monster in the digital world? The provocation was ITU’s World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) in Dubai, where ITRs were proposed to be revised. Leaked documents of the proposals made to ITU had shown that statist countries like Russia and China, known for their crackdown on Internet freedom, had put forward proposals to regulate digital “crime” and “security” aspects that are currently not regulated at the global level for want of consensus on balancing enforcement with protection of individual rights.

Other proposals were about technical coordination and the setting up of standards that enable all the devices, networks and software across the Internet to communicate and connect with one another. Although ITU secretary general Hamadoun I Touré had emphasised that the Dubai WCIT was primarily attempting to chart “a globally agreed-upon roadmap that offers future connectivity to all, and ensures sufficient communications capacity to cope with the exponential growth in voice, video and data”, there was widespread scepticism among developed countries.

Online subversion in India AT the seventh annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan, last November, Minister for Communications and Information Technology Kapil Sibal was a star turn. He made an elevating speech about the need to put in place a “collaborative, consultative, inclusive and consensual” system for dealing with policies involving the Internet. India, with 125 million Internet users—a number that “is likely to grow to about half a billion over the next few years”—would be a key player in the cyberworld of tomorrow, he promised. According to the minister, Internet governance was an oxymoron because the concept of governance was for dealing with the physical world and had no relevance in cyberspace. These were high sounding words that crashed against the reality of India’s paranoia over online subversion. For starters, Sibal flew into a media blitz over Google’s transparency Report which ranked India second globally in accessing private details of its citizens. Even if it was a far second behind the US, it was an embarrassing revelation for the government which appears to have been rather enthusiastic in seeking information on the users of its various services. Such user data would include social networking profiles, complete gmail accounts and search terms used. In the first half of 2012, India made 2,319 requests related to 3,467 users compared with 7,969 requests by the US. Globally, Google clocked a total of 20,938 requests for user data. A few days down the line there was a public explosion over the arrest of two young women in Palghar, near Mumbai, for posting a prosaic comment on Facebook over Bal Thackeray’s death. Thanks to the deliberately vague wording of Section 66A of the IT Act, such arrests have become common and Rajya Sabha devoted a whole afternoon to discuss the impugned legislation and seek its withdrawal. Sibal’s response has been to issue guidelines on the use of this Section which civil society organisations say will do nothing to sort out matters. Then there are the IT (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, issued under Section 79 of the IT Act, which have been used indiscriminately by business interests to shut down websites, resulting in unbridled censorship of the Internet time and again. Although a motion for its annulment was moved in Parliament by Rajya Sabha member P Rajeeve, it was withdrawn after Sibal promised to talk to all stakeholders. A host of MPs have termed the rules a violation of right to freedom of speech besides going against the laws of natural justice. The promised meeting of stakeholders has not yielded any results and censorship on grounds of possible online piracy continues. In this regard, India is more restrained than the US which has pulled down huge numbers of domains on the ground they were violating intellectual property by selling pirated goods.

Western global powers, behemoth Internet companies, private telecom corporations and almost the entire pack of civil liberties organisations came together in a frenzied campaign to ensure that ITU kept its hands off the Internet. Massive online petitions were launched, backed by Internet companies such as search engine Google and social networking service Facebook. The Internet, they said, should not become an ITU remit because it would change the multi-stakeholder approach, which currently marks the way the Internet is governed, and replace it with government control that would curb digital freedom. Not only did the US administration oppose the revision of ITRs, the US Congress also passed a rare unanimous resolution against the WCIT proposals.

In the end, it was an anti-climax: nothing much came of these proposals. Although WCIT was marked by high drama—a walkout by the US and six European countries, a show of hands on a contested but innocuous resolution and an unexpected vote—the “final acts” (http://www.itu.int/en/wcit-12/Documents/final-acts-wcit-12.pdf) or the changes in ITRs make no mention of the I word. Not once. The 30-page document states at the outset that “these regulations do not address the content-related aspects of telecommunications” —an indirect reference to the Internet.

	Ultimately, it was a triumph of the US-led position even if 89 of the 144 eligible countries signed it. Most of the developed countries refused to sign it. Nor, unexpectedly, did India, and thereby hangs a curious tale. Officials who were privy to the negotiations told Down To Earth that India was all set to sign the new ITRs when its delegation got last-minute instructions from Delhi not to endorse them. “It was unexpected and a let-down for India and our global allies,” confesses an official of the Ministry of Communications & IT. “There was nothing in the final document that we had objections to.” According to the grapevine, Minister for Communications and Information Technology Kapil Sibal was facing pressure from two sides: the US Administration and domestically from civil society, Internet service providers and the private telecom players who had objected to India’s proposals on ITRs. The US is known to be keeping a close eye on what India decides to do on the new treaty which it can still ratify. In the Dubai treaty, the only ITR that does impinge on the Net is (Article 5B) on unsolicited bulk electronic communications or spam. But even here, what it merely states is that member-states should endeavour to take necessary measures to prevent the “propagation of unsolicited bulk electronic communications and minimize its impact on international telecommunication services.”

In many ways, what took place during the hectic days before and during the December 3-14 WCIT was in a broad sense a replay of the Cold War scenario of the good (freedom-loving countries) versus evil (authoritarian or autocratic regimes), although alliance may have shifted in the two blocs. What is clear is that a larger geopolitical fight is playing out with the Internet as disputed terrain. American analysts themselves have pointed out that the “US got most of what it wanted. But then it refused to sign the document and left in a huff.”

Even the innocuous Article 5A, which calls on members “to ensure the security and robustness of international telecommunication networks”, was interpreted by US delegation head Terry Kramer as a means that could be used by some governments to curb free speech!

As an outraged Saudi delegate said, “It is unacceptable that one party to the conference gets everything they want and everybody else must make concessions. And after having made many concessions, we are then asked to suppress the language which was agreed to. I think that that is dangerous. We are on a slippery slope.” The final outcome: all the contentious issues were relegated to resolutions, which have no legal basis.

Indeed, the US has managed to get its way on most issues: protecting the mammoth profits of its Internet companies and ensuring that control of the Internet address system, now done by a group based in the US, will not be shared with other ITU members. And, the likes of Google (2011 profit: $37.9 billion) and Facebook will not have to pay telecom companies for use of their networks to deliver content.

Challenges of securing cyberworld

E-commerce in India, where every tenth person is online, is on the rise—and, consequently, crime on the Internet. In 2011, the country’s nodal agency for handling cyber crime, Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, tackled 13,301 incidences of security breach. The incidents ran the gamut from website intrusions, phishing to network probing and virus attacks. Further, in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 (until October), there were 201, 303, 308 and 294 cyber attacks respectively on sites owned by the Indian government. Most notably, hacker group Anonymous defaced the website of Union Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Kapil Sibal.

To beef up cyber security, the Union ministry plans to pump in Rs 45 crore in 2012-13. It also put up a draft cyber security policy for public comments in 2011. Currently, cases involving cyber security and crime are handled under the IT Act of 2000 (Amendment 2008) and the Indian Penal Code.

But will the government go about its business of securing the Net in a responsible manner? There is scepticism. Section 69 of the Act gives any government agency the right to “intercept, monitor or decrypt” information online. Chinmayi Arun, assistant professor of law at National Law University in Delhi, said at the Internet Governance Conference held at FICCI in October that crimes like defamation are not on the same page as cyber terrorism, and “we have to question whether they warranty invasion of privacy”. She added that the workings of the surveillance system has to be made more open to build public trust.

Pranesh Prakash, policy director at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bengaluru, draws attention to a fundamental flaw in the section. “Government is allowed to wire tap under the Telegraph Act, 1885. But the Act lays out specific guidelines for such an action. For example, you can only tap phones in the case of a ‘public emergency’ or ‘public safety’ situation. The IT Act does not put such limitations on interception of information,” he says.

Cyber security and ITU

A few months prior to the controversial World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai, countries, including Russia and Arab states, had proposed measures that would, through International Telecommunication Union (ITU), grant disproportional power to countries to control the Internet in the name of security measures. Several proposals, most notably those of India and Arab States, explicitly stated in the proposed Article 5A that countries should be able to “undertake appropriate measures, individually or in cooperation with other Member States” to tackle issues relating to “confidence and security of telecommunications/ICTs”. It raised alarm among civil society. US-based think tank Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) said in its report dated September, 2012, that cyber security does not fall under the ambit of International Telecom Regulations, and some countries would misuse such privileges for “intrusive or repressive measures”.

The proposal by African member states recommended that nations should “harmonise their laws” on data retention. In other words, intermediaries would have to retain public data for a long period so that governments can access it whenever they please. With regard to this, CDT noted, “Not only do national laws on data retention vary greatly, but there is ongoing controversy about whether governments should impose data retention mandates at all.”

A clause in the Arab proposal on routing said, “A Member State has the right to know how its traffic is routed.” Currently, the way Internet works, senders and recipients do not know how data between their computers travels or is routed. However, enabling countries to have control over routing has its dangers. CDT notes, “(This) would simply not work and could fundamentally disrupt the operation of the Internet.” Internet traffic travels over an IP network. While travelling, it is fragmented into small packets. Packets generally take a different path across interconnected networks in many different countries before reaching the recipient’s computer. CDT notes providing routing information to countries would require “extensive network engineering changes, not only creating huge new costs, but also threatening the performance benefits and network efficiency of the current system”. Although routing was not part of India’s proposal, Ram Narain, deputy director general at the department of telecommunications, told Down To Earth it was one of the country’s concerns.

However, to civil society’s partial relief, such draconian cyber security clauses were not adopted in the new itr treaty. Two clauses added to the treaty, Article 5A and 5B, address some cyber security concerns. Titled “Security and robustness of networks”, Article 5A urges countries to “individually and collectively endeavour to ensure the security and robustness of international telecommunication networks”. Article 5B talks about keeping tabs on spam.

Prasanth Sugathan, senior advocate with Software Freedom Law Centre, an international network of lawyers, says while he would have preferred that the two clauses were kept out of the new treaty, they do not seem harmful. “They are a much toned down version of what Arab states and Russia had suggested,” he says.

This is one reason India, Brazil and other democracies from the developing world also want a change in ITRs. They want the Internet behemoths to pay for access to their markets so that such revenues can be used to build their own Internet infrastructure.

In the furious debate on keeping the Net free of international control even hawk-eyed civil society organisations prefer to ignore the monetary aspects of Net control. Some analysts believe that maintaining the status quo is not so much about protecting the values of the Internet as about safeguarding interests, both monetary and hegemonistic. Such an assessment may not be wide of the mark if one joins the dots. Google, says a Bloomberg report of December 10, “avoided about $2 billion in worldwide income taxes in 2011 by shifting $9.8 billion in revenues into a Bermuda shell company, almost double the total from three years before”. It also said that the French, Italian, British and Australian governments are probing Google’s tax avoidance in its borderless operations.

	What is clear, however, is that a number of countries for reasons springing from different motivations, appear determined to undermine America’s control of the outfits that now define how the Internet works. Although the US maintains that ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is a private, non-profit corporation, it is overseen by the US Commerce Department. According to People’s Daily, what the US spouts about Net freedom is so much humbug. In an August 2012 report, the leading Chinese daily claimed the US “controls and owns all cyberspaces in the world, and other countries can only lease Internet addresses and domain names from the US, leading to American hegemonic monopoly over the world’s Internet”. It also highlighted a fact that has slipped below the radar. During the Iraq invasion, the US government asked ICANN to terminate services to Iraq’s top-level domain name “.iq” and thereafter all websites with the domain name “.iq” disappeared overnight. It charges the US with having “taken advantage of its control over the Internet to launch an invisible war against disobedient countries and to intimidate and threaten other countries”. While this may be true, the irony is that China, with its great firewall of censorship, is in no shape to position itself as a champion of freedom. Like other authoritarian countries, it will do everything to police the Net and control it.

The right of countries and peoples to access the Net was highlighted in Dubai when some African countries raised the issue of US control of the global Internet. Some of these, such as Sudan, have long been complaining about Washington’s sanctions that entail denial of Internet services. ITU officials point out that Resolution 69, first passed in the 2008 meeting, invoked again in 2010 and dusted off once again for the WCIT negotiations, invoked “human rights” to argue for “non-discriminatory access to modern telecom/ ICT facilities, services and applications”. Says Paul Conneally, head of Communications & Partnership Promotion at ITU, “The real target of these resolutions are US sanctions imposed on nations that are deemed bad actors. These sanctions mean that people in those countries—not just the government, mind you, but everyone, innocent and guilty alike—are denied access to Internet services such as Google, Sourceforge, domain name registrars such as GoDaddy, software and services from Oracle, Windows Live Messenger, etc.”

The catalogue of Sudan’s complaints shows at least 27 instances in 2012 when companies from Google to Microsoft and Paypal to Oracle cut off their services to the African country. This might explain why major companies would be opposed to the resolution on a right to access Internet services. Such a right would allow countries to use ITRs to compel them to provide services they might otherwise have preferred not to. But so far all such sanctions appear to have been a decision of the US Administration.

The problem of the digital divide, in fact, did not get the headlines it should have. Africa accounts for just 7 per cent of the 2.4 billion people who use the Net worldwide and penetration in the region is just 15.6 per cent of the population. Compare this with North America where over 78 per cent are linked to the digital world and Touré’s logic about the ITU’s mandate appears reasonable.

When Apple censors the drone war NETIZENS know that the Internet suffers from the depredations of government, hackers and viruses. But not many are aware that companies are as prone to taking legitimate stuff off the Net on the flimsiest grounds. In the case of Apple it could have been misplaced patriotism or plain business sense that prompted it to block an app which monitors drone strike locations in November last year. The App Store rejected the product, calling it “objectionable and crude”. Drones+ (see photo) is an application that simply adds a location to a map every time a drone strike is reported in the media and added to a database maintained by the UK’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Josh Begley, a graduate student at New York University, who developed the app, says it shows no visuals of war or classified information. All it does is to keep its users informed about when and where drone attacks are taking place in Pakistan and Afghanistan. “This is behavior I would expect of a company in a repressive country like China, not an iconic American company in the heart of Silicon Valley,” says a petition to the company CEO. Did Apple’s censorship have anything to do with the fact that it received huge contracts from the Pentagon? US legislators have joined the protests against Apple. The most brazen act of corporate censorship occurred in August 2012 with NASA’s livestream coverage of the Curiosity rover’s landing on Mars in the space agency’s $2.5 billion mission. A news agency, Scripps, coolly claimed as its own the public domain video posted on NASA’s official YouTube channel that documented the epic landing (see our opening visuals). “This video contains content from Scripps Local News, who has blocked it on copyright grounds. Sorry about that,” said a message on NASA’s blackened screen. So much for the strict US laws aimed at curbing online piracy!

Touré noted that the revised ITRs would see greater transparency in global roaming charges, lead to “more investment in broadband infrastructure” and help those with disabilities. But he was hopeful that the new treaty signed in Dubai would make it possible for the 4.5 billion people still offline to be connected. “When all these people come online, we hope they will have enough infrastructure and connectivity so that traffic will continue to flow freely,” Touré said.

But should ITU govern the Net? Not in its entirety, according to experts. For one, ITU until the Dubai meeting was far from being transparent and does not allow participation of civil society or other stakeholders in its negotiations unless they are part of the official delegation of the member-states. In fact, even critics of the current system, who think the system is lopsided and hypocritical, believe ITU needs to reform itself and confine to the carrier/infrastructure layer of the Internet. Nor should it get into laying down standards which is done by Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the naming and numbering that is managed by ICANN.

But Conneally counters this by asking what would happen if the US decided to deny domain name root zone to Iran because of its bad human rights record. “Suppose it ordered Verisign to remove .IR from the DNS root and make it non-functional. Would we want ICANN/the Internet governance regime to be used as a political/strategic tool to reform Iran? What happens to global interoperability when the core infrastructure gets used in that way?”

Who then should ensure that the Internet is run in a free and open manner? Should it be the Internet Governance Forum (IGF)? But IGF is to be an open consultative forum that cannot by itself govern. It brings in participation for any or all Internet-related policy processes but it by itself was never supposed to do policy or governance.

Parminder Jeet Singh, executive director of ItforChange, says whoever governs is the government for that purpose. “This truism is significant in the present context, because there is an attempt by those who really control/ govern the Internet at present, largely through illegitimate and often surreptitious ways, to confuse issues around Internet governance in all ways possible, including through abuse of established language and political principles and concepts.”

ITforChange is a Bengaluru institution working on information society theory and practice, especially from the standpoint of equity, social justice and gender equality, and it is that perspective which informs Singh’s suggestions. “What we need are safeguards as, for instance, with media regulation. The Internet, of course, is much more than media. It is today one of the most important factors that can and will influence distribution of economic, social and political power. Without regulation it will always be that those who currently dominate it will take away the biggest pie.

Surveillance club

Eight Indian companies are among the 700 members of European Telecommunications Standards Institute. The group works with government and law enforcement agencies to integrate surveillance capabilities into communications infrastructure. It also hosts regular meetings on lawful interception

Wipro Technologies	Associate Service Providers
• HCL Technologies Limited	• Associate Consultancy for Co./Partnership
• Accenture Services Pvt Ltd	• Observers
• CEWiT	• Associate Research Body
• Saankhya Labs Pvt Ltd	• Associate Manufacturers
• Sasken Communication	• Associate Manufacturers
• Technologies
• SmartPlay Technologies	Associate Consultancy for Co./Partnership
• TEJAS NETWORKS LTD	• Associate Manufacturers

Other critics of the current system concede that bringing governments on board, especially authoritarian and statist powers which the digital world threatens, would give them perverse incentives to control it. But this threat should be met not by insisting that the Internet needs no governance or regulation, but by safeguards that ensure equitable access and benefits, Singh stresses.

While the jury is out on the question whether the new ITRs will make any material difference to the way, and if at all, the Net will come under added government oversight and intervention, developments elsewhere show that ITU is not the main threat to digital freedom.

The irony is that while cyber security is contentious in ITU, other international organisations, such as the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and a clutch of influential telecom industry associations, are pushing for surveillance programmes that ensure policing of a high order with sophisticated infrastructure to monitor online communications. A host of countries already have such systems in place and are pressuring countries like India to fall in line.

A UNODC report, titled ‘The use of the Internet for terrorist purposes’, has detailed how countries can and should use new technology for online surveillance—all in the name of anti-terrorism. The report discusses sensitive issues such as blocking websites and using spyware to bypass encryption and also urges countries to cooperate on an agreed framework for data retention.

At the same time, powerful industry bodies, such as ATIS (Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions) and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), are reported to be working with government and law enforcement agencies to integrate surveillance capabilities into communications infrastructure, according to Future Tense, a project which looks at emerging technologies and how these affect society, policy and culture. It says India is under pressure from another industry organisation, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), “to adopt global standards for surveillance”, calling on the country’s government to create a “centralized monitoring system” and “install state-of-the-art legal intercept equipment”.

TIA is a Washington-based trade group which brings together companies such as Nokia, Siemens Networks and Verizon Wireless, and is focused on issues related to electronic surveillance and is developing standards for intercepting VOIP and data retention alongside with ETSI and ATIS. At least seven Indian companies are members of ETSI, which is said to hold international meetings on data interception thrice a year.

Add to this chilling list the International Chamber of Commerce. It is reported to be seeking the establishment of surveillance centre hubs of several countries to help governments intercept communications and obtain data that is stored in cloud servers in foreign jurisdictions. Given this backdrop why are the US and its cohorts creating a ruckus on ITRs?

It would also mean that by focusing on ITRs and ITU as a major threat to Internet freedom civil society may be jousting at windmills.

Malice and freedom of speech

Two suits highlight the challenge of treading between the two

Among the many legal cases in India related to the use and misuse of the world wide web, two stand out for involving web giants and provoking sharp reaction. These are the cases registered in Delhi district courts in December 2011, objecting to chunks of content—portraying prominent political figures and religious places among others in a certain light—hosted on websites. One was filed by a Delhi journalist, Vinai Rai, requesting the court to press criminal charges against 21 web agencies, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo! India. The other, filed by a social activist, M A A Qasmi, was a civil suit requesting action against 22 web agencies. Both mentioned that the content on the websites was inflammatory, threat to national integrity, unacceptable, and created enmity, hatred and communal discord.

A year on, tangible impact has not been much. The number of accused in the civil case has come down to seven web agencies and in the criminal case the government is yet to issue summons to the companies concerned (see ‘The case so far’). However, these litigations are seen as landmarks in the recent history of the Internet and its interaction with societies and governments. The cases—especially off-the-record comments by the judiciary suggesting blanket ban and pre-screening of all content—provoked a debate on the freedom of expression and Indian cyber laws.

The case so far

JANUARY 13, 2012: Delhi High Court dismisses petition by Google and Facebook asking to be absolved of criminal charges filed in district court

JANUARY 20: High Court asks for reply from Delhi Police in response to plea by Yahoo! India challenging district court summons

FEBRUARY 16: Court refuses to stay proceedings against Facebook and Google but allows them to be represented by counsel

MARCH: Court dismisses criminal charges against Yahoo! India and Microsoft but says the charges can be revived if new evidence comes to light. Sets aside summons

Malicious content exists on the web and may even need to be taken down, but the laws used to remove malicious content can also be used to curb political speech, thus, infringing on the right to freedom of expression, says Prasanth Sugathan, senior advocate with Software Freedom Law Centre, an international network of lawyers.

Some like Pranesh Prakash of non-profit Centre for Internet and Society believe the IT Rules are at odds with the IT Act and give powers for censorship. He explains that the IT Act, 2000, provides for protection of intermediaries; web browsers, social networking sites and websites cannot be held responsible for what a third party publishes on their forums—“similar to the way in which we cannot sue a telephone agency or a post office for someone else making use of these platforms to harass or defame another person”. But the IT rules of 2011 watered down this protection.

Supreme Court advocate and cyber law expert Pavan Duggal explains how. The Act states once a complaint is made against certain content, the web agency hosting it must notify the person who put up the content, verify the content and judge whether it needs to be removed. But the rules state that once the web agency is notified it must remove the content within 36 hours or it could be prosecuted for not acting on the complaint. The rules have gone beyond the Act’s scope, especially vis-a-vis privacy and data protection, leaving no scope for hearing out the accused, he says.

The disjunct between the Act and the rules is being contested in various spheres, including Parliament. But there is a bright side too. Duggal believes the cases have brought pertinent issues, like free speech and privacy concerns, into the public domain. Ramanjeet Chima, policy adviser for Google, says freedom of expression is paramount for Google but the recognition of local sentiments is also being given equal weightage.

Senior advocate Sidharth Luthra, who was representing Facebook in the Delhi High Court, wonders whether the existing Indian laws are in tune with the ever-changing online world. Unwilling to comment on the case, he says the law is limited in its scope, while technology is not. Refusing to comment on the cases, the Google adviser emphasised the need to use the existing provisions of big web agencies to address grievances regarding content.

The Internet “is not the wild wild west”; all content, users and viewers can be traced, Duggal cautions. Since the Internet can impact political issues government is increasingly looking for ways to control it. “There is no ideal solution but it is evident that some monitoring and regulation are required, and in all parts of the world all regimes are in the process of addressing this,” he says.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/down-to-earth-latha-jishnu-dinsa-sachan-moyna-january-15-2013-clash-of-the-cyber-worlds

Clarify and define terms in IT rules, panel tells govt.

praskrishna — 2013-04-03T10:02:33Z

In the wake of concerns that the government is increasingly using ambiguously-phrased terms in legal codes to crack down on online speech, the Parliament’s Committee on Subordinate Legislation has asked for greater clarity and definition on terms which can serve as grounds for restrictions.

The article by Prashant Jha was published in the Hindu on April 1, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

In 2011, the government issued Intermediary Guidelines under Section 79 of the Information Technology (IT) Act. Rule 3 requires intermediaries – including Internet Service Providers (ISPs), web hosts, cyber cafes, blogging platforms, search engines and others – to inform users not to ‘host, display, upload, modify, publish, transmit or share information’ that is ‘grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, libellous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically objectionable, disparaging, or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatsoever.’ Any person aggrieved by the content can ask intermediaries to take it down, and if they do not do so within 36 hours, they can be legally liable.

‘Remove ambiguities’

The committee has heeded the views of NGOs that these terms have not been defined either in the IT Act or the rules. In a report submitted on March 21, it has drawn the attention of the Ministry of Communication and IT to the ‘reported misuse’ of Section 66A of the IT Act in the absence of precise definitions, and said it was important to remove ‘ambiguities/misgivings in the minds of people.’

In its report, the committee, chaired by MP P. Karunakaran, suggested that the definition of those terms in other laws be incorporated in one place for the ‘convenience of reference’ of intermediaries and general public. It has added that those terms not mentioned in other laws be defined in a way that ‘no new category of crimes or offences is created in the process of delegated legislation.’ The committee said it expected the Ministry to have a fresh look at the guidelines and ‘make amendments to ensure there is no ambiguity.’

Highlighting the significance of the committee’s directive not to create new offences, Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society said that this was recognition that ‘many categories of speech prohibited by the Intermediary Guidelines Rules are not prohibited by the statute, and hence cannot be prohibited by the government through these rules.’

‘Conflicting picture’

The committee has also pointed out that there was a ‘conflicting picture’ regarding the ‘legal enforceability’ of these guidelines. In its response, the Ministry told the committee that these are of ‘advisory’ nature; it is not ‘mandatory’ for the intermediary to disable information and this does not amount to ‘censorship.’ But the rules state the intermediary ‘shall act’ within 36 hours of complaint.

The committee said there was a need for ‘clarity on the aforesaid contradictions,’ particularly on the process of ‘take down of content,’ and install ‘safeguards to protect against any abuse during such process.’

Mr. Prakash of CIS said that this had exposed the ‘government’s Janus-faced stance on the issue of mandatory nature of these rules.’

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-april-1-2013-prashant-jha-clarify-and-define-terms-in-it-rules-panel-tells-govt

Clarification on the Information Security Practices of Aadhaar Report

praskrishna — 2017-05-16T16:41:58Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/clarification-on-the-information-security-practices-of-aadhaar-report

Civil Society Pushes for Privacy Panel

praskrishna — 2014-05-27T11:39:20Z

The article was published in the Times of India on May 6, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Civil society organizations are pushing for a 'privacy commission' to provide protection to individuals from illegal breach of their privacy, with guidelines imposing penal sanction against the violators. This assumes significance

This assumes significance at a time when the Centre has decided to set up a judicial panel to probe the snoopgate scandal wherein the BJP government in Gujarat was allegedly involved in illegal surveillance of a woman architect and especially when the Right to Privacy Bill is pending in Parliament.

However, industry consortia, including CII and FICCI, prefer lesser regulation, though calling for a cautious approach.

Among civil society organizations pressing for a stringent privacy bill is the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), the only representative from Kerala to attend the NETmundial conference held recently in Brazil. The meet focused on privacy issues to ensure basic human rights, including freedom of expression.

NETmundial is the first step towards pushing for a privacy law against the snooping and spying on individuals by those in power, including agencies within and outside the country Privacy guidelines should be clear as to what data can be collected without infringing on the dignity of an individual as 'data' represents the duration of a call, while 'metadata' reveals the content of the caH," said ICFOSS director SatishBabu.

Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), another NETmundial participant, also stands for a strong privacy law. "The two-day conference that concluded on April 24 was a baby step towards a privacy law with a road map for global internet governance. It is the first step towards a multi-stakeholder model offering an equal footing for all civil society organizations, academia, government, private sector and the UN fora," said CIS executive director Sunil Abraham

“We are pushing for a privacy law in the country aimed at national privacy regulation and constituting a privacy commission on the lines of the information commission," he added.

Click to read the full story

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-may-6-2014-laxmi-ajai-prasanna-civil-society-pushes-for-privacy-panel

Civil Society groups urge State Judicial Academy to restructure agenda for Judges' Roundtable meet

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:47:36Z

Some of the Civil Society groups in the country have urged the Maharashtra State Judicial Academy to restructure the agenda for the 'Judges Roundtable on Intellectual Property Rights Adjudication' being held in Mumbai on July 24 and 25 to promote public interest and a deeper understanding of intellectual property amongst judicial officers. FICCI is the joint organiser of the event.

In a letter to justice Dr D Y Chandrachud, director (Officiating), Maharashtra State Judicial Academy, the Civil Society groups said that the industry associations like FICCI and CII are primarily known for their lobbying activities towards greater IP protection. Therefore it is not proper for Judicial Academies to collaborate with such organisations without ensuring that the agenda that is set does not promote a biased view. While industry input is necessary, such one-sided collaborations will result in marginalisation of public interest in the IP enforcement
adjudication.

The agenda clearly shows that one side view of IPR and ignores the core concerns emerging out of IPR protection and enforcement related to access to knowledge and access to medicines. Except three academics, all other resource persons outside of the judicial fraternity are from corporate IP law firms and industry associations. The agenda failed to provide a balanced view on IP protection and enforcement, they said.

The letter further said that it is very clear from the agenda and the list of speakers of the roundtable that it is highly skewed, and that there is no balancing of viewpoints that the judicial officers are being presented with. Many of the speakers, who are from corporate law firms, have openly, in public, advocated against public interest provisions of the Indian Patent Act, such as s.3(d) which seeks to prevent evergreening of pharmaceutical patents or s.3(k) which seeks to prevent basic building blocks of technology and business like mathematics,
business methods, and software, from being patented.

Moreover, many of the lawyers have made attempts to import the jurisprudence of developed countries in the matters relating to the enforcement of IPRs, too often with success. Anton Piller orders, which are no longer prevalent in the UK, have been imported into India and modified to even allowing for lock-breaking. This very idea of adhering to foreign jurisprudence on the matters of IPR is highly opposed to the development of indigenous jurisprudence. We feel that jurisprudence of a country should be based on the developmental issues and contexts at the domestic level.

Further, at least four resource persons represent the industry associations like Indian music Industry (IMI), Business Software Alliances (BSA) and The Film & Television Producers Guild of India Ltd. These associations have been actively advocating for IP enforcement law and policies at the national and international level, which undermine the public interest. Hence, these resource people are not in a position to provide a holistic perspective on IP protection and its enforcement, the Civil Society groups contended.

“In the interest of equity and justice, we urge you to take appropriate actions, including requiring the sensitization programme to be balanced both from an industry perspective as well as from a developmental perspective. The Maharashtra State Judicial Academy's collaboration with FICCI does not seem to do either, and instead specific narrow interests seem to be promoted in the form of a sensitization programme. We urge you restructure the agenda to avoid this capture of interest and to actually promote public interest and a deeper understanding of
intellectual property amongst judicial officers,” they said.

This article by Ramesh Shankar appeared in Pharmabiz.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/judges-roundtable-meet

Civil society and Internet Governance: practices from Southeast Asia and beyond

praskrishna — 2013-11-19T09:29:44Z

On 21 October, the day before the opening of the 2013 Internet Governance Forum in Indonesia, Hivos’ Southeast Asia Regional Office co-organised a pre-event workshop with ID-CONFIG, “Civil Society and Internet Governance: Multi-Stakeholder Engagement Practices from Southeast Asia and Beyond,” at the Bali Nusa Dua Convention Centre.

Click to read the original published by Hivos on October 31.

Recognising that the IGF has been a global project for the past eight years, the workshop provided a critical perspective to the forum’s impact on local civil society organisations. In the past, the IGF has been criticised for focusing on policy-level IG debates that lack grassroots, on-the-ground applications. Additionally, it is has been challenged to demonstrate the relevance of IG policies for civil society organisations, which frequently have limited understanding of and involvement in the issue.

By drawing empirical case studies from different regions of Asia, the aim of the workshop was to help civil society organisations find a relevant role in IG and explore how IG frameworks with a focus on the role of civil society can be applied in developing regions to uphold the right of citizens to express themselves through the Internet.

Five speakers discussed the intersections between Internet Freedom and Internet Governance: Arthit Suriyawongkul (Thai Netizen Network, Thailand), Shahzad Ahmad (Bytes 4 All, Pakistan), Donny Budhi Utoyo (ICTWatch, Indonesia), Lobsang Gyatso Sither (Tibet Action Institute), and Pranesh Prakash (Center for Internet and Society, India). Attended by approximately 70 participants, the discussions revolved around the varying feasibility of a multi-stakeholder platform in different political contexts.

The speakers represent civil society organisations in vastly different political environments in South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia. They all continuously pointed out how emerging democratic movements are often counterbalanced by political power concentrated in existing state institutions. In such state-centric Internet Governance contexts, civil society organisations are often pitted against official censorship and filtering attempts. While speakers from relatively more democratic countries, namely India and Indonesia, showcased examples of how civil society organisations have engaged the government in Internet policy-making, those from Thailand and Pakistan illustrated the need for a strong litigation capacity for public interests in order to defend citizens from state infringement of their rights. At the other end of the spectrum, Gyatso Sither emphasised the importance of safeguarding Tibetan activists in the homeland and in the diaspora from surveillance by the Chinese state, whose latest strategies have included interceptions, targeted malware, and cyber attacks.

Nonetheless, civil society organisations are uniquely placed to engage both government agencies, as providers of regulatory frameworks, and the private sector, as the primary provider of ICT infrastructure, to demand equitable access to the Internet and maintain the freedom to expression online. Through an ideal multi-stakeholder framework, civil society organisations can empower communities by strategically using ICT to uphold transparency and accountability.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/hivos-october-31-2013-civil-society-and-internet-governance-practices-southeast-asia-and-beyond

Civil Society - Privacy Bill

praskrishna — 2014-05-27T11:34:53Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/civil-society-privacy-bill.pdf

Civil society & industry oppose India’s plans to modify ITRs

praskrishna — 2012-11-30T09:42:17Z

Industry fears ITU control over Internet; excessive content control and surveillance an issue for civil society.

Shalini Singh's article was published in the Hindu on November 23, 2012.

India’s proposal on International Telecommunications Regulations (ITRs), submitted last month to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the U.N. agency responsible for information and communication technologies, has drawn opposition from, and fears of content control among, civil society and the industry alike.

Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet Society, told The Hindu: “The Indian government’s position on the ITRs can be improved, particularly with regard to the proposed definitions, approach to cyber security, scope of regulation.” However, he said, “we are confident that the Indian position will protect consumer and citizen interest once the government implements changes based on inputs from all… stakeholders.”

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), which represents the $100-billion IT and BPO industry, has strong views against the Internet governance model of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers and Names (ICANN), but favours self-regulation. Its president Som Mittal says: “NASSCOM does not favour oversight by an existing U.N. organisation like ITU. Internet and infrastructure have to be in the hands of expert organisations with proven experience.” NASSCOM has also expressed discomfort with the inclusion of “ICTs along with processing” in Section 21E of India’s proposal, since this would subject IT and BPO industries to inter-governmental regulation through the ITRs.

The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), which represents India’s largest mobile operators with nearly 700 million subscribers, has also opposed any role for ITU in the areas of international roaming and Internet governance, fearing a direct impact on domestic network architecture, costs and technology choices. COAI director-general Rajan Mathews said: “We are already regulated by the Department of Telecom (DoT) and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). Placing the ITU’s jurisdiction over us — where we neither have voice nor recourse — is unacceptable.” The COAI’s position is consistent with the GSM Association (GSMA), the world’s largest association of mobile companies representing 800 operators spanning 220 countries. The COAI further alleges that most of its inputs “have been rejected without reasons assigned or even a meeting.” It has lodged a protest with the DoT.

The Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) has similarly protested against ITU’s jurisdiction over issues of Internet governance, architecture and cost.

Subho Ray, president, Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), said: “We represent a vast majority of Internet companies but have not been consulted by the DoT. We are completely opposed to ITU’s jurisdiction in any area related to Internet policy.”

The FICCI has also given detailed inputs on the dangers of allowing ITU’s jurisdiction, especially in areas of Internet policy and governance. It supports a bottom-up consultative and consensus-led multi-stakeholder approach, similar to the one propounded by Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal at the Internet Governance Forum, the world’s largest multi-stakeholder conference, held in Baku.

Several prominent civil society groups and members of academia involved in Internet governance also have apprehensions about expanding the ITU’s reach to Internet regulation through the ITRs. In a November 15, 2012 letter to Telecom Secretary R. Chandrashekhar, Society for Knowledge Commons, Internet Democracy Project, Free Software Movement of India, Delhi Science Forum, Media for Change and Software Freedom Law Center have complained about not having been consulted, while warning that India’s proposal “could have far reaching implications for the Internet.”

On the issue of cyber security, industry associations and several civil society groups are unanimously against any role for ITU, pointing out that including ill-defined terms such as ‘spam’ and ‘network fraud’ in a binding treaty is a terrible idea. Further, cyber security commitments can force India to cooperate with countries whose military and strategic interests are against it.

Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, Data Security Council of India, and head of NASSCOM’s security initiatives, said: “Cyber security is sought to be taken over by ITU — an area in which it has little experience. Cyber security includes areas of application security, identity and access management, web security, content filtering, cyber forensics, data security, including issues such as cyber espionage and cyber warfare. The ITU has had no involvement in these matters over the last two decades, and should therefore stay out of them.”

Similar views have been expressed in varying degrees by the COAI, the IAMAI, the ISPAI and the FICCI. Dr. Ray of the IAMAI says: “cyber security is essentially a state prerogative and should not be part of an external treaty obligation. Any attempt to channel it through the ITU may be counter productive.”

Mr. Sibal, who has already been challenged by opposition to the domestic IT rules, is aware that if left unaddressed, opposition to India’s stance on ITRs will only escalate at a national and global level, and that if corrections have to be made in India’s position, those will have to be done consensually within the governance structure. Mr. Sibal confirmed that while cyber security was an area of discussion with the ITU, “the ITU does not have any role in Internet governance.”

According to him, either he or the Department will hold meetings on these issues with the industry to further evolve India’s position.

Mr. Chandrashekhar further confirmed that similar to several global national delegations, the government would include media and industry experts as part of its delegation to Dubai, the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT-12) will be held from December 3 to 14. The final decisions on the ITRs and the composition of the delegation would be announced the coming week.

A deeply divided house in Dubai is a strong possibility, with countries which favour democracy and free speech taking a stance against those who, due to political compulsions, have proposed inter-governmental control through the ITRs by the ITU, not just on Internet policy, but also its traffic and content, most of which automatically fall under the definitions of the ICTs.

The 193-countries at THE WCIT may well spend 11 days discussing national proposals to separate issues that can be addressed nationally from those which require inter-governmental cooperation, while further debating which platforms may be best to address global cooperation.

It is equally clear that the existing Internet governance system is unacceptable to most countries, and therefore a more evolved democratic and internationally equitable system, which is managed through a multi-stakeholder process and yet with a definite role for countries like India, appears the only way forward.

Mr. Sibal, at meetings with global Internet governance bodies in Baku, is learnt to have bargained hard for India’s explicit role in the existing Internet governance processes.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-nov-23-2012-shalini-singh-civil-society-and-industry-oppose-indias-plans-to-modify-itrs

Civil Society

praskrishna — 2015-08-24T14:38:40Z

Civil Society

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy_of_CivilSociety.png

Civil Society

praskrishna — 2014-04-22T11:35:18Z

Civil Society

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/CivilSociety.png

Civil rights in the digital age, about the impact the Internet has on civil rights

praskrishna — 2012-10-04T08:50:16Z

Malavika Jayaram, fellow of CIS is a panelist at this workshop to be held at the IGF 2012 in Azerbaijan.

The freedom of internet is increasingly causing heated debate . On the one hand the internet is the embodiment of freedom literally crossing all borders, on the other hand governments more and more think of curtailing e.g. social media when these are used to organize criminal activities. Governments in some countries restrict access to the internet or censor information even before their citizens go online. As a matter of fact the internet in Iran and China has already become an ‘intranet’. But also in the UK there is a growing body of public opinion that is in favor of more supervision of social media. When will the influence of this medium have become so strong that it, in certain situations, could be considered a danger to society? Will supervision then be a solution? Unique is the research carried out by D66-member of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake into internet freedom all over the world. The research should lead to a resolution on civil rights in our digital era. The report is expected to be finished sometime around the IGF in November. Subjects treated are trade, human rights, development, safety and the like. The report will contain a number of concrete suggestions both for businesses and for governments, so as on the one hand to expand opportunities with the help of technology, but also to limit possible risks.

Short program:

Introduction:

Each panelist has 2 minutes to introduce him/herself and make one statement on the topic.

Open discussion:

This is followed by an open discussion between panelist and the audience, fed and led by moderator Robert Guerra.

Recommendations:

15 minutes before the end of the workshop, recommendations, emerged from the open discussion, will be put to word.

Organiser(s) Name:

ECP on behalf of the IGF-NL (ECP | Platform for the Information Society wants to take barriers for the implementation and acceptance of ICT away to the benefit of our economy and society, and in order to strengthen our international competitive position. In addition, ECP (also at a political-governmental level) draws attention to a number of specific themes such as growth of productivity, strengthening of competitiveness and the European Digital Agenda. One of it programs is the public-private partnership NL IGF. NL IGF prepairs for the IGF and provides good embedding of the results of the IGF in national policy) Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture & innovation Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs Hivos, the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation

Previous Workshop(s):

NL IGF organized : 2010: Public-private cooperation on Internet safety/cybercrime http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=W... 2011: Parliamentarian Challenge: a Round Table between Parliamentarians and other Stakeholders http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=W...

Submitted Workshop Panelists:

Marietje Schaake (Euro parliamentarian D66)
Lionel Veer (Dutch Human Rights Ambassador)
Hanane Boujemi (Diplo Foundation and upward of this autumn she will work for Hivos on it’s program 'Internet Govenance for the Mena region'.)
Malavika Jayaram (Fellow of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore (India), assisting on projects and matters relating to IT law, data protection and privacy. She is also working on a Ph.D. on data protection and privacy laws, with a special focus on the new identity project launched in India. Malavika has over 15 years experience as a lawyer with a focus on technology and intellectual property.)
Emin Milli (an Azerbaijani writer)
Moderator: Robert Guerra (a Canadian independent consultant specializing in issues of Internet Freedom, Internet Governance and Human Rights)
Front row: two Dutch students (both male and female)

All speakers mentioned above have confirmed their participation.

Name of Remote Moderator(s):

Sophie Veraart, NL IGF – ECP

Assigned Panellists:

Schaake - Marietje
Veer - Lionel
Boujemi - Hanane
Jayaram - Malavika
Milli - Emin
Guerra - Robert

Read the original published on the IGF website

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/intgovforum-cms-w2012-proposals

Civic hackers seek to find their feet in India

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T06:45:41Z

In 2006, when Sushant Sinha,who holds a doctorate in Internet security from the University of Michigan, tried to use the Indian government’s judicial rulings website, Judis.nic.in, he found it difficult to get the data he was looking for. “Judis.nic.in didn’t have a good text search or ability to sort results by relevance,” Sinha said. The lack of these two critical functions rendered the wealth of data on the site largely unusable.

Sinha, who currently works at Yahoo India, set about creating the legal search engine Indiankanoon. org, which now has a database of more than 1.4 million judgements. It tries to overcome the deficiencies of the government’s effort, indexing judgements by the Supreme Court, the high courts and various tribunals, and linking them to the underlying Acts.

In November, the portal saw around one million unique visits. Sinha is a “civic hacker”, a programmer driven by the urge to create applications that will allow fellow citizens to help themselves and further the democratic process by using information, often from freely available government databases. (A “cracker”, on the other hand, uses similar tools to break into secure systems with malicious intent.)

Nishant Shah, director, research, at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore, offers a wider definition for civic hackers.

“In a Web 2.0 world, you needn’t have programming skills to be a civic hacker. When people have access to digital technologies, they are potentially civic hackers, because they have learned how to negotiate with oppression and injustice. In the West, the ubiquitousness of digital technologies has enabled a lot of people to engage with civic hacking—from subversive documentaries by the Yes Men group to parodic YouTube videos that critique state-market policies— all these qualify as civic hacking.”

WikiLeaks, said Shah, is the biggest example of such a civic hacker in recent times. “Civic hackers are always in grey territory,” he said. “Their legality is always being questioned, depending on how far they go. Remember, WikiLeaks was around for five years before they began talking about banning it.”

Much of the online Indian information in the open domain, from the government or autonomous bodies such as the Election Commission (EC), isn’t always served up such that it can be sliced and diced in ways that citizens can digest, making the civic hacker a critical part of the democratic process in the digital age.

A larger presence in the West, they are thin on the ground in the country. “Civic hackers, while present (in India), are not numerous, and it’s unclear to what extent they are conscious of the work that others are doing, although this could be easily remedied through networking efforts both online and offline,” according to a report by CIS.

One of the reasons for their sparse numbers CIS suggests is that the Indian government doesn’t engage yet with the hacking community,

unlike countries such as the US. New York, Washington DC and San Francisco, for instance, have portals that share data with the intention of encouraging application development.

The NYC BigApps competition has a cash prize of $20,000 (nearly `9 lakh) for the best application using the City of New York’s NYC.gov data mine. Around 350 data sets including public safety data, buildings complaints, and real-time traffic numbers are thrown open to participants. In 2009, an application to let New Yorkers findmass transit routes, public school information, etc., based on their location won the prize.

Despite the lack of incentives, some hackers are still mushrooming in the Indian space. In 2009, just ahead of the April-May general election, 25-year-old Akshay Surve, the founder of a think tank for social change called SocialSync.org Labs, was building a Web application to profile members of Parliament.

The application was aimed at generating a snapshot of each legislator based on the debates they participated in, the number of Parliament sessions attended, and other such information that could help voters make an informed choice.

The websites of the EC and the Lok Sabha had much of this data in Excel and Adobe PDF documents, but that didn’t necessarily make it usable. The formats changed every year, and some files didn’t allow text and numbers to be extracted. To build the mashup—an application that throws together data from more than one source, mashing everything up to create a new service—Surve had to parse and standardize the data.

Realizing that the problem he faced was not an isolated one, Surve and his friend, Pavan Mishra, launched OpenCivic.in this year, a set of standards and APIs (application programming interface) that sift data from government websites and make them available in a machine-readable, remixable format.

Surve’s API is the primary engine for Askneta.com and Gov-Check.net, which track the performance of elected representatives and use OpenCivic’s feed. He plans to keep the API free for non-commercial use. Now his team is at work to develop a mobile version of the API. Another example is RTINation. com, built in August 2009 by a group of graduates from the Kanpur and Delhi Indian Institutes of Technology.

RTINation.com enables the online filing of Right to Information (RTI) applications. A 2009 PricewaterhouseCoopers report estimated that more than a quarter of those who file RTI applications have to visit a government office over three times to do so. RTINation.com generates its revenue by charging each user `125 for an application. It is now building a backoffice to handle marketing and promotion.

“Since we launched, we have seen 200,000 unique visitors,” said Rahul Gupta, a cofounder of RTINation.com. Most civic hackers in India entered the field through work related to various e-governance initiatives and the RTI Act, which has put more government data in the public domain than ever before. This data, though, is dumped in a format that makes it difficult for citizens to use or understand. “Few of the publicly accessible databases are open in terms of data reusability (in terms of machine-readability and openness of formats), data reusability (legally), easily accessible (via search engines, for persons with disabilities, etc.), understandable (marked up with annotations and etadata),” according to CIS. Here is where civic hackers such as Sinha and Surve come in.

CIS suggests that networking across civic hacking teams could strengthen this effort. OpenCivic.in has been proactive in its tie-ups. In February, it joined hands with Yes To Politics, a civic participation endeavour by Texas-based software engineer Murali M. Launched in 2009, Yes To Politics offers tools to help communities work on causes. Among these are analytics of previous elections and a tracker of ongoing campaigns. During its peak usage in the four weeks leading up to the 2009 assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh, the website had on an average 43,000 visitors a day, with a oneday surge of 97,457 visitors on 9 April that year. Yes To Politics, inactive since last year’s polls, is going to launch a new version in January. “Once we do that, we contribute our own data feeds to OpenCivic,” said Murali.

Talking about the challenges, Murali said, “The data sets from the Election Commission’s site were raw and not directly presentable to users. So we had to iteratively transform it and correct (it) on the way and make meaningful sets. It took me almost three-and-a-half weeks to get it ready. And when the EC releases any new data, they always release in PDF files that are hard to retrieve and mashup. So I wrote special apps (applications) to scan files, transform data, and automatically correct spelling mistakes in names.” The 36-year-old software engineer works full-time for Alcatel-Lucent and develops the applications when he’s free. Yes To Politics has been steadily adding bells and whistles to its portal. Recently, it integrated Google Maps into an application called Vote2009, layering it with information such as when a constituency is scheduled to have elections. “Another example is, due to delimitation, about 77 assembly and eight parliamentary constituencies in AP (Andhra Pradesh) have been reorganized. We set up a section where users can look at what has changed and find their constituency based on mandal and district information,” Murali said.

Read the original article in Livemint here

Read it in IndiaInfoline here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/civic-hackers-in-India

Civic BRICS

praskrishna — 2015-08-10T14:19:12Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/civic-brics.pdf