Centre for Internet and Society

CIS Completed Searches

praskrishna — 2013-10-24T10:26:42Z

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

CIS Comments to HRD Ministry on WIPO Treaty

praskrishna — 2013-12-07T04:43:08Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-comments-to-hrd-on-wipo-treaty.pdf

CIS Comments on Finance Committee Statements to Open Letters on Unique Identity

praskrishna — 2011-11-13T02:39:16Z

We from the Centre for Internet and Society had sent six open letters to the Parliamentary Finance Committee on the UID. The Committee responded through an email on 12 October 2011. Our response to the points raised is reproduced below.

Dear Members of the Finance Committee,

Since January 2011, we have sent six open letters on the Unique Identity (UID) project to the Members of the Finance Committee. The Committee has responded through an email dated 12 October 2011. This letter is in reply to the points that were raised.

Finance Committee: "Comparison between SCOSTA and the UID project are not valid since SCOSTA is fundamentally a standard for smart card based authentication and does not work for the objectives of the UID project."

CIS: We disagree with this statement. The UID Bill states that the aim of the project is to provide identification and authentication services. Biometric technology may be useful for identification. The seventh open letter [1] that we sent to the Committee last week uses basic statistical analysis to demonstrate that the FPIR has to be 10−6 or a thousand-fold greater than the current level mandated by UIDAI procurement policy in order to achieve the project goal of building a national database of unique ID's. SCOSTA based smart card technology is more appropriate for the authentication of individuals because:[2]

Authentication will be based on asymmetric keys and perhaps pass-phrase or pin. This is known as public key infrastructure, and will allow a person to protect their authentication factor, and easily replace it if compromised.
Authentication through public key infrastructure does not depend on connectivity to a centralized network. This will allow for inclusion of unconnected populations.
Authentication through public key infrastructure establishes mutual trust between citizen and state. Instead of only the citizen being made transparent to the state – the state is also made transparent to the citizens. This will lower the presence of fraudulent institutions and corrupt transactions.
Connection to a centralized server is not required for only the authentication of an individual in a transaction. This will lower the cost of transactions and lower the IT overhead costs.

Finance committee: "The UID project follows a different approach and has multiple objectives like providing identity to the residents of India, and ensuring inclusion of poor and marginalized residents in order to enable access to benefits and services."

CIS: We disagree with this statement. Biometrics do not ensure the delivery of benefits. As mentioned in our third open letter,[3] in every transaction that requires the use of the biometric based UID number, there are four points where corruption is possible and delivery of services will not take place:

The technology fails, and does not perform authentication. Lack of connectivity, electricity and non-lab conditions for biometric technology.
The authority fails and delivers a false positive or false negative.
The local agency fails to deliver the service after authentication.
The biometric fails due to biological changes, and thus the individual is denied benefits.

Finance Committee: "Eliminating the fakes, duplicates and ghost identities prevalent in other databases."

CIS: We disagree with this statement. Biometrics cannot eliminate fakes, duplicates and ghost identities. The deduplication algorithm only checks for uniqueness of biometric information. This can easily be defeated by a.) presenting a combination of two persons biometrics, b.) presenting the biometrics of foreign nationals collected remotely using the Internet, and c.) modifying biometric information using software tools like image editors. This is not a remote technological possibility since many registrars like banks have financial incentives for creating ghost identities for benami bank accounts. The deduplication algorithm and technology is completely black-box and has not been subject to any independent audit. Ideally research organisations like CIS should be provided legal immunity so that we can conduct independent audits of the deduplication technology and provide evidence for policy-makers. Since the deduplication technology has such a direct impact on the quality of citizenship – we recommend that the Finance Committee include proper independent audit provisions in the draft bill.

Finance Committee: "Provide a platform for authentication in a cost effective and accessible manner."

CIS: We disagree with this statement. As our first open letter[4] to the Finance Committee notes, biometrics are not appropriate authentication factors. In our opinion the dependency of biometrics on connectivity, deduplication, and centralized storage causes them to be more expensive than smart cards. The onus is upon the UIDAI to demonstrate that biometrics are cheaper than existing systems like magnetic cards used by credit card and debit card companies. If it was truly technologically and economically the better option, surely banks driven by such considerations would have adopted them many years ago.

Finance Committee: "UIDAI is not issuing cards or smart cards."

CIS: We agree with the statement made and that is why it would be possible to defeat the UIDAI authentication system using fevicol and wax as demonstrated by security expert, Jude Terence D'Souza.[5]

Finance Committee: "Cards can be issued by agencies that are providing services."

CIS: We agree with the statement made and that is why the UIDAI cannot claim the benefits of secure authentication. In other words, agencies providing smart cards will have a more secure authentication based on smart cards and sooner or later citizens will stop using the weaker authentication based on biometrics provided by the UIDAI.

Finance Committee: "UID authentication does not exclude smart cards – service providers can still choose to issue smart cards to their beneficiaries or customers if they want to."

CIS: We agree with this statement but that makes the whole project redundant. If service providers are forced to issue smart cards to their customers, they will have to create separate databases of pins and keys for authentication. The service provider will not be able to authenticate users through the UID system.

We are grateful to have received a response from the Finance Committee and look forward to more correspondence with the Committee. We would also be very grateful if the Committee could give us an opportunity to come to Delhi on our expense and testify before the committee on legal, technology and privacy related aspects of the project.

Yours sincerely,

Elonnai Hickok

[1].http://goo.gl/93sl2

[2].http://goo.gl/ZrEQr,http://goo.gl/jHRvq

[3].http://goo.gl/pW3Wi

[4].http://goo.gl/ZrEQr

[5].http://goo.gl/0z22h

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/comments-on-finance-committee-statements

CIS Celebrates 5 Years: A Report in Udayavani

praskrishna — 2013-06-12T11:48:23Z

Udayavani on May 25, 2013, published a report of the evening programme hosted as part of the Centre for Internet and Society's 5 year celebrations in its Bangalore edition.

Dr. Chandrashekhara was the chief guest for the event on May 23, 2013. He gave a talk on Kannada in modern era.


Above is the report published in Udayavani on May 25, 2013

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/udayavani-may-25-2013-cis-celebrates-5-years

CIS Celebrates 5 Years: A Report in Prajavani

praskrishna — 2013-06-12T11:46:48Z

Prajavani published a report on the Centre for Internet and Society's 5 year celebrations organised in Bangalore on the final day, May 23, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a talk on Kannada and IT.


Given below is the report published in Prajavani on May 24, 2013:

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/prajavani-may-24-2013-report-on-cis-celebrates-5-years

CIS Celebrates 5 Years

praskrishna — 2013-05-18T02:09:00Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-celebrates-5-years.pdf

CIS anniversary

praskrishna — 2013-05-06T07:28:07Z

The Centre for Internet and Society will celebrate five years of its existence with an exhibition showcasing its works and accomplishments.

This was published in Hindu Business Line on May 5, 2013

The exhibition will be held concurrently at both Bangalore and Delhi offices from May 20 to 24, 2013, said a press release.

“To promote transparency, we're getting the general public to be our auditors by throwing open our account books and contracts which show how we have spent the Rs 8.3 crore received from our donors.”

The exhibition will also see artists like Kiran Subbaiah, Tara Kelton, Navin Thomas, Abhishek Hazra, among others exhibiting their works, as well as lectures.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-business-line-may-5-2013-cis-anniversary

CIS 12A Certificate

praskrishna — 2014-07-10T05:38:49Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-12-a-certificate.pdf

CIS 5 Years Posters

praskrishna — 2013-06-06T05:46:13Z

All posters that were exhibited recently at CIS during the open days.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-5-years-all-posters.zip

CIS

praskrishna — 2014-09-16T04:18:35Z

CIS

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

CIS

praskrishna — 2012-04-16T07:05:35Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/copy_of_CISlogo1.jpg

CIS

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T08:42:50Z

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

Cijo

praskrishna — 2012-02-15T09:03:09Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/cijoaj2003.jpg

CIIPC-NLUD Workshop on Wikipedia Editing and Open Source Knowledge Sources

praskrishna — 2016-11-23T08:04:16Z

Centre for Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Competition (CIIPC), National Law university, Delhi as part of its Open Science Project, had organised WikiEdit2016 a two day workshop regarding orientation on editing Wikipedia and hands-on-training session. The event was organized on November 11 and 12, 2016 at National Law University in New Delhi.

Rohini Lakshané and Tanveer Hasan conducted and facilitated this workshop.

The purpose of this workshop was to introduce students to diverse aspects of open knowledge resources and to motivate them to move beyond passive consumption of knowledge and become active producers of knowledge. The participants were briefed about the editing activity earlier, because of which they had come prepared with references for the topic that they had earlier selected. We hope that this group (20 students with majority women editors) would continue to edit Wikipedia with thematic (law) focus and contribute further.

More details on the workshop can be accessed here.

Photo courtesy: Prof. Arul George Scaria, National Law University, Delhi.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/ciipc-nlud-workshop-on-wikipedia-editing-and-open-source-knowledge-sources

CIIPC Asia Pacific Workshop on Empirical Methods in Innovation IP and Competition

praskrishna — 2017-03-14T14:10:14Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/files/ciipc-asia-pacific-workshop-on-empirical-methods-in-innovation-ip-and-competition