Centre for Internet and Society

UB Pavanaja

praskrishna — 2013-05-10T18:05:15Z

UB Pavanaja

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u2

praskrishna — 2016-02-19T02:35:08Z

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u1

praskrishna — 2016-02-19T02:27:39Z

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U.S. support sought for treaty to allow blind people access to copyrighted works

praskrishna — 2012-08-01T09:44:47Z

Advocates of visual disability groups from across the world urged the United States to get off the fence at the global copyright negotiations in Geneva this week and actively back a strong treaty that allows blind people access to copyrighted published works.

This article by Rama Lakshmi was published in the Washington Post on July 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The proposed treaty would make it obligatory for countries to allow copyrighted printed published works to be converted into an accessible format for people with visual and reading disabilities and shared around the world without seeking permission from the copyright holder.

The United States and European Union agree in principle to disability access but are not committed to a legally binding global treaty. Disability advocates at the ongoing negotiations of the United Nations agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization, say that if the U.S. backs their demand, the European Union will automatically fall in line.

“The American publishers industry, comprising of the publishing giants, does not want it to be a treaty and only want it to be a set of recommendations,” said James Love, director of the Washington-based nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International that is part of the campaign in Geneva. “The U.S. has the biggest collection of accessible English language books. It all boils down to the American government’s will. Do you or do you not believe that the American libraries should cooperate with blind people in other parts of the world?”

But American publishers say they are opposed to a treaty that has the potential to set the stage for similar exceptions and limitations to the rights of copyright owners in other areas as well.

“We are not against allowing an exception for people with print disabilities, but our concern is that a treaty will establish a precedent that they will then apply in the other areas like educational uses, library and archives,” said Allan Adler, vice president of legal and government affairs at the Association of American Publishers in a telephone interview. “Generally, international treaties establish the minimal rights of the copyright owners first, and not the limitations and exceptions to those rights.”

Adler’s view was echoed in what a U.S. delegate, Justin Hughes, told negotiators in Geneva on Thursday: “We do not accept any form of linkage between the effort on behalf of the world’s print disabled people and any other project. To us, such a linkage between the print disabilities effort and an effort for business affairs would be unprincipled, it would be unethical, and the United States will not have any part of it.”

The U.S. government also is advocating a softer, nonbinding alternative to a legally binding treaty, delegates in Geneva say.

But many disability rights groups say mere recommendations place no obligations and would be toothless.

Disability advocates say that the needs of visually impaired people are being neglected in this battle over what legal shape the agreement ultimately takes.

“The lack of access to information and knowledge is central to the debate about exclusion of visually impaired people,” said George Abraham of Score Foundation, a New Delhi-based group that supports the campaign to produce a treaty.

Time is running out, advocates of the treaty say. The negotiations began as early as 1981 but have now reached a conclusive stage that could result in a treaty by next year. The Geneva discussions end Wednesday, and lack of consensus this week would put off the negotiations to 2014. By then, most negotiators would have moved on, treaty supporters say.

This urgency has driven developing nations like India to take a strong stand. While the exact number is uncertain, experts agree that India has a high proportion of the world’s blind population, with estimates ranging from one-quarter to one-half. G.R. Raghavender, who represents the Indian government at the negotiations, said the Indian delegation “will not return empty-handed.”

Earlier this year, India passed key amendments to its domestic copyrights law to permit people with visual disabilities to freely convert text material into an accessible format. But only a global treaty can allow visually disabled Indians to import and use accessible books without taking permission from the copyright-holder.

“The vast majority of visually disabled people live in poor, developing countries where very little money is spent on converting books into accessible formats, while they are much more readily available elsewhere,” said Pranesh Prakash, a lawyer at the Center for Internet and Society. “The treaty would end the book famine that they currently face.”

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/us-support-sought-for-treaty-to-allow-blind-people-access-to-copyrighted

Typography Day 2016

praskrishna — 2016-04-24T15:16:04Z

Typography Day was organized for the 9th time at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore in collaboration with the Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) with support from India Design Association (InDeAs) and Aksharaya.

Subhashish Panigrahi was a speaker at the event. He along with Pooja Saxena made a presentation on Bringing Ol Chiki to the Digital World.

Typoday 2016: Presentation by Pooja Saxena and Subhashish Panigrahi from Subhashish Panigrahi

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/typography-day-2016

Two women arrested over Facebook gripe on Mumbai shutdown

praskrishna — 2013-01-15T09:26:33Z

A woman who complained about the Indian city of Mumbai shutting down for the funeral of divisive Hindu nationalist politician Balasaheb Thackeray was arrested for "hurting religious sentiments," local police told reporters amid public anger over the case.

This article by Emily Alpert appeared in Los Angeles Times on November 19, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Indian media identified the woman as Shaheen Dhada, 21, who reportedly wrote, "People like Thackeray are born and die daily and one should not observe a bandh [shutdown] for that.”

Police also arrested a friend of hers who "liked" the comment.

The Facebook remark spurred angry backers of Thackeray, a controversial figure who once openly called for attacks on Muslims, to assault a clinic owned by Dhada' uncle. Analysts told the Associated Press that the arrests appeared to be a move by police to head off any further violence from Thackeray supporters.

Free-speech groups were outraged by the ransacking and arrests. In a blistering letter to the chief minister of Maharashtra state, a former Supreme Court justice who now heads the Press Council of India called the charges absurd and unlawful and demanded that the police officers involved be prosecuted.

"We are living in a democracy, not a fascist dictatorship," Markandey Katju wrote.

The Maharashtra director-general of police ordered a probe into the arrests Monday, Indian television station IBN reported. The two women were reportedly released on bail during the day.

The Shiv Sena political party that Thackeray founded has polarized Mumbai over the years with campaigns against Muslims and migrants. His death put the city on high alert over the weekend amid fears of violence. As shops were shuttered and taxis sat idle, some Mumbai residents grew frustrated.

"When tens of thousands were making similar comments ... how did the police single out Shaheen Dhada and her friend for arrest?” wrote Pranesh Prakash of the Center for Internet and Society. He added, "This should not be written off as a harmless case of the police goofing up."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/la-times-nov-19-2012-emily-alpert-two-women-arrested-over-facebook-gripe-on-mumbai-shutdown

Two Indians in Global Commission on Web Governance

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T09:56:05Z

Two Indians are among 25 internationally recognised experts named to assist a global body in identifying and prioritising web governance and Internet policy-related issues.

The article was published in Outlook,in the Economic Times and in Matters India on April 1, 2014. Sunil Abraham has been named as one of the experts.

Subimal Bhattacharjee, former country head of General Dynamics in India and a well known cyber security expert hailing from Assam, and Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society appointed to Research Advisory Network (RAN) of the Global Commission on Internet Governance (GCIG) are the two Indians named.

GCIG is a two-year initiative launched by the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Chatham House. RAN will assist in identifying and prioritising Internet governance and Internet policy related issues within the commission's mandate.

Members of RAN will provide expert briefings to the members of the commission and conduct research and analysis for the commission's preparatory work and final report.

Chaired by Sweden's Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, the commission will produce a comprehensive stand on the future of multi-stakeholder Internet governance.

Bhattacharjee works on cyber security and critical infrastructure protection policy issues.

He was one of the 31 experts invited by the UN through UNIDIR in 2008 to deliberate on the agenda for the 20 nations Group of Governmental Experts that was set up in 2009 to study the impact of cyber on international security.

He was also a member of the Expert Group on Global Initiatives under the Sam Pitroda Expert Committee to review the functioning of Prasar Bharati.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/outlook-april-1-2014-two-indians-in-global-commission-on-web-governance

Twitter’s Censorship Move Aimed at Regaining China?

praskrishna — 2012-01-30T04:54:51Z

Twitter, the popular social networking site for micro-blogging, has announced it is open to content censorship and region-based filtering, if required by law. The service boasts nearly 300 million users from across the world. Vinod Yalburgi writes this in the International Business Times.

In a Twitter post - "Tweets Must Still Flow", the service's management has stated: "Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country, while keeping it available in the rest of the world."

Twitter's drastic move comes in the wake of recent U.S. government allegations against Internet sites like Google, Yahoo and Facebook, regarding the need to regulate and filter controversial user-generated content. Both Google and Facebook have made similar commitments.

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However, it must be seen if either of the three do follow through with those commitments.

Meanwhile, experts quoted in a report by The Times of India, where too social networking Web sites are coming under the scanner, suggest the lack of clarity in laws in countries like India means Twitter can only act reactively; the situation in Germany or France, for example, where laws about pro-Nazi propaganda are codified, they can act proactively.

Another post by Twitter speaks of a new feature that will allow the site's administrators to enable region-based selective content blocking, thereby allowing region-sensitive information to remain hidden from users in those areas. The post also cited the example of Germany and France: "Some countries differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others restrict certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content."

There is also speculation that one reason for this decision could be Twitter's plans to re-enter the Chinese market, where the micro-blogging service has been banned since 2009. Incidentally, China boasts the largest number of Internet users in the world, at this moment.

The hope, for Twitter, must be the promise to block sensitive tweets (or those the Chinese government deems offensive) without affecting the global audience. Twitter has rarely resorted to such censorship practices. However, the company does not seem unwilling to shy away from that responsibility.

"...if and when we are required to withhold a tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld," the company's statement said.

"The region-specific blocking was already being used on video hosting websites like Youtube and Hulu, where due to the wishes of copyright owners many videos are not available in India. Twitter is extending this technology to its tweets," said Pranesh Prakash at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India.

"We have to take care of the sensibilities of our people. Cultural ethos is very important to us," Kapil Sibal, the Indian Telecom Minister, said last month, during his request to both Google and Facebook to filter offensive content.

The trend of social networking Web sites resisting censorship seems a thing of the past. Prakash recalls an incident in 2011, when the U.S. government sought detailed information about a Twitter user, only to be challenged, by the Internet company, in court.

Read the original published by International Business Times on 28 January 2012. Pranesh Prakash was quoted in it.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/twitter2019s-censorship-move-aimed-at-regaining-china

Twitter, Facebook take the lead in blogosphere as blog searches fall by half

praskrishna — 2011-12-07T15:43:11Z

Blogging is old hat. A prominent trend-tracking tool shows that blog searches around the globe have halved, while micro-blogging platforms Twitter and Facebook have grown, suggesting a seminal shift in online communication.

Google Insights, which tracks search terms on Google search engine worldwide, shows a 50% decline for blogs in 2010. On the other hand, micro-blogging sites Twitter and Facebook logged exponential rise in users.

While the number of blogs on the Internet, as tracked by BlogPulse, rose just 21% from 126 million in 2009 to 152 million in 2010, the Tweets on Twitter were up 160% over the same period, according to Internet monitoring website pingdom.com.

A comparative figure for Facebook was not available, but the social networking site showed a 74% rise in users during the period.

Celebrities such as Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, and even the more regular Ramgopal Verma haven't blogged for over six months now. Maverick politician Lalu Prasad hasn't updated his blog either.

"We live in an era of short attention, where Hindi movies have reduced to 90 minutes, emails are shorter, and the books we read are slimmer and faster to skim through," said Mahesh Murthy, founder of social media company Pinstorm Technologies. "The move from blogging to micro-blogging is just part of (this) larger trend. Even our clients are investing more in social media than in blogs," he said, adding blogging declined by 30% in India in 2010.

Blogging, which requires ideas to be bunched to make paragraphs, gained popularity in the early 2000s. But it now appears to have hit the skids, as micro-blogging platforms offer a quicker and easier way of sharing thoughts, either as a few sentences or even mere fragments.

Blogging is also getting more network-driven, as on shared networks like Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus, in contrast to independent blogs on independent domains.

"Blogs have definitely become less noticeable. At the same time, they have become more mainstream, that is, blogs run by newspapers, companies etc," said Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society. Personal blogging, too, has seen a dip, he added.

Twitter and Facebook, the popular social networking platforms that allow users to post comments via mobiles, have caught the attention of firms that manage the online visibility of organisations and individuals. These social media companies have almost stopped maintaining blogs for their clients.

"Companies, too, are planning their ad campaigns keeping social media in mind, forcing bloggers to switch to the micro format," said Deepak Gopalkrishnan, a blogger and cartoonist who works with social media marketing firm Windchimes Communications. Earlier, revenues for blogs came from Google's AdSense system. Today, say people in the social media, Facebook revenues have eclipsed AdSense's revenues for blogs.

Facebook has over 34 million users in India while Twitter has over 13 million.

"Humour bloggers such as Ramesh Srivats and Anand Ramakrishnan haven't updated their blogs for a year. But they are perpetually active on Twitter," Gopalkrishnan said.

This article by Ameya Chumbhale was originally published in the Economic Times on 17 November 2011. Pranesh Prakash has been quoted in this article. Read it here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/twitter-facebook-lead-in-blogosphere

Twitter users hit back at government ban

praskrishna — 2012-08-25T02:51:18Z

The government faced an angry backlash from Twitter users on Thursday after ordering Internet service providers to block about 20 accounts that officials said had spread scare-mongering material that threatened national security.

Published in the Hindustan Times on August 24, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The backlash came as New Delhi turned up the heat on Twitter, threatening "appropriate and suitable action" if it failed to remove the accounts as soon as possible. Several Indian newspapers said this could mean a total ban on access to Twitter in India but government officials would not confirm to Reuters that such a drastic step was being considered.

Twitter, which does not have an office in India, declined to comment. There are about 16 million Twitter users in the South Asian country.

The government has found itself on the defensive this week over what critics see as a clumsy clampdown on social media websites - including Google (GOOG.O), YouTube and Facebook - that has raised questions about freedom of information in the world's largest democracy.

"Dear GOI (Government of India), Keep your Hands Off My Internet. Else face protest" tweeted one user, @Old_Monk60.

India blocked access to more than 300 Web pages after threatening mobile phone text messages and doctored website images fuelled rumours that Muslims, a large minority in the predominantly Hindu country, were planning revenge attacks for violence in Assam, where 80 people have been killed and 300,000 have been displaced since July.

Fearing for their lives, tens of thousands of migrants fled Mumbai, Bangalore and other cities last week. The exodus highlighted underlying tensions in a country with a history of ethnic and religious violence.

According to documents obtained by Reuters, the government has targeted Indian journalists, Britain's Daily Telegraph, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera television in its clampdown on Internet postings it says could inflame communal tensions.

The directives to Internet service providers listed dozens of YouTube, Facebook and Twitter pages. A random sampling of the YouTube postings revealed genuine news footage spliced together with fear-mongering propaganda.

In Washington, the State Department urged New Delhi to balance its security push with respect for basic rights including freedom of speech.

"As the Indian government seeks to preserve security we are urging them also to take into account the importance of freedom of expression in the online world," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.

Nuland said Washington stood ready to consult with US companies as they discuss the issue with the Indian government, although it was not now directly involved.

"The unique characteristics of the online environment need to be respected even as they work through whether there are things these companies can do to help calm the environment," she said.

Indian journalists targeted

The government says Google and Facebook have largely cooperated while Twitter has been much slower to respond.

"Every company, whether it's an entertainment company, or a construction company, or a social media company, has to operate within the laws of the given country," said Sachin Pilot, minister of state in the Ministry of Communications.

Twitter has been instructed to remove 28 pages containing "objectionable content," an interior ministry official said.

"If they do not remove the pages, the Indian government will take appropriate and suitable action," he added.

The government has ordered Internet service providers to block the Twitter accounts of veteran journalist Kanchan Gupta and television anchor Shiv Aroor. Some appeared to have begun complying with the order on Thursday as Twitter users reported difficulties in accessing their pages.

"It is a political decision, because of my criticism of the government," said Gupta, who was an official in the previous government led by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.

The government's actions triggered a storm of criticism from Twitter users, with the hashtags #Emergency2012 and #GOIBlocks among the top trending topics on Twitter in India on Thursday. Some compared the situation with the state of emergency imposed by the government in 1975, when some journalists were jailed.

The Centre for Internet and Society, which analysed the 300 banning orders, found that they contained "numerous mistakes and inconsistencies." Some of the banned websites belonged to people trying to debunk the rumours, for example, it said.

"This isn't about political censorship. This is about the government not knowing how to do online regulation properly," said CIS programme manager Pranesh Prakash.

Parliament last year passed a law that obliges Internet companies to remove a range of objectionable content when requested to do so, a move criticised at the time by rights groups and social media companies.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-hindustantimes-com-aug-24-2012-twitter-users-hit-back-at-govt-ban

Twitter users find several accounts suspended for unknown reasons

praskrishna — 2014-12-07T01:27:05Z

Twitter users woke up on Saturday to find several accounts suspended for unknown reasons, triggering conspiracy theories that only the accounts of right-wing supporters had been targeted.

The article by Vasudha Venugopal was published in the Economic Times on November 2, 2014. Pranesh Prakash gave his inputs.

While it was said to have resulted from a technical glitch that suspended random accounts, several tweeters said there was a pattern to the suspension because 'suspended users' were asked to change their behaviour to be able to continue using the micro-blogging site. But by afternoon it was clear that many accounts, irrespective of their posts, had been suspended for a few hours. All suspended accounts were restored by afternoon.

A message sent out to a tweeter whose account was suspended read, "Twitter has automated systems that find and remove multiple automated spam accounts in bulk.

Unfortunately, your account got caught in one of these spam groups by mistake." Twitter also apologised for the inconvenience but added, "It is possible your account posted an update that appeared to be spam, so please be careful what you tweet... You will need to change your behaviour to continue using Twitter. Repeat violations of the Twitter rules may result in the permanent suspension of your account."

This triggered outrage among the Twitteratti who called it internet policing. There was humour too, with a tweeter posting, "In the Twitter canteen you never get chicken wings in pairs because the right wing is blocked."

Twitter officials said there was no deliberate blocking of accounts and that the incident was an accident as part of spam cleaning process. Pranesh Prakash, policy director, Centre for Internet and Society, said though there have been instances of 'privatisation of censorship' in the recent past, this incident did not look like one such attempt. "It doesn't look deliberate especially because even accounts such as eBay India were suspended."

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-economic-times-vasudha-venugopal-november-2-2014-twitter-users-find-several-accounts-suspended-for-unknown-reasons

Twitter handles: How and why govt erred and what it can do to be smarter & more effective

praskrishna — 2012-09-07T09:22:47Z

Here's a weekend reading recommendation for the mandarins who run the Government of India: it's a freely downloadable, a 145-page long document called "After the Riots". It is a report by the Riot Communities and Victims Panel, set up by the British prime minister to study reasons for the cause, spread and the damage wreaked by the riots that occurred in towns and cities in England in early August 2011.

TV Mahalingam and Shantanu Nandan Sharma's article was published in the Economic Times on August 26, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

During the riots, many British politicians had blamed social media for the quick spreading of lawlessness. "Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media," British Prime Minister David Cameron had told the British parliament. Others called for social networking sites to be "switched off". That is perhaps why the word Twitter features four times in the report, Facebook twice, BBM once and the phrase 'social media' appears 39 times.

So, what did the report have to say about the role of social media in the riots that tore through England? "Although social media was used to mobilise rioters, it has also been acknowledged that a number of forces used social media extensively to engage with their communities and provide reassurance during the riots," reads the report.

The report also highlights that by using social media to provide and receive intelligence, social media "can become a crime fighting tool". It shot down the idea that social media be switched off during times of widespread and serious disorder. The panel also recommended that every neighbourhood policing team should acquire social media capability by the end of 2013.

Bangalore Falling

Bangalore's deputy commissioner of police Vincent S D'Souza has had a harrowing 10 days. He had been asking most of his friends to post his mobile number on all social media networks. D'Souza's message: if anyone from the Northeast feels insecure in any part of the city, contact him directly.

But by then, the damage was already done. In the three days beginning August 15, as many as 37,000 people belonging to India's Northeastern region fled the city after SMS threats spread like a wildfire among the closely-knit Northeastern communities living in the city.

"A lot of the damage happened through social media. The images of victims of Tibet earthquakes and Gujarat riots were morphed and passed on as those of Assam riots. We busted a module in Bangalore. Seized computers and mobiles have given us enough leads," says D'Souza, who is in charge of intelligence.

Nitin Pai, founder of Takshashila Institution, a think tank, believes that the current crisis unfolded in two phases. The first phase, says Pai, was the events (the riots and mobilised violence) that occurred in Assam before August 15. The second phase, starting August 15, was the flight of Northeastern people from various parts of India after rumours of attacks began to flow. "To be fair, what happened between August 15 and August 18 was unprecedented in India," says Pai.

"Perhaps, for the first time, the Indian government had legitimate reasons to censor speech," says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, adding that even international human rights treaties like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), of which India is a signatory, provide for restrictions in free speech for the protection of public order.

However, what most people who have closely followed the events of the last fortnight, will disagree with is the way in which the government has gone about playing censor. "The government got in too late and went about too bluntly," says Pai.

Subtle as a Sledgehammer

"Given that SMS-based mobilisation isn't new in India (stone-pelting incidents in Kashmir led to a ban on SMSes since 2010), the government has had almost 2-3 years to put in place the strategy and ability to counter the problem. The arrests of miscreants spreading rumours through SMSes should have happened sooner," says Pai.

On August 17, two days after the trains from Bangalore began to fill up, an advisory signed by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (ICERT) chief Gulshan Rai cautioned intermediaries that "publishing and hosting of hateful and inflammatory content is an offence" under Section 69A and 79-3(b) of Information Technology Act, 2000. The advisory, which lacked specific details such as the names of the offenders and details of such content, asked all intermediaries to disable inflammatory and hateful content hosted on their website on "a priority basis". ICERT falls under the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

"That essentially made intermediaries like ISPs the judges of what was inflammatory or hate speech and what wasn't," says Abraham. In the following days, more orders would come, this time from the Ministry of IT and Department of Telecommunications and they would worsen things even more. These orders were a lot more specific: they had URLs of websites, Twitter posts and Facebook pages that were ordered to be blocked.

However, like a Centre for Internet and Society posting revealed: the list wasn't compiled with enough care. Some items did not exist, others were not even web addresses and in some case, thanks to overzealous ISPs, whole websites were blocked instead of a page on the site. One webpage that actually busted doctored riot pictures was blocked.

What gave teeth to the rumours that the government was using the events of August 15 to go after its critics was its crackdown on Twitter accounts. First, the government asked for a list of accounts parodying the PMO's account to be blocked, on charges of impersonation (which Twitter eventually did on Friday).

On late Wednesday, several other people, including journalists, a tech entrepreneur, discovered that their accounts had been blocked by some ISPs. Even as speculation raged if this was the case of yet another trigger-happy ISP, the government maintained a stony silence, The Economic Times broke the story that it was a notification issued by Ministry of IT and Department of Telecommunications that resulted in these blocks. The blocked account holders meanwhile continued to tweet, thanks to the ISP-level blocks, making the whole affair shambolic.

Big, Bad Government?

For its part, heavyweights from the government like Sushil Kumar Shinde and Kapil Sibal have maintained that this was just an effort to censor hate speech and not free speech. That's a line many are increasingly finding tough to believe, especially what this government tried to do late last year. In December 2011, Sibal had called a meeting of social networking companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google and asked them to remove offensive content.

A New York Times report had said that Sibal had showed the companies a page that maligned Congress president Sonia Gandhi and told them that this was "unacceptable". After heavy criticism followed Sibal's call to "pre-screen" content, the government backed off. So, is this government's second attempt to muzzle voices that it doesn't want heard?

"Perhaps not. It's just government being itself: gauche, clumsy, big-brother like and swinging a club when it needs to be using a surgeon's knife," says a cyber security consultant who has worked with the government in the past. "But, it would be a good idea to keep track if any more blocks or bans come our way. That would be crucial," he adds.

As for the companies themselves, Facebook and Google have "co-operated" in removing the "objectionable pages", while Twitter, after taking its time, knocked off the PMO "impersonators".
Rules of Engagement

Social media is posing challenges and opportunities for governments and law enforcement agencies across the world. In the developed world, police departments like the New York Police Department (@nypd) or London's Metropolitan Police department (metpoliceuk) use Twitter to engage with citizens. They upload mugs and profiles of suspects, give advisories and ask for retweets of missing persons' pictures. It's a game Indian authorities have just begun to play.

"At best, cyber monitoring is a reactive intervention. So the strategy must be how best to live with social media and counter it [misinformation] from within," says GK Pillai, former Union home secretary. He suggests that the government must create a separate department to exclusively tackle issues arising out of social media and messages.

"If social media is used for any propaganda, the government should use the same platform to counter it. If one hate message appears, there should be a thousand to counter it. We can't ban social media the way China has done it. We have to live with it," he adds.

Social media is a challenge to existing legal frameworks like never before, even in countries where free speech is protected a lot more than ours. Last week, the New York Police Department went to court to get Twitter to reveal details of a person who had tweeted: "people had gonna die like Aurora" at a Broadway theatre. Initially, Twitter had refused to share details but eventually relented (after lots of criticism) and the matter was resolved 'without an arrest'.

Things get even more complex, say government officials, because Twitter is a US-based company and claims that it is beyond India's jurisdiction. "Social media and disputes associated with it are relatively new areas [for India]. The US is already engaged in court battles with social media sites. We are a bit slow on this matter," admits Mohan Parasaran, additional solicitor general of India.

Centre for Internet and Society's Abraham believes that the government needs to put in a process which is transparent when it comes to censoring hate speech. "Even in Saudi Arabia, when you go to a blocked site, reasons are given why the site is being blocked along with addresses of the offices where redressal can be sought," says Abraham.

For now, observers say the Indian government needs to learn to engage and communicate better on social media. "There is a lot of hyperbole out there because the Indian government doesn't communicate — what it does and how it does things — very well. There is a lot of second-hand information and as a result a lot of speculation," says Pai. "Basically, the government is trying to use industrial age policies [like blocking] to solve information age issues," he adds.

A first step, perhaps, is fine-tuning the guidelines for social media use for its departments published by the government last week. It will be a big challenge — a change of mindset — for the Indian government which is used more to monitoring and posturing than engaging.

When the law & social media worlds intersect, the results can be not so pleasant. Here are a few examples:

1) An anonymous tweet that people were going to "die like Aurora" at Broadway show had the New York police department worried. So, the police approached Twitter for details about the account, which Twitter turned down. After some criticism, Twitter shared the details. The matter was resolved "without an arrest".

2) In Early 2010, Paul Chambers was stranded at Robin Hood Airport, south Yorkshire, thanks to cancellation of flights due to heavy snowfall. "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high," he tweeted. He was charged, asked to pay a fine and lost his job. However, two appeals later, Chambers conviction was overturned.

3) When footballer Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the field after suffering a heart attack, 21-year-old Liam Stacey posted a vile, racist remark on Twitter about Muamba. When others questioned him, Stacey was combative and a case was registered against him. Even though Stacey admitted that he was drunk and that he was sorry, a court sentenced him to a 56-day imprisonment.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/economic-times-aug-26-2012-twitter-handles

Twitter

praskrishna — 2019-02-18T14:13:40Z

Twitter

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praskrishna — 2012-02-17T06:28:24Z

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Twists and turns of the SOPA opera

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T09:48:02Z

Proposed DNS filtering threatens the core protocol on which the Internet's universality depends, writes Deepa Kurup in this article published in the Hindu on 15 January 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted in this.

As the debate over piracy and copyright infringement on the web hots up in the United States, with the Government seeking to clamp down on intellectual property rights violations online, Internet majors Reddit, Wikipedia and others are planning a complete “Internet blackout” of their services for 12 hours on January 18.

This is in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), introduced in the House of Representatives last year, and a related legislation in the U.S. Senate, the Protect IP Act.

The way the debate is playing out pits the large media corporations — movie houses, record companies and other IP holders — against ‘Internet users', backed by powerful Internet intermediaries such as Google and Yahoo!, who also stand to lose in a clampdown on websites and services that host content that violates U.S. copyright laws.

Global Relevance

Significantly, the proposed law, backed by big business interests, equips the U.S. Government to act against any website hosting content that it believes infringes copyright, even if hosted overseas. This makes SOPA relevant, globally.

The proposed action could involve domain name system (DNS) filtering or blocking, directing advertisement providers and web payment services to stop doing business with the host and preventing search engines from linking to the site. Penalties for simply streaming copyrighted content, such as movies, personal recordings of television shows or even a clipping of your favourite pop song, could be up to five years.

On the technology side, experts have argued that the proposal to allow DNS filtering (or blocking) can potentially weaken and destabilise the Internet. DNS servers convert every request made in a human-friendly languageto an IP address that computers and networks understand. Now what SOPA proposes is that at this DNS server level, when a request is made for “rogue sites”, it is redirected.

Technically, experts believe that this will have huge implications of the stability of the internet. A whitepaper titled ‘Technical concerns raised by DNS filtering requirements', authored by technology experts, claims that while this will promote more techniques to circumvent the DNS, it threatens “the ability of DNS to provide universal naming, a primary source of the Internet's values as a single, unified, global communications network.”

The DNS is a protocol that allows for universality, which lies at the core of the internet, enabling it to grow and become the important, borderless medium it is today. Further, such blocking would make it tough to distinguish between a resolution failure and a request from a hacked server, creating security concerns. It would also be counterproductive to existing Internet security protocols.

A Firewall

While opponents of the Bill have attacked it as an attempt to create a “firewall” — akin to or even worse than the infamous one that China has for its citizens — they point out that it is at stark odds with the oft-repeated stance of the U.S. on “Internet openness”.

Companies in the business of providing web services are, understandably, against the law as it allows the Government to block access to any intermediaries that facilitate or host any material that infringe on copyrights. This affects every service that hosts user-generated content.

In an advertisement published in The New York Times, nine internet majors including eBay, Google, Yahoo! And LinkedIn, urged the Government to find “targeted ways” to combat “foreign rogue websites” while preserving “the innovation and dynamism” that make the internet a driver of “growth and job creation”. Ironically, the Government too seeks to address protection of jobs and economic interests through this legislation.

Politics of the Internet

In terms of infrastructure, the U.S. controls critical web resources. Contrasting this to the Chinese firewall that blocks content for users within its jurisdiction, the U.S. decision to redirect a link can act as a “global block”, explains Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society. Physically, seven of 13 root servers (or clusters) that run the DNS system, are located in the U.S., he points out. So, for an Indian citizen who chooses to record the latest episode of Dexter and stream it online, it means that both his site and the intermediary could be blacked out, in a post-SOPA world. Currently, the IP holder would have to take the trouble of reporting or challenging this in an Indian court, Mr. Abraham explains.

In recent years, countries led by Brazil, India and China have been lobbying for a greater role for multilateral bodies in controlling the Internet. In 2010, the U.S. Government “liberated” the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) from its direct control. But, bringing a law that allows it to come down heavily on “rogues” unilaterally, is being viewed as a step backwards.

For now, all eyes in the tech community are on the legislation, and the many debates surrounding it, which promise to be among the most controversial and interesting ones in technology in recent times.

Read the original published in the Hindu

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