Fight for cyber freedom

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

When the Indian government pushed the Information Technology Act through Parliament in 2000 its main aim was to regulate e-commerce. During the Mumbai terror strike of 2008, the attackers continuously received encrypted messages from their handlers in Pakistan. This prompted it to amend the law to assume more powers. In the emotionally surcharged atmosphere, Parliament approved the loosely worded amendments without even a debate.

The law covers not only public postings on social networks but also private email messages which may cause “annoyance or inconvenience.” Section 66A, incorporated in 2008, makes it a crime to communicate digitally “any information that is grossly offensive or has menacing character.” Anyone found guilty can be fined and jailed for up to three years.

Section 69 allows the government to intercept, monitor or decrypt information conveyed through digital media and Section 69A empowers it to direct the networks to block access to any information through any computer.

Cyber law experts say these provisions bear the influence of two British laws, the Malicious Communications Act of 1988 and the Communications Act of 2003. The colonial hangover which still afflicts the state 65 years after Independence and the police’s propensity to act in the interests of their political masters render such provisions far more dangerous in India than in Britain.

The police often tag provisions of the Indian Penal Code, drawn up by the British rulers in the 19th century, to cyber law cases. Although IPC has undergone a few revisions since the country gained freedom, it retains its character as an instrument of oppression. State governments routinely invoke its provisions regarding sedition against critics of the government. Cyber giants like Google and Facebook have blocked access from India to hundreds of web pages, responding to requests from the government which alleged they contain objectionable material. While it claims the material violates IPC provisions, most of it is critical of prominent politicians rather than of the central and state governments.

When the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was in power in Kerala, the police lured back a young immigrant from a Gulf State who had forwarded to friends a photograph of a mansion which was wrongfully presented as state party secretary Pinarayi Vijayan’s house. Puducherry police recently arrested a small businessman for alleging in a tweet that Union Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s son Karti has amassed more money than Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra, whom anti-corruption campaigner Arvind Kejriwal has accused of profiting from dubious land deals.

The Maharashtra police hauled up Aseem Trivedi, who posted at his website his own cartoons critical of the state of the nation. The sedition charge against him was dropped following a nationwide uproar, but he still faces charges under the IT Act. The West Bengal government arrested a Jadavpur University professor for circulating material lampooning Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

Early this month Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal had brushed aside criticism of the IT Act saying the fault lay with law enforcers, not the law. Offences under Sec 66A are bailable and cops had jailed the accused due to ignorance, he said. “Just because some people act improperly the law cannot be scrapped,” he added.

Netizens reacted angrily to the arrest of Shaheen Dhada, who wrote in Facebook that Mumbai had shut down on the death of Shiv Sena founder Bal Thackeray out of fear, not respect, and her friend Renu Srinivasan, who “liked” the comment. They considered Shaheen’s assessment fair and contrasted it with the news channels’ fawning coverage of the funeral of Thackeray, whom a judicial commission had found guilty of inciting mob violence. Sibal conceded the arrests were illegal.

The public outcry encouraged two Air India employees, who were held in custody for 12 days in May for allegedly making insulting comments about politicians, to come out with the story of their humiliation.

Sibal has convened a meeting on Thursday to review the working of the IT Act. But the fight for cyber freedom may well be long drawn out. While civil society groups want the government to amend the law to protect privacy and legitimate criticism, Sibal appears inclined to stop with writing to the state governments to ensure that cases are initiated only after clearance by designated officers of the rank of Inspector General of Police. This may not improve the situation. Several of the reported cases of misuse of the law were in fact initiated with the knowledge and concurrence of high-ranking officers.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, November 27, 2012.

Youths' freedom struggle

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

Sixty-five years after the successful end of India’s freedom struggle, young citizens are engaged in a freedom struggle of their own. The fight this time is to secure Internet freedom.

India’s Internet population, which crossed the 100 million mark last November, is expected to touch 300 million in three years if the present growth rate is maintained. There are more than 2.6 million domain names and about one million businesses are online.

Already India ranks third after China and the United States in Internet use and it is well poised to top the list as it replaces China as the world’s most populous country in the next few decades.

After the electorate rebuffed the Emergency regime of 1975-77, which resorted to rigorous censorship, successive governments have tried to live with a free press. With public opinion opposed to new legal curbs on the media, they have been watching idly as television channels under professionally weak leadership act irresponsibly.

However, they have been unwilling to view the new media’s irreverent conduct with the same degree of indulgence. Surreptitious attempts to gag Internet criticism have been on for more than a decade.  Shivam Vij, a Delhi-based journalist and active Internet campaigner, has chronicled the ham-handed and often counterproductive censorship efforts of this period.

According to Vij, the first act of censorship was in 1999 when the Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited, then the country’s biggest Internet service provider, blocked the website of Dawn to deny Indians access to the Pakistani version of the armed conflict on the icy heights of Siachen.  The VSNL had complied with the wishes of the government, headed by the Bharatiya Janata Party, without any written instructions.

The following year Parliament enacted the Information Technology Act, which provided for the creation of the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to deal with problems like hacking and malware attacks. Although the law does not authorise the agency to block websites, Vij says, it has been resorting to censorship since it came into being in 2003.

The clandestine operation came to light when the government, acting on CERT-In’s advice, asked the ISPs to block the Yahoo! Groups page of a small outfit of the Khasi tribe of Meghalaya state and they inexplicably blocked all Yahoo! Groups, leading to a public uproar. The resultant publicity enabled the Khasi group, which had only 82 members at the time, to reach a large audience through another platform.

A similar faux pas occurred three years later when the ISPs blocked all blogs in Google’s Blogger site. The New York Times reported the event and the embassy in Washington informed the government the report was an international embarrassment. Thereafter CERT-In asked the ISPs to block only specific blogs and not the entire Blogger platform.  By now the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance was in power.

Since 2007 social networking sites have taken off hundreds of pages at the instance of the Indian government or courts following complaints that they contained defamatory material. The Google revealed 70 per cent of the material it removed between January and June last year in response to official requests was criticism of the government. 

New rules under the IT Act framed by the government last year made “intermediaries” like social networks and blog platforms liable for the content. Anyone can now lodge a complaint against what appears on blogs and social network sites and ask for that objectionable content to be removed.   

While the authorities, in demanding removal of material, claimed it was prejudicial to national security or might create enmity between different groups, most of it was criticism of Central or state leaders. A Facebook page critical of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi was in the dossier Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal placed before executives of FB, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!, whom he summoned to demand that they evolve a mechanism to delete objectionable content.

Some of what the government considers objectionable material can be attributed to the immaturity of India’s Internet users, 75 per cent of whom are below 35 years. The social networks, which can be accessed easily, happen to be the only forums where they can express themselves freely.

P. Rajeeve, a Communist Party of India-Marxist member of the Rajya Sabha, has given notice of a motion for annulment of the new IT rules. An online petition in support of the move says the government is invoking national security and public morality concerns to undermine digital rights and exhorts Internet users to tell the lawmakers they won’t stand for censorship and unsupervised information sharing.--Gulf Today, Sharjah, May 8, 2012.

Bid to rein in social media

BRP Bhaskar
Gulf Today

As the world hailed the social media’s role in promoting change last week, authorities in India, annoyed by content unacceptable to them, were looking for ways to rein it in.

The United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, in focusing on social media during the International Human Rights Day celebrations on Saturday, had said it enabled ordinary people, from Cairo and Tunis to Madrid and New York, to demand change.

Indian citizens howled in protest as a New York Times blog revealed Communications Minister Kapil Sibal had been talking to executives of Internet companies and social media sites to persuade them to prescreen user content from the country and remove objectionable material before it goes online.

Sibal had reportedly shown them a Facebook page that maligned Congress President Sonia Gandhi and said, “This is unacceptable.” The Google Transparency Report disclosed that between January and June this year the Indian government had requested the company to remove 358 items from its services, including YouTube and Orkut, citing various reasons.

The most widely cited reason was criticism of the government (255 items). Other reasons included defamation (39), privacy and security (20), impersonation (14), hate speech (8), pornography (3) and national security (1). The reason for seeking blocking of the remaining15 items was not clear.

The government’s effort met with a good measure of success. Although the report said “we declined the majority of these requests” it conceded that as much as 51 per cent of them were complied with. The contradiction in the statement apparently stems from the fact that in many cases compliance was partial, with the company locally restricting videos “that appeared to violate local laws prohibiting speech that could incite enmity between communities”.

Google also received requests from the police to remove 236 communities and profiles from Orkut. It did not comply with the request as the content did not violate its community standards or local laws. There were also requests to remove some YouTube videos on the ground that they displayed protests against social leaders or used offensive language against religious leaders.

Sibal’s interaction with Internet service providers was part of a misconceived plan to curb new media. In 2000, the government had enacted the Information Technology Act, which, while giving legitimacy to electronic communication, provided for action against those misusing the facility. Three years ago the law was amended in the light of experience.

Exercising powers flowing from this law, the Kerala police had arrested a doctor who created a website in the name of a former minister and uploaded allegedly defamatory videos. On a complaint by Communist Party of India-Marxist leader Pinarayi Vijayan, it had lured home a UAE-based Keralite who allegedly forwarded by e-mail the photograph of a mansion falsely claiming it was Vijayan’s house.

Last year the makers of BlackBerry refused India’s request to give it access to users’ messages. Early this year the government assumed the power to ask ISPs to delete information posted on websites which officials or private citizens considered disparaging or harassing. It has also drawn up plans to set up a unit to monitor information posted on websites and social media sites.

Anna Hazare’s supporters are using social networks with a fair degree of success in their anti-corruption drive. This, coupled with the government’s citing of criticism as the main reason for wanting to block social network posts, lends support to the widely held view that fear of a Jasmine revolution haunts the authorities.

According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India, the number of Net users is expected to touch 121 million by the year-end. Of them, 97 million may be active users who “access Internet at least once in a month”.

Google India claims more than 100 million users and Facebook more than 25 million. While the country has a large Internet population, the authorities’ threat perception appears to be exaggerated. Indian cyber space is as diverse and divided as Indian society and polity, and cannot at present give rise to a movement of the kind that swept the Arab countries.

The freedom the Indian media enjoys flows from the freedoms of speech and expression that the Constitution guarantees to all citizens. It must apply to digital media as much as it does to print and electronic media. Any regulatory mechanism created to check misuse of the freedom must remain outside the government’s control but it must have statutory backing.--Gulf Today, December 12, 2011.

Rajeev Motwani

The following is from SAJAforum, the newsy SAJA blog - new South Asian stuff daily:
http://www.sajaforum.org

If you read a statement by Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google that read, "Today, whenever you use a piece of technology, there is a good chance a little bit of Rajeev Motwani is behind it," you are likely to think Motwani was a wise old man.

Turns out Motwani, a Stanford professor and one of the earliest influencers and advisers to Google and Paypal - and who died on Friday - was wise, but only 45.

Read all about Motwani, including a tribute from Brin and leading blogger and SAJA co-founder Om Malik, at http://www.sajaforum.org/2009/06/obit-rajeev-motwani.html

You will also find links to papers Motwani (an IIT and UC Berkeley grad) co-wrote with the two Google boys in early 1998 that set them on the path to fame and fortune.

Please post your comments there.

Prof. Sree Sreenivasan | sree@sree.net
Dean of Student Affairs, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
http://www.sree.net | http://www.sreetips.com
Twitter: @sreenet - http://twitter.com/sreenet

Ralph Nader visits Google

Below is Ralph Nader's first-person account of a visit to Google, distributed by countercurrents.org

Mountain View, California — An invitation to visit Google’s headquarters and meet some of the people who made this ten year old giant that is giving Microsoft the nervies has to start with wonder.

The “campus” keeps spreading with the growth of Google into more and more fields, even though advertising revenue still comprises over 90 percent of its total revenues. The company wants to “change the world,” make all information digital and accessible through Google. Its company motto is “Do No Evil,” which comes under increasing scrutiny, especially in the firm’s business with the national security state in Washington, DC and with the censors of Red China.

Google’s two founders out of Stanford graduate school — Sergey Brin and Larry Page — place the highest premium on hiring smart, motivated people who provide their own edge and work their own hours.

We were given “the tour” before entering a large space to be asked and answer questions before an audience of wunderkinds. E-mail traffic was monitored worldwide with a variety of electronic globes with various lights marking which countries were experiencing high or low traffic. Africa was the least lit. One of our photographers started to take a picture but was politely waved away with a few proprietary words. A new breed of trade secrets.

I noticed all the places where food — free and nutritious — was available. The guide said that food is no further than 150 feet from any workplace. “How can they keep their weight down with all these tempting repasts?” I asked. “Wait,” he said, leading us toward a large room where an almost eerie silence surrounded dozens of exercising Googlelites going through their solitary motions at 3:45 in the afternoon.
“How many hours do they work?” one of my colleagues asked. “We don’t really know. As long as they want to,” came the response.

In the amphitheatre, the director of communications and I started a Q and A, followed by more questions from the audience. It was followed by a YouTube interview. You can see both of them on: Q&A and Interview.

Google is a gigantic information means, bedecked with ever complex software, to what end? Information ideally leads to knowledge, then to judgment, then to wisdom and then to some action. As the ancient Chinese proverb succinctly put it — “To know and not to do is not to know.”

But what happens when a company is riding an ever rising crest of digitized information avalanches without being able to catch its breath and ask, “information for what?” I commented that we have had more information available in the last twenty five years, though our country and world seem to be getting worse overall; measured by indicators of the human condition. With information being the “currency of democracy,” conditions should be improving across the board.

“Knowledge for what?” I asked. Well, for starters, Google is trying to figure out how to put on its own Presidential debates, starting with one in New Orleans in the autumn. Certainly it can deliver an internet audience of considerable size. But will the major candidates balk if there are other candidates meeting criteria such as a majority of Americans wanting them to participate?

The present Commission on Presidential Debates is a private nonprofit corporation created and controlled by the Republican and Democratic Parties (see opendebates). They do not want other seats on the stage and the television networks follow along with this exclusionary format.
Google, with its own Foundation looking for creative applications that produce results for the well-being of people, should hold regular public hearings on the ground around the country for ideas. They may be surprised by what people propose.
In any event, the examples of knowing but not doing are everywhere. More people succumbed to tuberculosis in the world last year than ten years ago. Medical scientists learned how to treat TB nearly fifty years ago. Knowledge alone is not enough.

For years the technology to present the up-to-date voting record of each member of Congress has been available. Yet only about a dozen legislators do so, led by Reps. Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Chris Shays (R-CT). Recalcitrant power blocks what people most want directly from their lawmakers’ website. Here Google can make the difference with Capitol Hill, if it wants to connect information technology to informed voters.
When the internet began, some of us thought that it would make it easy and cheap for people to band together for bargaining and lobbying as consumers. At last, the big banks, insurance companies, credit card companies, automobile firms and so forth would have organized countervailing consumer power with millions of members and ample full time staffs. It has not happened.

Clearly technology and information by themselves do not produce beneficial change. That depends on how decentralized political, economic and social power is exercised in a corporate society where the few decide for the many.

I left Google hoping for a more extensive follow-up conversation, grounded in Marcus Cicero’s assertion, over 2000 years ago, that “Freedom is participation in power.” That is what connects knowledge to beneficial action, if people have that freedom.

An Indian Google may come from a small town, not Bangalore or Bombay

Can India Produce a Google? Sandip Roy, of New American Media, put this question to Rafiq Dossani, Executive Director of South Asia Programs at Stanford University's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, in an interview.

Dossani, who was once an editor with Business India weekly, one of India's best-known business publications, is the author of a book "India Arriving-How this Economic Powerhouse is Redefining Global Business", which was published in the United States recently.

Dossani told Roy: “If you ask me, ‘Will those who started the industry and have taken it to its present size - firms like TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), Infosys, Wipro, can they be the ones to do the kind of Google creative work?’ the answer is no. In fact, Google was not created by a large firm, it was a startup.

“Now, if you ask whether someone else might do that in India, and who that will be, well I have an answer that will probably surprise you. I think it will come not from Silicon Valley inspired startups, although several of those have been formed and are doing fairly innovative work, but catering mostly to the global markets. It will come when India's local market reaches a certain level of maturity, and it'll come from a small town. It won't come from Bangalore or Bombay, Delhi, or one of those cities.

More excerpts from the interview at the NAM site.