Sarai I-Fellowship Posts 4 & 5
Sorry for the long delay in uploading new content; I've been stuck with lots of things ranging from travel, exams, and falling sick, which have somewhat added to the general inertia I have on posting about the status of my work. I'm now uploading the entries for posts 4 & 5 regarding my research. The entries dealing with post 4 are concerned with my findings drawn from my interviews of Dr. Gulshan Rai (Scientist G-HOD, Department of IT, Govt. of India, and Head, CERT-IN) and also one with an official with the Karnataka Police.
The post 5 entries are my observations from the interviews I had with certain officials of the Delhi Police, along with lots of findings concerning the extent of Internet regulation in that can be tracked from public documents and reports. The last entry will also chart out the new rough time-line of regulation of speech and expression on the Internet by the Indian State.
With the entries under posts 4 and 5, you see a shape emerging as to the form of regulation by which the Indian State has chosen to control speech and expression on the Internet in the national context. In our now bordered Internet, where the founding libertarian belief that the Internet was beyond the power of the nation state to regulate has lost credence, the Indian State has been steadily and quietly expanding its structure of regulation. Flowing from vague legislative authority in the form of the Information Technology Act passed by Parliament in 2000, executive agencies have sought to ensure that Internet regulation takes place not only with respect to online content, subject to opaque control in the form of website blocking requests decided by agencies such as CERT-In; but also control over the infrastructure of the network itself. This network information infrastructure (NII; a term coined by Giampiero Giacomello) is dominated at every stage by the Indian State, which had from the outset sought to regulate ISPs as well as cybercafes. We see regulation happening at the central level, with notifications empowering agencies such as CERT-In to coordinate and sanction direct acts of censorship by issuing website blocking instructions to ISPs, and the creation of ISP license agreements which not only call for compliance with such broad censorship powers, but which also call for frighteningly invasive forms of communication monitoring and interception at the level of the ISP complexes themselves.
What is most notable about all of this perhaps is not as much the potentially Orwellian powers that the Indian State has granted itself, but rather the near abysmal public awareness and protest against the same. The Indian State is in fact particularly vulnerable to public outrage based on claims of violation of our rights to free speech and expression, as typified by its response to the widely recognized public outrage against the blog blocking incident of July 2006. As a result of this, the Indian State seems to be determined to avoid any public inquiry into its regulatory framework vis-a-vis speech and expression on the Internet, which can be seen in my observations from my interview with Dr. Gulshan Rai of CERT. The executive was stung by the outrage triggered in the blog blocking incident into being more careful and circumspect, but it still considers the continuance, and arguably also an expansion, of its regulatory framework (based on extremely flimsy legal authority) necessary and without opposition.
The Centre is only one part of the matter, with there state governments also taking up the mantle of having to regulate matters which touch upon speech and expression on the Internet in India, most notably with regards the framework in which cybercafes operate. In their vitally important role of being cheap publicly available providers of access to the Internet, cybercafes have been systematically brought withing the ambit of local jurisdiction by the police acting on behalf of state governments. In certain cases, as in Karnataka, this is given some clarity in the form of a government order, dubiously authorized supposedly under the provisions of the Information Technology Act, putting in place a structure by which the state monitors usage of such fora, with details having to be maintained in registers of "prescribed formats".
Sorry for the long delay in uploading new content; I've been stuck with lots of things ranging from travel, exams, and falling sick, which have somewhat added to the general inertia I have on posting about the status of my work. I'm now uploading the entries for posts 4 & 5 regarding my research. The entries dealing with post 4 are concerned with my findings drawn from my interviews of Dr. Gulshan Rai (Scientist G-HOD, Department of IT, Govt. of India, and Head, CERT-IN) and also one with an official with the Karnataka Police.
The post 5 entries are my observations from the interviews I had with certain officials of the Delhi Police, along with lots of findings concerning the extent of Internet regulation in that can be tracked from public documents and reports. The last entry will also chart out the new rough time-line of regulation of speech and expression on the Internet by the Indian State.
With the entries under posts 4 and 5, you see a shape emerging as to the form of regulation by which the Indian State has chosen to control speech and expression on the Internet in the national context. In our now bordered Internet, where the founding libertarian belief that the Internet was beyond the power of the nation state to regulate has lost credence, the Indian State has been steadily and quietly expanding its structure of regulation. Flowing from vague legislative authority in the form of the Information Technology Act passed by Parliament in 2000, executive agencies have sought to ensure that Internet regulation takes place not only with respect to online content, subject to opaque control in the form of website blocking requests decided by agencies such as CERT-In; but also control over the infrastructure of the network itself. This network information infrastructure (NII; a term coined by Giampiero Giacomello) is dominated at every stage by the Indian State, which had from the outset sought to regulate ISPs as well as cybercafes. We see regulation happening at the central level, with notifications empowering agencies such as CERT-In to coordinate and sanction direct acts of censorship by issuing website blocking instructions to ISPs, and the creation of ISP license agreements which not only call for compliance with such broad censorship powers, but which also call for frighteningly invasive forms of communication monitoring and interception at the level of the ISP complexes themselves.
What is most notable about all of this perhaps is not as much the potentially Orwellian powers that the Indian State has granted itself, but rather the near abysmal public awareness and protest against the same. The Indian State is in fact particularly vulnerable to public outrage based on claims of violation of our rights to free speech and expression, as typified by its response to the widely recognized public outrage against the blog blocking incident of July 2006. As a result of this, the Indian State seems to be determined to avoid any public inquiry into its regulatory framework vis-a-vis speech and expression on the Internet, which can be seen in my observations from my interview with Dr. Gulshan Rai of CERT. The executive was stung by the outrage triggered in the blog blocking incident into being more careful and circumspect, but it still considers the continuance, and arguably also an expansion, of its regulatory framework (based on extremely flimsy legal authority) necessary and without opposition.
The Centre is only one part of the matter, with there state governments also taking up the mantle of having to regulate matters which touch upon speech and expression on the Internet in India, most notably with regards the framework in which cybercafes operate. In their vitally important role of being cheap publicly available providers of access to the Internet, cybercafes have been systematically brought withing the ambit of local jurisdiction by the police acting on behalf of state governments. In certain cases, as in Karnataka, this is given some clarity in the form of a government order, dubiously authorized supposedly under the provisions of the Information Technology Act, putting in place a structure by which the state monitors usage of such fora, with details having to be maintained in registers of "prescribed formats".
