Shuddhabrata Sengupta on Wed, 23 May 2001 07:17:57 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> the new authoritarianism |
apologies for cross posting for those who are also on the Sarai-Reader-List. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- UNTOUCHABLE CYBERSHADOWS This is in response to the posting that have already been made by Rana Dasgupta (forwarded by me) about the 'new authoritarianism' , (Thursday May 17) alerting us to the imminent dangers to the 'public domain' of cyberspace in India. Rana's telling terminal question - "How can you tell when the cybershadow of an untouchable has fallen across you?" is very pertinent. Following from Rana's argument, I think that the perceived threat of 'contamination', and the drawing up of draconian regimes to wipe out such contamination in cybercafes and in cyberspace is not unlike the great fear of the lower castes having access to the 'code' of Sanskrit that beset the pundits of previous times. They would defile the code with the pollution that comes with being lower caste bodies speaking the code. Similarly, the Indian corner of 'cspace' needs to be protected from unruly and unpredictable usage practices and patterns in public spaces. There is every likelihood that the clinical cyber-ram-rajya-utopia of acres of medical transcription, html sweatshops and software export processing zones so beloved of our rulers may be contaminated by 'bad boys and girls looking at bad websites on the internet in streetcorner cybercafes'. In a little known story in the Ramayana, Ram in deference to the consensus of the brahmins in his court(oce he was back in Ayodhya and had established Rram Rajya) condemned the untouchable Shambuk to death , because he had dared to deploy Sanskrit. The impure person speaking the code of the masters has always been seen in the glorious tradition of high culture,as nothing less than a capital crime. Today, Information Technology is the new code of the masters. The Sanskrit of our times. And just as the language of the gods was always in danger of being sullied and polluted by the hordes, so too must the whole arena of Information technology be sanitized. We might consider the global regimes of surveillance and sanitization that now surround us (viz the pioneering internet related legislations in Australia, Italy, Singapore and UK) as instances of a sweeping international pandemic of a peculiarly 'Sanskritic' paranoia with the purity of code. Purify the code at the places where it has the greatest traffic (in India - the Cybercafes) and make sure that only those who wear the sacred thread of a licence can actually use the code. (the licencing regualtions, of which, more shortly) The threat to the free space of the public domain of cyberspace comes at two ends and this posting is an attempt to further discuss the two ends of the threat.Both ends seem to reflect a state apparatus gone insane.Unfortunately we all have to deal with this insanity, it is already begining to deal with us on the streets.In a quickly forgotten incident that distracted our attention a few months ago, a young man in Okhla was gunned down in cold blood as he slept by crack commandoes of the Delhi Police (with you, for you, always) . They had come to the conclusion that HE was the terrorist who had let off a few rounds in the Red Fort. And how did they come to this conclusion - he frequented a cybercafe far too frequently. The Control over Content : A Law, A Guideline and A Draft Bill (Two and a Half ways to choke freedome in cyberspace) Here what we have to alert ourselves to is the immense weight of legislation that is shortly to be brought to bear on the space of creation and dissemination of media content. We are talking about An existing and a would be law and a set of guidelines. First the Law The Information Technology Act of 2000 (which is now law, and people are being arrested under its provisions) in its now notorious clauses 66 and 67 criminalized 'hacking' and 'publishing of information which is obscene in electronic form'.Clause 80 of the same Act empowers police or state officers or to enter and search a Public Space (read Cybercafes) in pursuit of cyber criminals or would be cyber criminals. The language of the state in this regard is chilling , and I quote from the 13th Chapter (Miscellaneous) of the IT Act 2000 "Section 80. Power of police officer and other officers to enter, search, etc. (1) Notwithstanding anything contained in the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, any police officer, not below the rank of a Deputy Superintendent of Police, or any other officer of the Central Government or a State Government authorised by the Central Government in this behalf may enter any public place and search and arrest without warrant any person found therein who is reasonably suspected or having committed or of committing or of being about to commit any offence under this Act" Explanation.—For the purposes of this sub-section, the expression "public place" includes any public conveyance, any hotel, any shop or any other place intended for use by, or accessible to the public." To read the IT Act 2000 online (or to download it) go to - http://www.mit.gov.in/itbillonline/it_framef.htm Now the Guideline After this we have already witnessed the promulgation of the Guidelines and General Information for the Setting Up of Submarine Cable Landings for International Gateways for the Internet (issued by the Ministry of Communications, Government of India) which makes provision for the interception of all and any messages and routine surveillance of data and regulations on encryption and limitations to privacy - all in the name of the national interest, public order, morality and the security of the state. To view the 'Guidelines' - go to - http://www.naavi.com/cl_editorial/edit_12aug00_1a.html Jeebesh Bagchi, in 'A Chronology of the Media and the State in India' ( the Sarai Reader 01 - pgs. 127 - 132 or (www.sarai.net/journal/pdf/127-132%20(law).pdf) has drawn a very succint picture of the scenario till here. Examining the ways in which the various media have been dealt with state in India from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. With the drawing up of the draft of the Communications and Convergence Bill we enter a qualitiatively new scenario.And since this posting has been occasioned Up till now, the control (in so far as content creation is concerned) has been retrospective. The IT Act enables prosecution, but only AFTER the offending website has been published and found by the cyber-informers who work for the Indian state (zealous and stupid journalists who act as guardians of public morality and state security, zealous and stupid cyberwarriors - the growing army of 'counter-hackers', dying to be on the payroll of the vigilant state, and some zealous and stupid so called feminist organisations that are more keen on censorship than they are in any form of human liberation). However, if the new Communications and Convergence Bill becomes law, then the control will be excercised PRIOR to the act of actually uploading anything on to the internet. The new italian cyberlaws require any person uploading content on to the web to register with the state as a journalist. This is similar to the system of 'accreditation' of journalists, which is one way of keeping controls in place over the print medium. But the C & C Bill goes one step further. It asks that anyone transmitting any media rich content over any device (read audio or video streaming) now must obtain a license from the soon to be formed 'Communication Commission of India'. Now suppose you are running a website and you want to upload streaming audio content on to the site, and you havent bothered to pay the license fee to the Communications Commission of India, which means you havent given any undertaking about the nature of your content. Suppose you have collected MP3 files from 'free music' sites or have actually gone to the trouble to record someone making music in their basement or in the open air and are uploading such files. Now suppose that some of these songs content material that is objectionable. For instance it could be a Baul Folk song containing what woud be considered by some 'obscene' and 'scurrilous' lyrics. Then you are liable to be prosecuted on three counts. First, for streaming audio ontent without having the license to do so. Second, for disregarding copyright conventions in your streaming audio content Third, for communicating 'obscene' content. In each of these cases you are liable to imprisonment ofr three to five years, and fines can be levied to the tune of fifty, ten, five or three crores, depending upon the seriousness of your transgression. This means that anyone who is happily streaming audio or video, or wants to do so in the near future, had better be prepared for a spell as a guest of the Government of India, and have just received a bequest for fifty crores with which they can pay the fine. If you think I am joking, take a look at the draft bill (and its wonderful language) at http://www.mit.gov.in/convergence.htm I am posting choice and chilling excerpts, in an accompanying post, that might save you the bother of ploughing through many pages of legales. But I am sure that are many other lethal provisions whose implications I have not been able to fathom lurking throughout the draft. And further, note also that it empowers the state to intercept any message that may be transmitted on any network anywhere, and that in times of war of national emergency the state may take over any communication network or content application provider anywhere. The draft bill has now been cleared by the GoM (Group of Ministers) and should hit parliament in the monsoon session.Where it will no doubt receive unanimous support from right,left and centre. The only way to make a few semi-comatose MPs to dither before they append their signatures is to make a sufficient amount of noise in what is nowadays called Civil Society. THe IT Act is History. No one made any noise at that time. We know what that has meant. Each piece of draconian legislation learns its draconian way from its predecessor. And if you thought that the C&C Bill was the end of the road, think again.Lurking in the corridors of the Ministry of Information Technology is the Semiconductor Design Bill. Which takes the regime straight into the hardware, into the question of whether or not the chips that you are using have the right kind of circuit design. In the near future, surveillance of what you do will be built into the machines that you use. All that is required is for the state to mandate that you can only use a machine which has a certain kind of chip built in, or added to it. This could mean that the computer that you use will be itself open to monitoring, by law. This is analogous to the 'registration' and 'licensing' of typewriters, photocopiers and cyclostyling machines that was once considered necessary in certain peoples democracies of eastern europe.What a way to go. So, we will all soon have identity cards to enter a cybercafe (which will allow remote digital monitoring of our individual time online) licenses to upload web content and stiff punishment if you are an unlicensed content provider institutionalized frameworks for surveillance and censorship mechanisms to block offending sites at the gateways and submarine cable landing stations and mandatory chips in our machines What else do we need? Meanwhile, a public spirited groups of citizens have filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Delhi Courts asking for all cybercafes to have mandatory patrolling and to be fitted by law with filters to ensure that people cannot access unsavoury sites.The Hindustan Times of May 1, 2001 carried a piece detailing the PIL. I quote from the HT article 'Smut cookies don’t crumble ' by Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad.(for the full text of this article go to http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/010501/bigidea.asp) "...In March, public interest litigation was filed in Delhi High Court against the cabinet secretary, the police commissioner of Delhi, the Delhi government, and the union ministries of Communications, Science and Technology, Home Affairs, Information and Broadcasting, Human Resources Development, and Social Welfare, Justice and Empowerment. The petitioners wanted the government to formulate procedures to prevent Indians, especially minors, from accessing pornographic websites as well as those advocating drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. They wanted the government to direct all Indian internet service providers (ISPs) to install filtering software at their gateways to prevent access to such websites. They also wanted all cybercafés and educational institutions to compulsorily install filtering software on their computers to "prevent exposure to inappropriate material that is sexual, hateful, or violent in nature, or encourages activities that are dangerous or illegal". They sought compulsory licensing of cybercafés by the government, and demanded: "At cybercafés, children below 18 years of age should be allowed to surf the internet only when they produce a permission letter from their parents, attested by a gazetted officer". The petitioners also wanted all cybercafés to maintain complete records of all the websites, chat rooms and bulletin boards visited by each one of their customers. Admitting the PIL, a division bench consisting of Chief Justice Arijit Passayat and Justice D. K. Jain directed the cabinet secretary to "hold a meeting of various ministries and file an affidavit indicating the definite stand taken by the government."..." Surely, this meeting has been held. Measures will be taken. Meanwhile, No public interest litigations. or campaings, to protect the privacy, freedom of expression. or right to information of the surfing citizen are anywhere in sight.Given the sanctimonious zeal of our judiciary, this censorious argument is likely to be the winning argument, and the ad-hoc police measures being followed in Bombay will soon become part of the acceptable, the routine, the everyday. Like the censor ceritificate before a film screening in the cinema, like the dishwater in our tv sets, like the boredom in the airwaves. Meanwhile, we will all be outcastes and untouchables in cyberspace.And the state will be looking out for our cybershadows. Shuddhabrata Sengupta SARAI: The New Media Initiative Centre for the Study of Developing Societies 29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India www.sarai.net # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net