Internet Censorship in India

The Kerala High Court has recently passed a significant judgment declaring that watching pornography in private without sharing or exhibiting it to others is not an offence under Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which pertains to the sale, distribution, and display of obscene material.

Justice PV Kunhikrishnan, while delivering the judgment in the case of Aneesh v State of Kerala, asserted that an individual's private choice to view explicit content in their personal space should not be subject to legal interference, as it would violate their right to privacy.

This ruling clarifies that watching explicit content privately, whether in the form of photos or videos on a mobile device, does not fall within the purview of Section 292 IPC. The court made it clear that this provision only applies when someone attempts to circulate, distribute, or publicly exhibit such material.

In a specific case where an individual was charged under Section 292 for watching explicit videos on his mobile phone in a public place, the court quashed the case, emphasizing the necessity of concrete evidence to establish the offense.

India's cybersecurity censor, the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), will require  cloud and VPN providers to register their users. Custodial wallets, exchange, virtual asset providers, cloud providers and even VPN providers will have to keep records of their customers (KYC) and records of financial transactions for five years. Service providers will maintain logs of their systems for 180 days.

This would defeat the purpose of using a VPN and creates honeypots of data that could be misused for surveillance or stolen.

CERT-In are claiming that the new requirements will improve the overall cybersecurity posture and ensure a safe and trusted internet in India.

Update: VPN Providers Threaten to Quit India

6th May 2022. See article from wired.com

VPN companies are squaring up for a fight with the Indian government over new rules designed to change how they operate in the country. On April 28, officials announced that virtual private network companies will be required to collect swathes of customer data204and maintain it for five years or more204under a new national directive. VPN providers have two months to accede to the rules and start collecting data.

...

There's a worry other, more liberal governments will follow the Indian-Chinese model, too. Attacks on end-to-end encryption are commonplace in the UK, while the US joined India, the UK, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand in signing an international statement asking for backdoor access that would subvert encryption standards.

Read the full article from wired.com

Update: India's New VPN Policy Explained

10th May 2022. See article from beebom.com

A good write of how Indian government policies will effect the use of VPNs in India

India's National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) is moving forward with proceedings to ban the access of children to Twitter in the country until the platform completely removes all pornographic material.

NDTV reports that on May 29, a letter was issued to the secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information and Technology to initiate a ban on the access of children on Twitter on an immediate basis till the time Twitter makes its platform safe for children by ensuring complete removal of child sexual abuse material and pornographic material and reporting of cybercrime cases to the authorities in India.

It is unclear how NCPCR intends to effect age verification for the 1.3 billion Indians, mostly adults, that would be affected by a potential block.

According to NCPCR chief Priyank Kanoongo, Twitter was found to have given false and misleading responses during the enquiry conducted by NCPCR for the presence of pornographic material, an offense under the POCSO Act. The POCSO Act is a 2012 law to provide for the protection of children from the offenses of sexual assault, sexual harassment and pornography.

Police from the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh announced the creation of a team to snoop on people's internet searches for pornographic material. The force has hired a company to surveille searches and keep data of the people who search for porn content.

In India, pornography is banned by the government, but the initial stages of the lockdown last year saw a 95% rise in viewership . The U.P. police's internet search tracking plan is being piloted in six of the state's districts. The monitoring will now be carried out across the state, which currently has about 11.6 million internet users.

The U.P. police has outsourced its monitoring of porn searches to the company Oomuph. If Oomuph spots an internet user consuming pornography, the police's analytics team will receive information on the user and search. Porn searches on the internet will also now yield an awareness message that searchers are being tracked by the police..

After Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered into a nationwide shutdown, reports out of that country indicated that at least some of the hundreds of porn sites blocked there since October of 2018 were quietly coming back online .

AVN.com reported that though there was no official lifting of the porn ban, PornHub quietly became accessible to Indian internet users just a day after the stay-at-home order went into effect, albeit via the site's .org address.

Locked-down Indian citizens have been accessing PornHub content at a record rate since Modi's shutdown order, according to a report by India's Free Press Journal. Pornhub has reported a staggering 95% increase in traffic from India as of late last week.

The tube site xHamster reported a 20% rise in Indian traffic over the first three weeks in March .

Some online commenters theorized that the government had quietly relaxed the national porn ban as an added incentive to keep Indians in their homes during the scheduled 21-day lockdown.

After five months of complete internet shutdown in the federally-administered Indian union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, only partial internet access has been restored after the interference of the Indian Supreme Court on January 10, which called the shutdown unconstitutional. Freedom of internet access is a fundamental right , said Justice N. V. Ramana who was a part of the bench that gave this verdict.

This shutdown marks the longest ever internet shutdown in any democracy around the world, and is viewed by experts as a potential signal of the rise of the Great Firewall of India . The term great firewall is used to refer to the set of legislative and technical tools deployed by the Chinese government to control information online, including by blocking access to foreign services and preventing politically sensitive content from entering the domestic network.

While the Chinese firewall has evolved as a very sophisticated internet censorship infrastructure, the Indian one is yet to get organized into a large-scale and complex structure. India's tactics to control information online include banning entire websites and services, shutting down networks and pressuring social media content to remove content on vague grounds. Read More: India partially lifts communications blackout in Kashmir, internet still down 301 websites whitelisted

According to internetshutdowns.in , a project that is tracking internet shutdowns in India and created by legal nonprofit Software Freedom Law Centre , the shutdown that was imposed on August 4, 2019, has been the longest in the country and was only partially lifted in Kargil on December 27, 2019, while the rest of the state was still under the shutdown.

Landlines and mobile communications services were also blocked in addition to regular internet services. Although the verified users of the Kashmir valley saw 2G services working on January 25, 2020 with access to only 301 white-listed websites (153 initially which was later expanded to 301), social media, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) and many other sites remain banned.

The administration of J&K passed an order on 25th January ordering for the restoration of 2G internet for around 300 whitelisted websites.

The Logical Indian reported on January 30, 2020, that broadband services in Kashmir will be be restored only after the creation of an alleged social media firewall. It is currently unclear whether these restrictions will only be imposed in Kashmir or in other areas of India as well.

Nazir Ahmad Joo, General Manager of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), a public mobile and broadband carrier, told the digital news platform that his company is working on a developing a firewall:

We have called a team of technical experts from Noida and Banglore who are working over creating a firewall to thwart any attempt by the consumers to reach to the social media applications[..]

Internet Service Providers like mobile internet carriers were asked by the government to install necessary firewalls while white-listing the list of allowed websites in an order dated January 13, 2020.

In the meantime, the partial shutdown continues in Kashmir despite the Supreme Court's verdict of January 10. Ironically, the order from the Jammu and Kashmir home department mentioned above was imposed a day after the Court ruling.

The Rajya Sabha is the upper house of the Indian parliament. Its Ethics Committee has just published an extensive list of internet censorship measures in the name of curbing online child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

The Committee has recommended that law enforcement agencies be permitted to break end-to-end encryption, and that ISPs provide parents with website blocking services.

The ad hoc Committee, headed by Jairam Ramesh, made 40 recommendations in its report pubished on January 25.

Recommendations:

• Amend the Information Technology Act, 2000:
  • Make intermediaries responsible for proactively identifying and removing CSAM, and for reporting it to Indian and foreign authorities, and for reporting, to the designated authority, the IP address/identities of people who search for or access child porn and CSAM
  • Make gateway ISPs liable so that they can detect and block CSAM websites.
  • Prescribe punitive measures for those who give pornographic access to children and those who access, produce or transmit CSAM.
  • Allow Central Government through "its designated authority" to block and/or prohibit all websites/intermediaries that carry CSAM . The designated authority has not been specified.
• Allow law enforcement to break end-to-end encryption to trace distributors of child pornography.
• Mandate CSAM detection for all social media companies through minimum essential technologies to detect CSAM besides reporting it to law enforcement agencies.
• Separate adult content section on streaming platforms like Netflix and social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook where children are not allowed.
• Age verification and gating mechanisms on social media to restrict access to "objectionable/obscene material".
• Manage children's access to internet: To do that, make apps that monitor children's access to porn mandatory on all devices in India, and make such apps/solutions freely available to ISPs, companies, schools and parents. Also, ISPs should provide family-friendly filters to parents to regulate children's access to internet.
• Use blockchain to trace buyers of child porn: MeitY should coordinate with blockchain analysis companies to trace users who use cryptocurrencies to purchase child porn online.
• Ban all payments to porn websites: Online payment portals and credit cards be prohibited from processing payments for any pornographic website.
• Amend the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012:
  • Prescribe a Code of Conduct for intermediaries (online platforms) to maintain child safety online, ensure age appropriate content, and curb use of children for pornographic purposes.
  • Make "advocating or counseling" sexual activities with a minor through written material, visual media, audio recording, or any other means, an offence under the Act.
  • Make school management responsible for safety of children within schools, transportation services and any other programmers with which the school is associated.
  • Make National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal the national portal for all report related to electronic material.
• Make National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) the nodal agency to deal with the issue. It should have "necessary" technological, cyber policing and prosecution capabilities. Each state and UT should also have a Commission for the Protection for Child Rights that mirrors NCPCR.
• Appoint e-safety commissioners at state level to ensure implementation of social media and website guidelines.
• National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) must record and report cases of child pornography of all kinds annually. Readers should note that the last annual report from NCRB was for 2017 and was released in October 2019.
• National Tipline Number where citizens can report about child sexual abuse and distribution of CSAM.
• Awareness campaigns by Ministries of Women and Child Development, and Information and Broadcasting on recognising signs of child abuse, online risks and improving online safety. Schools should also conduct training programmes for parents at least twice a year.

Nitish Kumar, the Chief Minister of the Indian state of Bihar is blaming rising incidents of sexual crime against women in the state on porn. He has written to the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi urging him to ban all porn sites and inappropriate content available online. He wrote:

It will be my request to take appropriate action to ban all porn sites and inappropriate content available on internet immediately after giving due consideration to the serious issue, he wrote.

The incidents (of gang rape and crime against women) take place in some cases because of the impact of these sites.

People make videos of heinous acts (rape) against girls and women and get them uploaded on social media such as Whatsapp, Facebook etc. Such content, which seriously affect the minds of children and youths, have been found as factors responsible for crimes (against women).

Long-term use of such content negatively affect the mind of some people, which gives rise to social problems and increases the number of cases of crime against women.

In October last year, an Indian court had ordered the government to reinstate its earlier ban on 827 porn websites including PornHub and xVideos. Porn companies initially put up a fight, launching mirror URLs such as pornhub.net after pornhub.com became inaccessible. But a few months in, major internet service providers Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio also started blocking out the mirror URLs tool.

However Indians haven't been taking the censorship lying down. Mobile downloads of virtual private network (VPN) apps in India grew 405% to 57 million in the 12 months starting October 2018, as analysed by London-based Top10VPN, a website that reviews VPNs.

The vast majority of users in India are using free VPN services, which are in effect not free--they often fund operations by selling user data. But the use of paid VPN services remains limited in India.

But not all Indian users have caught on to VPNs. Nearly half of the visitors of the banned websites have merely shifted to other adult content sites that aren't blocked in the country, such as RedPorn and SexVid, according to research from the analytics firm SimilarWeb.

I always wonder if this response is one of the reasons why age verification for porn was cancelled by the British Government. The security services surely didn't want vast numbers of people to start using VPNs. They needed the AV services to be easy and safe enough for porn users to be willing to use. And in the end most of the methods on offer were anything but.

Short video-sharing app TikTok came into the spotlight in India in the spring of this year. The app was accused of facilitating the distribution of pornography.

The app was banned for a while but was restored after it introduced a minimum age of at least 13 for new accounts. It also implemented automatic censorship tools that detected and blocked nudity.

Now the app has reappeared in the spotlight. The Swadeshi Jagran Manch (SJM), the economic wing of the Indian ruling party Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, has again called for video sharing site TikTok to be banned in India. In a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the SJM said:

To prevent such applications from operating in India, we would humbly request the creation of a new law that requires testing and also regulation to protect our national security as well as the privacy of Indian users from countries with inimical interests to India. Until such a law is notified, all such Chinese applications, including TikTok and Helo should be banned by the Ministry of Home Affairs.

In recent weeks, TikTok has become a hub for anti-national content that is being shared extensively on the application. We have been notified of videos advocating views that promote religious violence, anti-Harijan sentiments, and mistreatment of women. There have also been various instances of deaths being caused due to TikTok across India.

The essence seems to be that if people are going to communicate with anti state ideas then they could at least use an Indian app rather than a Chinese one.

AVN.com is reporting that the online forum Reddit has been blocked by the country's largest ISPs

Reddit is ranked as the 21st most heavily trafficked site in the world. It has 330 million users spread across 217 countries. 

Reddit, of course, is one of the few remaining major social media platforms that does not ban porn, and according to the India Times report, that is likely the reason why the Indian ISPs would block the discussion forum site.

Video-sharing app TikTok has introduced an age gate feature for new users, which it claims will only allow those aged 13 years and above to create an account. TikTok also declared that it has removed more than six million videos that were in violation of its community guidelines.

TikTok is said to be based in more than 20 countries, including India, and covers major Indian languages, including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati.

The app was banned by the Madras High Court earlier this month, chiefly on the ground that it posed a danger to children. The court said the app contained degrading culture, and that it encouraged pornography and pedophilia.

In February, TikTok was fined $5.7 million by the US Federal Trade Commission for violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting personal information of children below 13 years without parental consent.

As of April 15, the app remains available for download on Google's Play Store. TikTok's push for user safety

Update: TikTok unbanned

25th April 2019. See article from theverge.com

The short video sharing app TikTok has managed to persuade an Indian court that it is capable of censoring nudity in videos that will degrade Indian viewers.

According to a recent analysis, people in Hyderabad have taken an avid interest in viewing porn even though it has been banned. With the Union government banning 827 porn sites across the country, an increase of 75% has been seen in porn viewing in Hyderabad.

Hyderabad is among the many states which have seen an increase in porn viewership. On conducting a medical study, it was claimed that the increasing number of divorces can be attributed to psychological effects of porn addiction.

A survey published by DocOnline and conducted by city doctors, it was inferred that the obsession with pornography is effecting the sexual health of viewers. Dr Syed Abrar Kareem, a physician stated that porn gives rise to impractical sexual expectations which when not met, result in psycho-somatic disorders. Out of the 5,000 people chosen for the survey, 3,500 were men and 1,500 were women confessed to watching porn regularly.

A rise of 31% has been recorded in divorces and break-ups. Allegedly, the doctors have also seen an increase in impotency cases being brought to them due to the extreme involvement in virtual sex.

The India ISP Jio has upped the ante in internet porn censorship as it has decided to block the websites of VPN providers.

Following a court decision in India requiring that the country ban access to online porn, reports began to emerge in October that internet access providers had begun blocking as many as 827 adult sites.

But now the Indian telecom firm may be going a step further, thwarting attempts by users in its 250-million strong subscriber base to find workarounds to the ban using Virtual Private Network (VPN) software.

Jio appears to have blocked access to proxy sites where the VPN software can be downloaded, according to the report.

Update: Censoring ISP loses customers

22nd January 2019. See  article from avn.com

There are now signs that Reliance Jio may be suffering blowback from its enthusiastic support of the porn ban, seeing an overall drop in traffic by its users for the final quarter of 2018, with the average Jio customer dropping data use from an average of 11 gigabytes per month to 10.8 gigs, according to a report by The Hindu newspaper.

Asked whether the drop in data use by its customers was a result of the ban on porn sites, Jio official Anshuman Thakur replied, Yes, you could say that.

Jio's new subscriber signups also dropped in the last three months of 2018, to 27.8 million new subscribers during that period, when the porn ban took effect, from 37 million in the previous quarter.

The Indian government's effort to block citizens from watching pornography hasn't quite worked, according to website analytics data. On the contrary, overall consumption of internet porn may have increased over the past few months with traffic shifting to other sites and the use of proxy servers.

Fifty-nine of the banned websites, data of which was shared by SimilarWeb, a web analytics company, received an average of 1.7 billion monthly visits before the ban and the figure dropped to 0.8 billion visits after the ban. However this drop has been more than compensated for by visits to at least 441 other websites that are not banned. These websites together received an average of 0.6 billion monthly visits before the ban and two billion after the ban. Adding these together reveals that monthly porn site visits increased from 2.3 billion to 2.8 billion as a result of the ban.

There are other factors also contributing to why the ban is not working.

First, at least 42% of the websites in the banned list (345 of the total 827) are still accessible on the internet if users write https instead of http in the web address. These accessible websites include the top three porn websites in India -- Xnxx, Xvideos and Pornhub.

Second, Indians are also accessing the banned porn websites through easily available proxy networks or virtual private networks (VPN) that hide their identity and location, and in turn let users bypass any such ban. A sudden surge in the number of visits to some of the most popular proxy service websites makes this fact evident.

For instance, proxy site kproxy.com received 2.3 million visits from India in November, according to ComScore. This was more than twice its average of 0.9 million visits in the previous three months. The increased use of proxy services by porn consumers in India is also evident from data on Google Trends, a tool that quantifies the popularity of search queries over time. The popularity of search terms like porn proxy, porn site proxy and porn vpn in India rose seven to 10 times in the week the ban was announced.

Third, the list of the 827 websites that were banned does not cover a wide enough range of such sites. Among the 500 most visited porn websites in India, according to ComScore data, only 59 websites have been banned. Among the top 10, only five have been blocked.

India's Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology has proposed new social media censorship rules.

Open for public comment through 31 January 2019, the new rules would compel platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter to remove, within 24 hours, any unlawful content that affects the sovereignty and integrity of India.

According to a definition posted online by the Indian government last week, unlawful material includes anything that could be seen as grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, pedophilic, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically objectionable, disparaging, relating or encouraging money laundering or gambling, or otherwise unlawful in any manner whatever.

The definition also covers political speech, including any content that threatens the unity, integrity, defense, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states, or public order, or causes incitement to the commission of any cognisable offense or prevents investigation of any offense or is insulting any other nation.

The new rule would also mandate companies to reveal the origin of a message when asked, which violates WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption privacy policy. They would also require companies with more than five million users in India to have a local office available for 24/7 cooperation with law enforcement.

Industry experts and civil rights activists are concerned that the new rules are veering dangerously close to censorship, and lobbyists have already started drafting objections to file with the ministry.

Internet company Mozilla Corp came out strongly against the guidelines, stating that the proposal was a blunt and disproportionate solution to the problem of harmful content online. Industry executives note that the guidelines would put the privacy of users at risk and would raise costs, as it would necessitate round-the-clock monitoring of content.

The new law is set to take effect on January 31.

Update: And as for backdoors for WhatsApp

18th January 2019. See article from ft.com

WhatsApp is gearing up to fight the Indian government's proposals to force tech companies to hand over the personal data and encrypted messages of Indian users.

India's internet censor and IT ministry have both proposed laws that would allow authorities to trace the origins of encrypted messages. The legislation would also compel tech companies including Facebook, Twitter and Apple to proactively monitor and remove objectionable content posted on their platforms.

The new rules essentially mean breaking encryption and collecting much more data than WhatsApp currently do, which amounts to mass surveillance.

A WhatsApp expert said that the app is designed to not collect or store a record of who wrote and sent every message on the platform. The company would have to redesign its systems and revise its privacy policies in order to comply with the proposals.

And of course if WhatsApp continues to operate in repressive regimes like India and Australia then worldwide users will be able to infer that all their messages can also be decrypted at the behest of the authorities in any country.

The Indian state of Uttarakhand has been hearing a rape case and has decided that porn was to blame. So the court is looking to resurrect an internet porn ban first mooted in 2015.

On August 3rd, 2015, three years back, the Government. of India had passed a notification which ordered all ISPs to ban pornographic content with immediate effect . Around 857 pornographic websites were ordered to be banned, and ISPs were duly informed.

However, the Government faced massive backlash over this issue and were criticized for banning porn. Some even described this as Talibanization of the Internet. After two days, a new notification was issued; and this time, the responsibility for the porn ban was passed over to the Internet Service Provider and limited to banning child porn.

Now the Uttarakhand High Court has ordered all Internet Service Providers to immediately ban porn websites, across India. If they fail to do so, then their license can be canceled!

While hearing a recent case of gang-rape in a school at Dehradun, the bench at Uttarakhand High Court comprising of acting chief justice Rajiv Sharma and justice Manoj Tiwari has asked the Centre Govt. to strictly implement a blanket ban on pornography sites. The Bench observed:

Unlimited access to these pornographic sites is required to be blocked/curbed to avoid an adverse influence on the impressionable minds of children.

Update: Another court chips in

6th October 2018. See  article from nagpurtoday.in

The Nagpur Bench of Bombay High Court has ordered the Information and Broadcasting Ministry to initiate effective steps against Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar and other private channels on Internet for broadcasting pornographic contents, crudity, sexual or discriminatory language, and various levels of violence,

A Public Interest Litigation (PIL) was filed by Adv Divya Gontiya requesting the High Court to issue orders aimed at 'urbing the deluge of vulgarity, violent scenes and crude language on webseries. The screening of pornographic contents, vulgar gestures and talks are overriding the Indian culture and morality.

The High Court has directed the concerned ministries to set up a pre-screening committee for curbing , crudity, sexual or discriminatory language, vulgar gestures, nudity, sex, immodesty on webseries, monitor the webseries and advertisements before going on online media.

India's internet censors have demanded that local ISPs block 240 escort service websites.

The communications and IT ministry on Monday ordered the censorship of pinkysingh.com, jasmineescorts.com, onlyoneescorts.com, payalmalhotra.in, localescorts.in, pearlpatel.in, kavyajain.in, xmumbai.in, shimi.in and anchu.in.

About a year ago the government tried to block notable porn sites but it caused an uproar, and the government reversed its censorship. Escort services are not likely to be widely supported so no doubt the government will get its thin edge wedged in.

Indian Telecom companies including Bharti Airtel BSE 3.26% , Vodafone , Reliance Communications, Telenor and Reliance Jio Infocomm are said to be considering a plan to offer optional network level website blocking for parental control.

Telcos and Internet service providers (ISPs) are in active talks with New Zealand-based Bypass Network Services (BNSL) to deploy its Buddy Guard parental control solution, said Matthew Jackson, the company's cofounder.

Buddy Guard is aimed primarily at parents who may want to regulate the online behaviour of their children. Consumers can choose to opt for the control on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

Jackson said the interest of telecom companies and ISPs in parental control had risen after last year's temporary porn ban.

The option may be debuted by one of the bigger fixed-line ISPs by February-March and by a telecom company within four months, starting with a few service areas and widening its reach gradually.

Twitter and Reddit users are reporting that state-owned ISPs MTNL and BSNL and privately-owned ISPs ACT, Spectranet, Tikona, Asianet and Hathway are blocking access to major porn websites. Mobile operator Vodafone is also blocking these websites.

While some users are just getting a This site has been blocked as per the instructions of Competent Authority, others are seeing a message that indicates that the sites are being blocked as per directions received from Department of Telecom, Government of India. Some users are just getting blank pages or Directory doesn't exist, error message.

This move seems to have been somewhat unexpected, with perhaps the notable clue from July, when a Supreme Court bench responded to a request for blocking of porn websites saying:

It is an issue for the government to deal with. Can we pass an interim order directing blocking of all adult websites? And let us keep in mind the possible contention of a person who could ask what crime have I committed by browsing adult websites in private within the four walls of my house. Could he not argue about his right to freedom to do something within the four walls of his house without violating any law?

The bench asked additional solicitor general Pinky Anand why the MHA had not taken any action on the list of websites and also not filed any response to the petition as sought by the court. Anand assured the court that the needful would be done:

The ministry will soon file a response to the petition and detail the action taken. All necessary steps under the Information and Technology Act will be taken.

Update: Government confirmed to be behind the internet censorship

3rd August 2015. See  article from  thehindu.com

The Indian government has ordered a large number of porn websites to be blocked, creating an uproar among users and civil rights groups in the country.

The Department of Telecommunications has issued orders for the blocking of 857 websites serving pornography, said two persons familiar with the matter, who declined to be named.

Section 69 (A) of India's Information Technology Act allows the government to order blocking of public access to websites and other information through computer resources, though this section appears to be designed to be invoked when a threat is perceived to the sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states or public order.

Pranesh Prakash, policy director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore pointed out the illegality of the censorship:

The government cannot on its own block private access to pornography under current statutes. Parliament has not authorized the government to ban porn on its own.

However, courts have in the past ordered specific websites to be blocked for specific offences such as defamation, though as far as I know not for obscenity.

Viewing pornography privately is not a crime in India, though its sale and distribution is an offence.

Some porn websites were still accessible through certain Internet service providers on Monday, as some ISPs took some time to implement the order. All the 857 websites will be blocked by all ISPs today, said a source in the ISP industry, who requested anonymity. As licensees we have to follow the orders.

Update: India plans to set up up a government porn censor

4th August 2015.  See  article from  financialexpress.com

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology has asked Internet service providers to take down 857 porn websites, an official said. The official, however, said it was a temporary measure till the final orders are pronounced by the top court.

Explaining rationale for the decision, a top government official said the government has merely complied with the Supreme Court directive asking for measures to block porn sites. He said that the government would line up for the court to hear an array of views, mostly anti-porn from NGOs, civil society, parental groups, child councillors, ISPs and government, and after hearing the views of all, let the court come with some guidelines. The official spoke of an official porn censor:

Let there be an ombudsman to take a call, like the TV ombudsman is there.

The censor could be a retired judge or somebody from the civil society. The official said all the stakeholders can give their views regarding the censorship mechanism that should be adopted for the cyber content related issues.

Update: An act of Talibanisation

4th August 2015. See  article from  economictimes.indiatimes.com

 Many are not impressed by te government censorship, Milind Deora a former Minister of State with the Ministry of Information Technology and Communications tweeted:

And the government takes one more step towards the Talibanization of India,

The latest ban is not about liking or disliking porn. It's about govt hijacking personal liberties. What'll they ban next - phones and TVs?

Privacy is my inalienable, constitutional right.

Update: And the list is...

4th August 2015. See  article from  torrentfreak.com

See India's list of blocked porn [pdf] from s3.documentcloud.org

The Indian Government has ordered local ISPs to block access to a list of 857 websites that supposedly link to adult material. The broad blocking order goes further than targeting dedicated porn sites alone though. Torrent sites kickass.to and h33t.to are listed too, as well as 9Gag, Liveleak and CollegeHumor.

The Government order is quite broad, and not just because of the high number of domain names involved. A leaked copy which list all of the affected domains reveals some unsuspected entries.

For example, the list contains two of the largest torrent sites, Kickass.to and H33t.to. The first is now operating under the new Kat.cr domain name and the latter site is down, so the effects of the blockade are minimal.

blockedcollegeWhile blocking these torrent sites may be justified as both sites do link to pornographic content, the same can't really be said for CollegeHumor and 9Gag, which are also on the blacklist.

The same goes for Liveleak, which has plenty of immoral videos but isn't really known for its vast amounts of porn. Finally, the list also includes nonvegjokes.com , a site specializing in dirty jokes.

Update: Porn unbanned

5th August 2015. See  article from  bbc.co.uk

India will restore open access to 857 pornographic websites, following widespread outrage over the censorship.

The department of telecoms told ISPs not to block porn URLs. The department tried to save a bit of face by bringing up the subject of child porn but of course none of the major porn websites being blocked have any.

Communications and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad met senior officials on Tuesday to review the ban and decided that internet service providers (ISPs) would be immediately asked not to block those sites which did not contain any child pornography.

News of the ban caused a furore on Indian social media, with several senior politicians and members of civil society expressing their opposition to the move.

Update: Still banned

7th August 2015. See  article from  independent.co.uk

Porn is still effectively banned in India, for the supposed reason that ISPs erroneously claim that there may be child porn on some of the world's best known and loved porn websites.

The government banned porn over the weekend, but after vast amounts of criticism quickly undid the block. But it came with a catch that sites that allow child porn should not be let back online. The  Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) ludicrously claimed:

ISPs have no way or mechanism to filter out child pornography from URLs, and the further unlimited sub-links.

The ISPs do not have mechanism to check the content, as the same is dynamic in nature. Hence, we request your good self to advise us immediately on the future course of action in this regard. Till your further directive, the ISPs are keeping the said 857 URLs disabled.

Update: Even the BBC wants to tell the story

8th August 2015. See  How the government was forced to reverse course  from  bbc.co.uk

The debate has also sparked concern over what some see as a growing culture of intolerance promoted by a series of actions by the right-wing BJP government, many of whose members are self-professed Hindu nationalists.

...see the full article

Update: Moral policemen say they don't want to be moral policemen

11th August 2015. See  article from  firstpost.com

India's Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi has appeared in court being quizzed about the short lived government censorship of porn websites. He now says:

How can you stop in on the privacy of your phone? The other thing is that if someone wants to watch it in the privacy of their bedroom, how can we stop that? These are now issues of 19(1).

There are many issues and we don't want to do moral policing. There is also difficulty: the websites can change their names and change their website, and it becomes difficult. We will obey court orders, but we don't want to become a moral police.

Article 19 (1) is about freedom of speech.  That's pretty much what the Chief Justice had told the porn ban petitioners in the first place.

Somebody can come to the court and say, 'Look, I am an adult and how can you stop me from watching it within the four walls of my room?' It is a violation of Article 21.

Article 21 is about a right to personal liberty.

So if both were on the same page anyway, why did the government willfully slap egg on its own face and make itself the butt of jokes last week with its 857-site ban which Rohatgi himself admits the department went and blocked without verifying ?

There will be no restrictions on watching porn within the confines of your own home, the Indian Supreme Court has said. The apex court declined a plea to pass an interim order to block all porn sites in India.

Hearing a petition by advocate Kamlesh Vashwani, Chief Justice H.L. Dattu said: Such interim orders cannot be passed by this court. Somebody may come to the court and say look I am above 18 and how can you stop me from watching it within the four walls of my room. It is a violation of Article 21 [right to personal liberty].

India's Supreme Court has ruled on three internet censorship sections of the Information Technology Act 2000 - Section 66A, Section 79 and Section 69A.

The draconian Section 66A was originally meant to tackle spam and cyber-stalking but was used by the powerful elite to crack down on online dissent and criticism.

Section 79 was meant to give immunity to internet intermediaries for liability emerging from third-party speech, but it had a chilling effect on free speech because intermediaries erred on the side of caution when it came to deciding whether the content was legal or illegal.

And Section 69A was the web blocking or internet censorship provision, but the procedure prescribed did not adhere to the principles of natural justice and transparency. For instance, when books are banned by courts, the public is informed of such bans but when websites are banned in India, there's no clear message from the ISP.

The Supreme Court upheld 69A, so web blocking and internet censorship in India will continue to happen in an opaque fashion which is worrying.

But on 66A and 79, the landmark judgment protects the right to free speech and expression. It struck down 66A in entirety, saying the vague and imprecise language made the provision unconstitutional and it interfered with the right of the people to know - the market place of ideas - which the internet provides to persons of all kinds .

However, it only read down Section 79 saying unlawful acts beyond what is laid down as reasonable restrictions to the right to free speech in the Constitution obviously cannot form any part of the section. In short, the court has eliminated any additional restrictions for speech online even though it admitted that the internet is intelligibly different from traditional media and might require additional laws to be passed by the Indian Parliament.

The Indian government has asked ISPs and mobile operators to block access to 32 sites in the name of its censorship laws GitHub, Archive.org, Imgur, Vimeo, Daily Motion and Pastebin are some of the more familiar names included on the list.

The leader of the Bharatiya Janata political party spouted some unlikely sounding bollox that the banned websites contained some content from ISIS.

Already it seems that some ISPs have taken action and cut access to a number of the websites. The Times Of India reports that its correspondents were not able to access Pastebin, DailyMotion or GitHub using Vodafone's 3G service, although they were able to get on the three sites via rival operator Airtel's service.

The addition of GitHub, a massively popular site for the community development of code seems a particularly harmful decision for India's technology industry. And surely there will be a powerful lobby calling for the unblocking of at least this site.

Update: 4 sites unblocked

2nd January 2015. See  article from  strangethingsarehappening.com

According to IANS , the Government decided to unblock four websites after they gave assurances to the government that they will not allow pasting on Jihadi propaganda. The sites that were unblocked were Website creation & hosting site Weebly.com , Video hosting platforms Vimeo.com & Dailymotion.com and software repository gist.github.com .

The original list of censored websites is:

1. justpaste.it/
2. hastebin.com
3. codepad.org
4. pastie.org
5. pastee.org
6. paste2.org
7. slexy.org
8. paste4btc.com/
9. 0bin.net
10. heypasteit.com
11. sourceforge.net/projects/phorkie
12. atnsoft.com/textpaster
13. archive.org
14. hpage.com
15. ipage.com/
16. webs.com/
17. weebly.com/
18. 000webhost.com/
19. freehosting.com
20. vimeo.com/
21. dailymotion.com/
22. pastebin.com
23. gist.github.com
24. ipaste.eu
25. thesnippetapp.com
26. snipt.net
27. tny.cz (Tinypaste)
28. github.com (gist-it)
29. nipplr.com/
30. termbin.com
31. www.snippetsource.net
32. cryptbin.com

Update: Pastebin Unbinned

7th January 2015. See  See  article from  zdnet.com

Pastebin tells ZDNet that the Indian government's wide-ranging internet block, which had included the site , has been removed and Indian citizens are again able to access Pastebin -- but 27 sites still remain banned under the order .

According to Pastebin's statement to ZDNet, there is still no verifiable explanation for India's government-ordered internet censorship.

Update: Unblocked

11th January 2015. See  article from  huffingtonpost.in

The Indian government has ended its blocking of all the 32 websites censored for the unlikely reason that the sites were being used by terrorists.  A source said:

Order was issued on Thursday to unblock all 32 websites that were blocked following complaint of Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad that ISIS is disseminating content through them. All websites has responded that they will work with government and removed jehadi content,

In the latest blow for free speech, the government of the southern Indian state of Karnataka has passed legislation that makes it illegal to upload, share, or like content with a view to hurt religious sentiments knowingly or unknowingly .

Back in June, Karnataka police warned citizens about the type of things that were covered by the Information Technology Act:

Citizens are warned not to upload, modify, resend (forward) and like (share) malicious or misleading images, videos and messages through any medium with a view to hurt religious sentiments knowingly or unknowingly. Citizens are encouraged to inform the Police Control Room at...

New legislation, the lengthily named Karnataka Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Bootleggers, Drug-offenders, Gamblers, Goondas, Immoral Traffic Offenders, Slum-Grabbers and Video or Audio Pirates (Amendment) Bill, 2014, means that citizens can now actually be arrested if they have even committed an offence under the Information Technology Act.

India's Supreme Court has ordered the government to take steps to block porn sites and has granted four weeks to produce a plan.

The court was hearing a petition filed by the morality campaigner Kamlesh Vaswani who claimed that although watching obscene videos is not an offence, pornographic sites should be banned as they are one of the major causes for crime against women.

The petition alleged that over 20 crore porn videos or clippings are freely available in the market, which are directly been downloaded through Internet or other video CDs.

The sexual content that kids are accessing today is far more graphic, violent, brutal, deviant and destructive and has put entire society in danger so also safety threats to public order in India.

The petitioner most respectfully submits that most of the offences committed against women/girls/children are fuelled by pornography. The worrying issue is the severity and gravity of the images are increasing. It is a matter of serious concern that prepubescent children are being raped.

The petition also asked that watching and sharing obscene videos should be made non-bailable and cognisable offence.