Blog censorship: some thoughts

Posted by admin

July 18, 2006

This is the 2nd time Indian state is controlling the civil society spaces in
internet. (hope you all remember the yahoo groups story). it is the
time to make a protest against state terrorism that denies the rights
to free speach of the people.

We need to have a clarity on the following questions

1) Are we against all type of censorship on blogosphere?

2) are you ok with banning some blogs which is a threat to national security?

In the discussion thread on NDTV poll question these questions came up.

I strongly suggest we must take a position against all kind of censorship in Blogosphere.
we must take a position against banning any blog in the name of national security. Blogs primarily represent the people’s voces without geographic boundaries. Nation security is a very vulnerable term and a repressive state can portray any blog as threat to national security (or against public interest.. that is the another popular term for the state).
what is the problem if someone blogs in favour of terrorism? I think nothing will happen State govt have enough websites to “balance flow of information”.. They have very good communication mechanisms than blogs. It is the same as Defence ministry & Abdul kalam worries about Google earth. if needed terrorists can buy high quality satellite data.

The CERT-IN’s statement is like ” terrorists might be using blogs to transfer information and communicate”
Unless they use some kind of ciphering/ encryption to send messages its highly unlikely that any blogger can pass the info. I am not saying that shutting these websites will be able to stop spreading on these messages. Skype for example is encrypted, and if you’re a terrorist I guess you would use that. I feel The problem is the state finds is the growing civil society space on blogosphere.

I think we must learn from the vikalp & films for freedom, movements while censorship happened at mumbai interanational film festival (Documentary)( MIFF) . The films denied under censorship are the documentaries like Final solution by Rakesh sharma, which portrays the pogorm in Gujarat. so censorship always acts in order to prevent the voices they dont like. They made a platform named films for Freedom & started a pareller film festival named vikalp. So it is also the time for us to study something from this example.

It may be a suitable time to constitute an Electronic Frontier Fountation in India.

Does blogosphere have a national boundary? i feel no. There are 2 parts involved in it. Bloggers & blog readers. On the discussions happened here we are addressing the bloggers within a geographical boundary of indian state. For a sucess of campaign we must provide new machanisms to people inorder to access blogs & ned to popularise them i am coming to jace’s point. There is enough tools for us ( bloggers) to post & access the content. but for The blog readers we need to provide some solution . we need to think on that way also

(This post is written for the purpose of a discussion on Bloggers collective mailing list. I cant find the mensioned mailes now because of the flooded data on the list)
Updates: John Gilmore, Cofounder of EFF said that they Dont have a plan to open up an Indian chapter near future. Rishabh mensioned about an organisation named FREE ( The Forum for Rights to Electronic Expression ), formed in 1995 with a nice name & a beautiful logo something like amnesty but with a modem instead of a candle. He also pointed the wired’s coverage. The Old mirrored content of FREE is available at http://www.free-in.org . This may be the time to Reactivate FREE