[Reader-list] POSTING NO. 1

[Rudradep Bhattacharjee]

Greetings,  fellow Fellows (and everyone else who’s
listening in)

A brief personal intro: The name is Rudradeep
Bhattacharjee. I was born in Shillong (hi, Janice!)
and spent most of my short life there till the
film-bug got me and I decided to move to Mumbai. I
have been in this city for about five years now trying
to eke out a living while hoping to go independent.
The guys at Sarai have finally given me an
opportunity. Thanks, you guys rock!!!

Now, about the project. Well, this is actually a
documentary film on the theme ‘Cyberspace and Freedom
in the context of India.’ I have included the proposal
below. 

The blog will soon be up. Will keep everyone posted.

I’m also looking for further funding to make this
documentary. Any ideas about potential sponsors,
anyone? Also, I think this project will be like
writing open-source code; it requires the
participation and collaboration of others to build the
final edifice that will be the film. So, comments,
reactions,  ideas, opinions, criticism, all are
welcome. 

Virtually yours,

Deep.

PS: Mumbai Fellows, we should try to set up a meeting,
what say you?

ABOUT THE FILM: 

'In cyberspace, borders and national sovereignty lose
meaning, and the individual reigns'. This represents
the core statement of what has been termed as
'cyberspace libertarianism'.

To understand this point of view it is imperative we
look at the architecture of the Internet. At the heart
of the Internet's design is an architectural principle
termed as 'end-to-end' (or e2e). This essentially
means that intelligence is located at the ends and not
in the network itself. The core of the network merely
provides a data transfer facility. While this greatly
enhances efficiency, it also means that the network
will be open and neutral with respect to the content
it transfers. This e2e design principle implicitly
embodies certain values, such as freedom and equality.
This, coupled with the fact that there is no central
server that can be easily contained and the Net's vast
global reach which transcends the jurisdiction of
national governments, makes cyberspace apparently
impossible to regulate. 

Thus, to the cyberspace libertarian the essence of
cyberspace is liberty itself. It is a place without
boundaries, unencumbered by the regulations that
typify the real world; a medium that is empowering and
democratizing as it revolutionizes the opportunities
for ordinary individuals to speak freely (sometimes
without having to identify themselves), to be
producers of culture, to share in communicative power
that was once reserved only for the elite. In other
words, the ultimate 'technology of freedom'. 

On the other hand, this notion of cyberspace being
'unregulable' as The Economist once put it is the
'founding myth' of the Internet. In fact, others like
Lawrence Lessig have noted that it is the very
openness and neutrality of the system that makes it
more 'regulable' than the libertarian movement
realizes or cares to admit : The nature of the Net is
set apart by its architecture, and this architecture
can be changed to make the Net more regulable. 

The Internet was built for research and communication,
not commerce. Its protocols were open and unsecured;
it was not designed to hide. Data transmitted could
easily be intercepted and stolen but this did not seem
to really matter in this libertarian utopia, the
domain of academics and researchers. But the
commercialization of the Internet changed all that.
>From the start, commerce has pushed for changes in the
architecture of the Net to enable more secure and
safer commerce. But commerce does not act alone; it
needs help constituting this 'architecture of trust'.
And this comes from the state which has increasingly
begun to understand the value of an architecture of
trust for its own regulatory objective. 

Historically, Indian IT policy has vacillated over the
years. The liberalization process began in 1991 but
India logged on to the Internet only in 1994. Even
then, the government resisted the global trend toward
privatizing telecommunication and introducing
competition. It was only in 1998 that the market was
thrown open for private ISPs. Committed to elevate
India to the level of an IT superpower, the government
set up a high level IT task force to formulate an
Action Plan. The recommendations of the task force
also formed the basis of the IT Act 2000. 

When I was first trying to cull out a proposal, 
certain events were already showing signs that the
days of the IT Act of 2000 were numbered.

The first is the arrest of a CEO of an extremely
popular auctioning site who has been charged with
abetting in the sale of pornographic material. This
has raised important questions about the extent to
which ISPs/system operators can be held responsible
for the actions of their users. Narayan Murthy, among
many others, advocated his support for the arrested
CEO and called for a change in cyber laws. While this
case managed to attract front-page attention, a more
significant change was brewing elsewhere. 

The National Association of Software & Service
Companies (NASSCOM) finalised a draft on amendments to
the IT Act to ensure cyber security in India. ("We
would like India to be a safe deposit vault for the IT
segment.") This is hardly surprising considering the
latest survey conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for
CII which revealed that the number of security
breaches in the country has shown a rise of 83 per
cent from last year, prompting Indian corporates to
put secure information systems high on their priority,


Now consider this: In July 2003, the Indian Computer
Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) was established. The
government said one of the jobs of that body would be
to ensure a "balanced flow of information". Two months
later, the team following an order by the central
government blocked access to the "Kyunhun" discussion
forum, which was reportedly linked to a banned
separatist group in Meghalaya. An unintended
consequence of the ban was that Indian Internet users
lost access to all Yahoo! websites, thereby
highlighting the danger of Internet censorship and the
complex technical problems involved. 

If issues of censorship and cyber crime were not
complicated enough, we also have to deal with a whole
gamut of related issues: privacy issues, intellectual
property and copyright, encryption technologies,
closed-source code versus open-source code, digital
signatures, spamming,  blogging (!!!)
 

It is inevitable that as we become a more 'digital
nation', as we try to come to terms with this
revolutionary new technology, we will have to answer
one absolutely fundamental question about the nature
of cyberspace we want for ourselves : How do we
preserve the Net's core values and open architecture
without encouraging anarchy yet at the same time not
allow cyberspace to be smothered by superfluous and
numbing regulations? 

The proposed documentary, the first attempt of its
kind to understand the issues related to freedom in
cyberspace in the context of a developing country like
India, asks this critical question and tries to seek
answers to it. 

The documentary will also be a reminder that while we
debate these issues, we cannot lose sight of the fact
that a huge digital divide exists in our country and
all notions of technological freedom and individual
empowerment are superfluous while it does. 



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