[Reader-list] Bearded Men and Blogs at Risk

Shuddhabrata Sengupta shuddha at sarai.net
Tue Jul 18 10:37:48 IST 2006


POST 7/11, GOVT TARGETS 'EXTREME' WEBSITES, BLOGGERS ON THE BLINK, says 
the Indian Express.

Those on the Commons Law List will have seen this already, (where it was 
forwarded by Prashant Iyengar) as will those who read Indian Express. 
Goes to show that the first responses of power in a moment of crisis are 
also inevitably the clumsiest ones possible.

Round up a few history sheeters, detain a man waiting to see a girl he 
loves deplane just because he had hidden himself in a burqa so that he 
could stand undetected by her chaperones. Send out eighteen crack 
investigation teams to look for men with facial hair. A bad time for 
bearded cross dressers.

Were I the foot soldier sometimes identified as a terrorist I would buy 
gilette mach 3 and after shave in bulk, wear a baseball cap the wrong 
way round, and cheerfully whistle my way through the next bombing. And 
write innocous messages on postcards to my handlers, whosoever they may be.

While the jackasses (patriotic hackers) of the outfit with the 'cool' 
title of Computer Emergency Response Team (India), a less than well 
known cabal in the ministry of telecommunications, cut a swathe through 
blogs, leaving blocked sites in their wake.

So begins a morning in the information superpower.

enjoy

Shuddha

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

POST 7/11, GOVT TARGETS 'EXTREME' WEBSITES, BLOGGERS ON THE BLINK

Source: The Indian Express
http://www.indianexpress.com/printerFriendly/8719.html

MUMBAI, NEW DELHI, JULY 17: The fast-growing community of online
bloggers has borne the brunt of the government's decision to block
some 20 websites in a post-Mumbai show of force. Some of the websites
that have been blocked are Dalitstan.org, Clickatell.com,
Hinduhumanrights.org and Hinduunity.com.

But the most harried Internet users were the bloggers, who couldn't
access Blogspot.com, Typepad.com or Geocities.com pages. Sources in
ISPs in Delhi as well as Mumbai confirmed that the one blog government
has asked them to block is Princesskimberly.blogspot.com.

It seems the order posed technical problems, resulting in a blanket
ban on all blogs. You cannot block a single page on blogspot.com,
which is why all of them are getting blocked, said Neha Viswanathan,
Regional Editor, South Asia, Globalvoicesonline.org from London.

The Indian order was issued on July 13, sources in the Ministry of
Telecom confirmed, though the Computer Emergency Response Team
(India), part of a global cyber-security network set up three years
ago, did not announce the bans officially.

Only sources in several ISPs such as Spectranet and Airtel confirmed
that they had received the site-blocking order. R Grewal, a
spokesperson for Spectranet confirmed: We received a list of over 20
websites to block from the Department of Telecom, and this
(Blogspot.com) was one of them.
Apparently, all the websites blocked are said to express 'extreme
religious views.'
MTNL officials said they were handed a 22-page document detailing the
sites to block a month ago. 'It came from the National Informatics
Centre (NIC). It was the first time that they had done something of
this nature,'' says RH Sharma, sub-divisional engineer for MTNL in
Delhi.

Government sources confirmed late in the evening that some websites
have been blocked based on police reports that they were fuelling
hatred. They denied that the Mumbai blasts had anything to do with
censorship and that security checks on the blocked sites were on since
before the terrorist attacks.




http://www.nalsartech.org/tikiwiki/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=16897
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