India Censorship - on then off again

India recently announced that all ISPs in the country will be required to block a list of over 800 websites. They claim all of these were for pornography or child pornography, but it turns out that was not the case for all of them. In the face of a massive backlash, the telecom ministry first said this was no big deal because people could use VPN services to bypass the censorship. They later down entirely.

Obviously this huge number of people protesting this move we're not all pedophiles but rather people who understood that this kind of censorship often leads to much broader and politically based censorship. At Anonymizer are we noticed a huge surge in the amount of traffic and sign-ups coming from India during this situation.

It is very important to set up your anti-censorship tools before you actually need them. It is easy for governments to block a website like Anonymizer.com, your service might continue to work for very long time but you would not be able to sign up in the first place once the censorship is put in place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NZL8D-p6FY

[powerpress]

Government to launch 'Netra' for internet surveillance - The Times of India

Government to launch 'Netra' for internet surveillance - The Times of India

India is preparing to deploy a comprehensive Internet content monitoring system. They claim that it will be able to trigger on messages containing specific words. There is also mention of capturing “dubious voice traffic” over Skipe and other voice channels.

Use of VPNs like Anonymizer Universal will allow traffic to pass through these systems unanalyzed, but the fact that you are using a VPN will be visible.

Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook and Google+.

India asks social network sites to manually screen all posts.

The NYTimes.com reports that Kapil Sibal, the acting telecommunications minister for India is pushing Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook to more actively and effectively screen their content for disparaging, inflammatory and defamatory content.

Specifically Mr. Sibal is telling these companies that automated screening is insufficient and that they should have humans read and approve allmessages before they are posted.

This demand is both absurd and offensive.

• It is obviously impossible for these companies to have a human review the volume of messages they receive, the numbers are staggering.
• The demand for human review is either evidence that Mr. Sibal is completely ignorant of the technical realities involved, or this is an attempt to kill social media and their associated free wheeling exchanges of information and opinion.
• There is no clear objective standard for "disparaging, inflammatory, and defamatory" content, so the companies are assured of getting it wrong in many cases putting them at risk.
• The example of unacceptable content sighted by Mr. Sibal is a Facebook page that maligned Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi suggesting that this is more about preventing criticism than actually protecting maligned citizens.