A couple of years ago, the government of India decided to ban a Yahoo newsgroup allegedly run by Naga insurgents. In the process, all Yahoo newsgroups were inadvertently blocked, leading to a furore among internet users in India. After about a week, matters were rectified, but the lessons seem not to have been learnt.
Now, internet users across India have been unable since this weekend to access any sites hosted on Blogspot or Typepad, two popular domains for India-based blogs. (Geocities is also blocked.) Again, it seems that there isn't a blanket ban on these blogs, merely a government order to block of couple of blogs that has gone awry.
When I first heard from a friend on Saturday that he couldn't access either his blog or mine, both of which are hosted on Blogspot, I assumed that it was just a temporary blip. The Indian government does not have a history of internet censorship, and bloggers have never faced the kind of issues with free speech that their Pakistani and Chinese colleagues have had to deal with. However, it soon became evident that the blocks were due to a government order. As it spread across the internet providers, a process that took a couple of days, bloggers monitored the situation, and set up a wiki against censorship and a public-access newsgroup to discuss the matter.
The government, to start with, wasn't responsive. The director of the government body set up to oversee internet censorship told a reporter, "Somebody must have blocked some sites. What is your problem?" The Indian Express confirmed reports that the government had asked for a few sites to be blocked, and that the blocking of all Blogspot blogs was probably inadvertent. They wrote:
"Though the communication, dated July 13, by the telcom [sic] department to ISPs lists specific pages/ websites, several ISPs have blocked all blogs because they were not equipped to filter specific pages. This could be because all websites hosted on blogspot.com, for instance, have the same IP address."
The government officials seem not to have understood that had effectively blocked a few hundred thousand blogs, as the Hindustan Times report made clear:
"Officials defended the decision saying, 'We would like those people to come forward who access these (the 12) radical websites and please explain to us what are they missing from their lives in the absence of these sites.'"
There are two issues at hand here. First, such a ban cannot be implemented. Short of banning the internet entirely, which the government won't dare to do, it simply cannot block access to all sites. Indian technology blogger Amit Agarwal listed some ways of getting around the ban here, and the one I favour, in this case, is using pkblogs.com, a site that was set up to help readers in Pakistan circumvent a block on Blogspot blogs there.
The second issue is a larger one of censorship. Despite a few flaws and hiccups, India is a remarkably well-functioning democracy, given the many disparate regional and religious identities it contains. If there is one thing the terrorists would like to strike at, it is India's tradition of being a (more or less) liberal democracy. Free speech is at the heart of this.
Quite a few Indians would probably not mind compromising on some of their civil liberties if it helped in the fight against terrorism, but this move by the government is just an attempt to appear to be doing something, and displays their ineptness. After the bomb blasts in Mumbai last week, cops rounded up dozens of innocent people returning home late in the night, simply because they needed to show on their books that they had made arrests. Banning a few blogs here and there is a similarly superficial gesture. Those who want to can read those blogs anyway - terrorists surely know about RSS feeds - and this just inconveniences many thousands of internet users in India.
Just what the terrorists would want, one would think.
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/amit_varma/2006/07/theres_no_stopping_free_speech.html
-------------------- Republican Values: 1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you. 2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child. 3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer. 4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.
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