The world is crying foul as the Olympics could not breach the Great Firewall of China. And protests against China breaking its vow to free Internet access during Olympics are not limited to human rights organisations. Global online giants including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, are working on a code of conduct to address how they will operate in countries like China. All three are under fire for bending to Chinese government?s diktat earlier and helping them control information flow.
We might scoff at China?s attempts to filter what its 1.3 billion people read or view online, but India is not above blocking websites or snooping on emails. While internet is relatively free and most of the interception is aimed at checking terrorist threats, no one can take privacy of their digital communications for granted. This includes anonymous posts on blogs and social networking sites and privacy of a personal email inbox.
Many service providers have reportedly obliged authorities with details of those who upload anonymous posts or copies of emails from ?personal? email inbox through ?informal agreements?. While cybercafes are required to verify the identity of all surfers and log all user information, many states are also ?encouraging? key-logging software that can track every keystroke in a cybercafe. Online world is already fraught with the possibility of breaches in their financial data in transactions done through a cybercafe.
Censorship came to limelight in 2006 for the first time, when authorities tried to restrict access to websites and blogs that it ?believed were harmful? and ISPs did a shoddy job and blocked the entire domain rather than specific blogs. Few chat groups have also been closed down earlier. India is on the list of 25 countries that study, block or filter Internet content compiled by OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a nonprofit collaborative partnership Harvard Law School, University of Cambridge, Oxford University and University of Toronto.
And India is not an exception. State-led censorship is on a rise all over the world. Only a couple of countries censored Internet in 2002, compared to 25 of the 41 surveyed last year.
Service providers confirm that interception is increasing as the terrorist threats are on a rise. No one would go on record but service providers are known to have provided information on ?polite requests? from police. Lawyers are more vocal. ?Internet is by and large free, but calling it completely free is incorrect. Sometimes, the police gets into an enthusiastic over drive,? says Pavan Duggal, a lawyer specialising in cyberlaw.
Moreover, there is little respect for privacy. Online communications can be intercepted under Section 69 of the IT Act with approval from Controller of Certifying Authority, according to him. But he had seen several cases where channels were intercepted without taking appropriate approvals.
Obviously, India has a much better track record than countries like China, Burma, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Around 15 countries have been identified as Internet blackholes by Reporters without Borders. China, alone has 50 cyber-dissidents in prison. About 40,000 cyber-police monitor online posts and more than 2,700 websites have been closed since last year. India has its shares of woes. Service providers goofed up in sharing identity of the uploader of a post which landed an ?innocent? person in jail. Police got the IP address from Google and followed up with Airtel for the identity of the uploader. It took several weeks before he could be released and several parallels were drawn with Yahoo handing over IP address of pro-democracy activists to the Chinese authorities.
If China hosts world?s largest Internet population, India is moving up on the radars of online giants too. Around 206 million or 81.55% of the 253 million Chinese netizens check news online and 63.29 million (one fourth of subscribers) use the Internet for shopping, according to the latest numbers form China Internet Network Information Centre. With an annual growth rate of 27%, India ranks among the fastest growing Internet markets worldwide, according to comScore.
Realising the growing importance of emerging markets, US think tanks and online activists have been pushing Internet giants to stop filtering information. Voluntary code of conduct being framed now, however, has failed to satisfy them. Attempts to curb American Internet giants from coming under foreign government?s pressure and share private information have been made earlier too. Prominent among them is the Global Online Freedom Act proposed by representative Christopher Smith in 2006.
The bill, if passed into law, would prohibit any US Internet company from providing any foreign official of Internet-restricting country information that ?personally identifies a particular user… except for legitimate foreign law enforcement purposes, as determined by the department of justice.?
Companies that violated this prohibition could be sued in the US courts by those foreigners whose information they divulged. Though the bill seems to be in cold for now, it could cause problems in any such information sharing if it ever becomes a law.
Though Internet censorship is making global headlines, it is not the biggest threat to online freedom as filters and firewalls can be penetrated. German hacking group, Chaos Computer Club, for instance, used its website to launch a toolkit designed to help journalists reporting from the Olympics to get uncensored access to western websites. The toolkit will be made available to journalists on a portable USB key that the CCC is calling the Freedom Stick. Tor, an anonymising Web proxy, is one of the popular utility found in privacy-concerned Internet user?s toolbox. It is easy to find tools to bypass censorship and organisations like Reporters without Borders and Electronic Frontier Foundation offer online tips on using them.
A bigger menace could come from state-sponsored or ?informal? online snooping on personal information. Privacy advocates are the most vocal in their protest, but these are being seen as a big threat to online commerce. It could pose a threat to online financial transactions like shopping or banking through the Internet, if people start suspecting the security of their financial data. While Internet can be allowed to spread terrorist threats, online retailers and advertisers feel that it is important to convince surfers that snooping happens only in extreme cases.