With Internet Service Providers lifting the ''total blockade'' imposed on blogs since July 14, on a directive of the Department of Telecommunications, after the recent serial blasts on Mumbai suburban trains, thousands of bloggers are rejoicing over the decision.
PANAJI: With internet service providers lifting the blockade imposed on blogs since July 14, on a directive of the Department of Telecommunications, after the recent serial blasts on Mumbai suburban trains, thousands of bloggers are rejoicing over the decision.
DoT sent a directive to the ISPs on Thursday, seeking an explanation for the blanket blockade, instead of blocking specific unintended websites/web pages as per its July 13 circular.
Blogs -- a type of website where entries such as in a journal or diaries are made often providing commentary or news on a particular subject and may also contain text, images and links to other blogs or websites pertaining to a topic -- were banned by the DoT to prevent bloggers from venting their ire against the blasts.
DoT also asked the ISPs why no action should be taken against them for not adhering to its circular. This was followed by a furore over the issue with ISPs blocking sites like Google’s Blogger.com, Yahoo’s Geocities.com and Typepad among others.
Country's main information technology trade group National Association of Software and Services Companies president Kiran Karnik observed that the blockade was neither desirable nor possible to impose censorship on the Net.
The bloggers had formed a group, Bloggers Against Censorship, and considered moving a public interest litigation against the Centre for the 'arbitrary ban,' which it said was an infringement on the freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1) of the Constitution.
www.censorship.wikia.com, which champions the cause of the victims of censorship the world over, had become a resource base for documenting the Internet restrictions in India and voices of the BAC community highlighting various aspects of the blockade.
The organisation is known for its readiness to sense the censorship of any kind in any part of the world and highlights it in its publications, including the website. It had documented the infamous 1975 Emergency in India.
Amnesty International launched a fresh global campaign against such blockades as reported in India and China that it feels are violative of the fundamental rights of citizens.
The campaign aims to claim back the web as a force for change in the face of an increasing willingness on the part of technology companies to aid censorship and repression.
From Iran to the Maldives and Cuba to Vietnam, governments are cracking down on Internet users from communicating their views and denying them access to its wealth of information. Web users are locked up, Internet cafes are shut down, chat rooms are policed and blogs deleted. Websites are blocked, foreign news banned and search engines filter out sensitive results, Amnesty International averred.
''The Internet can be a great tool for the promotion of human rights -- activists can tell the world about abuses in their country at the click of a mouse. People have unprecedented access to information from the widest range of sources,'' said Amnesty International.
Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, Yahoo! and Google are among the companies implicated in helping governments censor the internet or track down individual users.
In 2004, Microsoft released information about Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu to the Israeli authorities without his knowledge or consent. The data was initially used to prosecute Vanunu for having contact with foreign media.
''We are calling on Internet users across the world to go to
http://irrepressible.info and sign a pledge calling on all governments and companies to respect Internet freedom,'' Amnesty said.
''Internet companies often claim to be ethically responsible -- these pledges will highlight how their co-operation against repression will make them complicit in human rights abuses and may cause damage to their credibility,'' the agency said.
The online pledges will be collected and presented to a key United Nations meeting on the future of the Internet in November 2006, it added.
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