Yesterday, Indian police attacked protesting students across different university campuses. They fired tear gas shells inside of libraries; they lit buses on fire and then told that the students did it. They broke into a Mosque and beat up students there.

The Internet has been shut down in Kashmir for over 130 days, and now few more states + different smaller parts of the country are having the same.

Search for #JamiaProtest or #SOSJamia on twitter to see what is going on in India. I asked to my around 5k followers, to reply if they can see our tweets (only around 5 replied via the original tweet).

Trigger warning (The following tweets shows police brutality)

I have curated a few tweets for you, please see these (if possible) and then share those.

• Police + goons (posing as police) beating up the girls https://twitter.com/amirul_alig/status/1206273340194746368
• Police attacked the library where students were studying https://twitter.com/i_kathayat/status/1206271022976008194
• Police attacking Jamia Milia University library https://twitter.com/imMAK02/status/1206213159981203458
• Police vandalizing university https://twitter.com/amirul_alig/status/1206273340194746368
• Police firing tear gases at AMU https://twitter.com/imMAK02/status/1206244102641049600
• Police firing their guns https://twitter.com/imMAK02/status/1206233908083187712
• Police vandalizing public property https://twitter.com/imMAK02/status/1206259162969038848
• Police breaking the gate of Aligarh Muslim University https://twitter.com/imMAK02/status/1206261850943311873
• Police putting fire on a bus https://twitter.com/DesiPoliticks/status/1206222796927438848
• Police attacking AMU https://twitter.com/tariq_shameem/status/1206259086796279810

Why am I writing this in my blog (maybe you are reading it on a technical planet)?

Most people are ignorant about the fascist regime in India, and the IT industry (including us) mostly tries to pretend that everything is perfect. I hope at least a few more around will read the tweets linked from this post and also watch the videos. I hope you will share those in your social circles. To stop fascists, we have to rise together.

Btw, you should at least read this story from New Yorker on how the fascist government is attacking the fellow citizens.

To know about the reason behind the current protest, read this story showing the similarities between Nazi Germany and current Indian government.

Top most drawing credit: I am yet to find the original artist, I will update when I find the name.

If you are following me on Twitter, you have already seen a lot of (re)tweets related to Aadhaar. For the people first time hearing this term, it is a 12 digit unique identification number provided by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). It is also the world’s largest bio-metric ID system. It is supposed to be a voluntary service.

From the very beginning, this project tried to hide the details from the Indian citizens. Let it be privacy advocates or security researchers or human rights activists, everyone predicted that this will become a monster, a mass surveillance system, a tool of choice of the power hungry dictators.

Like any other complex system, the majority of the people only see the advertisements from the government and completely miss all the problems and horror stories this project is creating. Here are a few links below for the interested people to read.

• IRC session log from Kiran Jonnalagadda
• Karana (detailed posts related to various parts of the project) Must read site.
• Aadhaar fail Details of scams/failures/deaths/other issues from Aadhaar project

Neither my wife, nor our daughter has an Aadhaar (I also don’t have one), that means Py (our daughter) did not get admission to any school last year.

Whenever security researchers or journalists tried to report on the project, the UIDAI tried to hide behind denials and police complaints against the journalists or researchers. There are various reports on how one can get access (both read/write) to the actual production database with as little as $10-30. We now have examples of terrorist organizations having access to the same database. The UIDAI kept telling how this is an unhackable technology and for security they have a 13 feet wall outside of the data center which in turn will keep all hackers away.

They have already build 360 degree databases on top of Aadhaar, and now they are trying to link DNA to the same system.

The current government of India tried their level best to argue in the Supreme Court of India to tell that Indians don’t have any rights to privacy. But, thankfully they failed in this effort, and the Supreme Court ruled privacy as a fundamental right. We are now waiting for the judgment on the Aadhaar (which will hopefully come out in the next few weeks).

Meanwhile, the evil nexus is pushing down Aadhaar to the throats of the Indian citizens and Pakistani spies and gods.

A few days ago, in an event in Jaipur, they asked Edward Snowden the following question.

How big of an issue is privacy?

The answer started with from where that argument comes from.

The answer is that Nazi Germany. The nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels did this. Because he was trying to change the conversation away from “What are your rights?” and “What evidences must the government show?” to violet them, to intrude into your private life and instead said “Why do you need your rights?”, “How can you justify your rights?”, “Isn’t strange that you are invoking your rights? Isn’t that unusual?”. But, in a free society this is the opposite of the way it is supposed to work. We don’t need to explain why you have a right. You don’t need to explain why it is valuable, why you need it. It is for the government to explain why you don’t deserve it. They go to a court, they show that you are a criminal. This is increasingly falling out of favor, because the governments and companies think that it is inefficient. It is too much work. Life would be easier, life would be more convenient for them, life would be more profitable for them if we didn’t have any rights at all.

But, privacy isn’t about something to hide, privacy is about something to protect. And that is the very concept of liberty. It is the idea that there can be some part of you, of your life, of your ideas that belong to you, not to society. And you get to make the decision about who you share that with. -- Edward Snowden

Why are we reading this in your blog?

This might a question for many of you. Why are reading this in a blog post or in a planet? Because we, the people with the knowledge of technology are also part of these evil plans. We now know about many private companies taking part with their local government to build 360 degree profiles, to track the citizens and to run the mass surveillance systems. For example, related to Aadhaar, for the last 4 years, Google silently pushed the Aadhaar support phone number (which now UIDAI is trying to stay away from) to every Google Android phone in India. When they got caught red handed, they claimed that they did it inadvertently. Finacle software by Infosys denies creation of bank accounts without Aadhaar. Microsoft is working to link Skype with Aadhaar. Bill Gates is trying to push the idea that Aadhaar is all good, and does not have any issues.

What can you do?

You can start by educating yourself first. Read more about the technologies which controls our lives. Have doubt about the things and try to understand how they actually work. Write about them, ask questions to the people in power. Talk about the issues to your friends and family.

This is not gong to be an easy task, but, we all should keep fighting back to make sure of a better future for our next generation.

A branch of the Indian government, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, is trying once again to censor Internet and Freedom of Speech. This time, it ordered to form a committee of 10 members who will frame regulations for online media/ news portals and online content.

This order includes these following Terms of Reference for the committee.

• To delineate the sphere of online information dissemination which needs to be brought under regulation, on the lines applicable to print and electronic media.
• To recommend appropriate policy formulation for online media / news portals and online content platforms including digital broadcasting which encompasses entertainment / infotainment and news/media aggregators keeping in mind the extant FDI norms, Programme & Advertising Code for TV Channels, norms circulated by PCI, code of ethics framed by NBA and norms prescribed by IBF; and
• To analyze the international scenario on such existing regulatory mechanisms with a view to incorporate the best practices.

What are the immediate problems posed by this order?

If one reads carefully, one can see how vague are the terms, and specifically how they added the term online content into it.

online content means everything we can see/read/listen do over cyberspace. In the last few years, a number of new news organizations came up in India, whose fearless reporting have caused a lot of problems for the government and their friends. Even though they managed to censor publishing (sometimes self censored) news in the mainstream Indian media, but all of these new online media houses and individual bloggers and security researchers and activists kept informing the mass about the wrongdoings of the people in power.

With this latest attempt to restrict free speech over the internet, the government is trying to increase its reach even more. Broad terms like online content platforms or online media or news/media aggregators will include every person and websites under its watch. One of the impacts of mass indiscriminate surveillance like this is that people are shamed into reading and thinking only what is in line with the government, or popular thought .

How do you determine if some blog post or update in a social media platform is news or not? For me, most of things I read on the internet are news to me. I learn, I communicate my thoughts over these various platforms on cyberspace. To all those computer people reading this blog post, think about the moment when you will try to search about “how to do X in Y programming language?” on Internet, but, you can not see the result because that is blocked by this censorship.

India is also known for random blockades of different sites over the years. The Government also ordered to kill Internet for entire states for many days. For the majority of internet blockages, we, the citizens of India were neither informed the reasons nor given a chance to question the legality of those bans. India has been marked as acountry under surveillance by Reporters Without Borders back in 2012.

Also remember that this is the same Government, which was trying to fight at its best in the Supreme Court of India last year, to curb the privacy of every Indian citizen. They said that Indian citizens do not have any right to privacy. Thankfully the bench declared the following:

The right to privacy is protected as an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 and as a part of the freedoms guaranteed by Part III of the Constitution.

Privacy is a fundamental right of every Indian citizen.

However, that fundamental right is still under attack in the name of another draconian law The Aadhaar act. A case is currently going on in the Supreme Court of India to determine the constitutional validity of Aadhaar. In the recent past, when journalists reported how the Aadhaar data can be breached, instead of fixing the problems, the government is criminally investigating the journalists.

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Different governments across the world kept trying (and they will keep trying again and again) to curb free speech and press freedom. They are trying to draw borders and boundaries inside of cyberspace, and restrict the true nature of what is it referring to here?.

In 1996, late John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, and I think that fits in naturally in the current discussion.

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. -- John Perry Barlow

How can you help to fight back censorship?

Each and every one of us are affected by this, and we all can help to fight back and resist censorship. The simplest thing you can do is start talking about the problems. Discuss them with your neighbor, talk about it while commuting to the office. Explain the problem to your children or to your parents. Write about it, write blog posts, share across all the different social media platforms. Many of your friends (from other fields than computer technology) may be using Internet daily, but might not know about the destruction these laws can cause and the censorship imposed on the citizens of India.

Educate people, learn from others about the problems arising. If you are giving a talk about a FOSS technology, also talk about how a free and open Internet is helping all of us to stay connected. If that freedom goes away, we will lose everything. At any programming workshop you attend, share these knowledge with other participants.

In many cases, using tools to bypass censorship altogether is also very helpful (avoiding any direct confrontation). The Tor Project is a free software and open network which helps to keep freedom and privacy of the users. By circumventing surveillance and censorship, one can use it more for daily Internet browsing. The increase in Tor traffic will help all of the Tor network users together. This makes any attempt of tracking individuals even more expensive for any nation state actors. So, download the Tor Browser today and start using it for everything.

In this era of Public private partnership from hell, Cory Doctorow beautifully explained how internet is the nervous system of 21st century, and how we all can join together to save the freedom of internet. Listen to him, do your part.

Header image copyright: Peter Massas (CC-BY-SA)

In the beginning of October, I attended a new PyCon in India, PyConf Hyderabad (no worries, they are working on the name for the next year). I was super excited about this conference, the main reason is being able to meet more Python developers from India. We are a large country, and we certainly need more local conferences :)

We reached the conference hotel a day before the event starts along with Py. The first day of the conference was workshop day, we reached the venue on time to say hi to everyone. Meet the team at the conference and many old friends. It was good to see that folks traveled from all across the country to volunteer for the conference. Of course, we had a certain number of dgplug folks there :)

In the conference day, Anwesha and /my setup in the PSF booth, and talked to the attendees. During the lighting talk session, Sayan and Anwesha introduced PyCon Pune, and they also opened up the registration during the lighting talk :). I attended Chandan Kumar’s talk about his journey into upstream projects. Have to admit that I feel proud to see all the work he has done.

Btw, I forgot to mention that lunch at PyConf Hyderabad was the best conference food ever. They had some amazing biryani :).

The last talk of the day was my keynote titled Free Software movement & current days. Anwesha and I wrote an article on the history of Free Software a few months back, and that the talk was based on that. This was also the first time I spoke about Freedom of the Press Foundation (attended my first conference as the FPF staff member).

The team behind the conference did some amazing groundwork to make this conference happening. It was a good opportunity to meet the community, and make new friends.

This time instead of per day report, I will try to write about things happened during PyCon India. This time we had the conference at JNU, in Delhi. It was nice to be back at JNU after such a long time. The other plus point was about the chance to meet ilug-delhi again.

Red Hat booth at PyCon

We had booth duty during the conference. Thanks to Rupali, we managed to share the booth space with PyLadies. After the keynote the booth space got flooded with people. Many of them were students, or freshers looking for internship option. We also had queries about services provided by Red Hat. Just outside the booth we had Ganesh, SurajN, Trishna, , they were talking to every person visit our booth. Answering the hundreds of queries people had. It was nice to see how they were talking about working upstream, and inspiring students to become upstream contributor. I also did a talk Python usage in Red Hat family.

PyLadies presence

This was the first time we had PyLadies presence in PyCon India. You can read their experience from their blogs, 1, 2, 3. This presence was very important as it helped the community to learn about PyLadies. We saw the expectation of starting new chapters in different parts of the country. Nisha, Anwesha, Pooja, Rupali, Janki and the rest of the team managed to get an impromptu open space session, which I think was the best session on community I ever saw. Jeff Rush, Van Lindberg, Paul Everitt, Dmitry Filippov joined to share their experience in community.

annual dgplug face to face meeting

From dgplug.org we all meet face to face during PyCon India, we generally call the meeting as stair case meeting as we used to seat in the stair case of the Bangalore venue. This time we chose the seat in the ramp in the venue. We had a list of people coming, but as you can see in the photo below, the list of dgplug, and friends is ever growing. Sirtaj also came in during the meeting, and shared some valuable ideas with the students. I should mention VanL's keynote at day one here. As he spoke about "failure", which is something people don't prefer to talk. It is very much important for the students to understand that failure is something to learn from, not to run away. Most of the students we talked later, had being able to understand the points Van made in his talk.

Anwesha's first talk at PyCon

She already wrote about the talk in her blog. But I want to mention it again as it gave a new perspective to the developers present in the conference. For the students present in the conference who wanted to become upstream contributors, got a chance to learn about the binding point, the license. She talked about best practises at the end of her talk. Few days back I read another blog post about her talk (and the PyLadies).

One can view all the photos in my flickr album.

Finally we have won. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has issued a press release some time ago telling that no one can charge different prices for different services on Internet. The fight was on in an epic scale, one side spent more than 100million in advertisements, and lobbying. The community fought back in the form of #SaveTheInternet, and it worked.

In case you are wondering what is this about, you can start reading the first post from Mahesh Murthy, and the reply to the response of Facebook. Trust me, it will be an amazing reading. There is also this excellent report from Lauren Smiley. There are also few other amazing replies from TRAI to Facebook about same.