"Download Anonymous masks for 9 June censorship protest"

The Anonymous mask.

India’s netizens are an angry group these days. The government has blocked access to file sharing websites like PirateBay, Vimeo and other torrent websites arguing that this is being done to stop privacy and copyright violations. This web censorship hasn’t gone down too well with the hacker group Anonymous who have asked users to organise protests against “web censorship” in India on 9 June.

As part of the protests, Anonymous has also asked all citizens to wear Anonymous’ (Fawkes) mask, dress completely in black and step out on the streets to protests.

The aim: to target public places like malls, markets, and houses of politicians in order to get maximum impact.

The group has also put out a cut-out of the Guy Fawkes, mask on its website which users can download, print, cut and put together to wear to the protest on 9 June.

Are the protests against government’s censorship justified? To a large extent yes. There will be people who will say that piracy is illegal and the government is well within its rights to block sites. But file-sharing aren’t the only sites that the Indian government has been blocking. And not all files shared on these sites are illegal. There are plenty of perfectly legitimate files on these sites that users upload and share with one another for the simple shared purpose of information exchange.

As Hatim Kantawalla, editor of Tech2.in points out in this earlier post the list of blocked websites, is only going to get longer. 

He writes: Soon enough we’ll reminisce fondly about once having unhindered, open access to the Web, a glorious two-decade-long era that was free from government and ISP intervention. Our current classification is ‘Country Under Surveillance’, and it won’t be surprising if we are lumped into the ‘Enemy of the Internet’ group pretty soon. 

Shivam Vij on Kafila.org, highlights that the latest crackdown on Vimeo and PirateBay is nothing new, but is in fact an action that is fully consistent with the past actions of the government of India who have been blocking websites for some time now.

They did so informally by blocking Dawn.com, website of the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, during the Kargil war in 1999. They did so again to the webpage of a militant group in the northeast, on the website of the Yahoo! Groups mailing list service. And again in 2006, when they blocked over 20 websites, some of them for no apparent reason.

The bigger problem is that the process of blocking a website is not clearly defined argues Vij.

A final decision  on censorship, is taken by the Department of Information Technology in consultation with the Home Ministry, is so opaque that we don’t even know which websites are blocked in India – we can only trust that the DIT’s responses to RTI applications are truthful.

It is a bleak picture for Internet regulation in India. The debate isn’t just about whether people should have the right to download movies and music illegally.

The protests are echoing a growing concern that India’s government doesn’t quite seem to understand how the Internet functions and are choosing to clamp down on it rather than attempt to understand it.