[Commons-Law] one more on the censorship trail

[Badri Natarajan]

Yes, this has been all over various mailing lists for a few days now, but 
the mainstream media has just begun to pick it up.

A silly idea on so many levels.

First, there's the 19(1)(a) Freedom of Speech issue - blocking like this is 
highly suspect. Second there is the question (as this article points out) 
whether the Govt has the legal authority to do this.

Third, technologies to block just the named Yahoogroup do exist - it's just 
that the Indian ISPs don't seem to want to take the trouble and have 
decided to block Yahoogroups completely.

Fourth, I cannot understand what the Govt hopes to gain by this blocking. 
Why does the Govt appear to think blocking IPs is a solution to this 
problem? Do they imagine that terrorists have not heard of the Google cache 
or proxy servers? It's true that the vast majority of "normal" net users 
would be unable to access blocked sites, and this approach (ignoring the 
freedom of speech/censorship implications for the moment) would work where 
the idea is to block access to a site used by the public in general, like 
an MP3 download site, but it's pretty pointless if the idea is to block 
access to a small group of people who can be easily taught to evade it.)

Fifth - I took a look at the Yahoogroup in question. It has all of 30 
members, and very few posts, most of which are not even in English. I 
skimmed through one of the (few) English posts and while it's a bit 
radical, it doesn't seem to be overly objectionable. What did the Govt hope 
to accomplish by this except draw MORE traffic and publicity to a dead site?

Badri

At 03:19 PM 9/23/2003 +0530, you wrote:
>sorry for cross posting to those on the reader 
>list 
><http://www.thehindu.com/2003/09/23/stories/2003092312761100.htm>http://www.thehindu.com/2003/09/23/stories/2003092312761100.htm
>
>The Hindu, September 23, 2003
>
>         Bid to block anti-India website affects users
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