Mr Sibal: whip the NIC into shape first, then fret about internet underbelly

By Senthil Chengalvarayan The minister, we have been told had hundreds of gnomes in his office trawling the gutters of the internet looking for filth on his political masters in preparation for his now famous meeting with Facebook and Google. Now, I have no sympathy for the sickos who inhabit the underbelly of the Net and I don’t think cracking down on them will undermine my freedom of expression. But how it should be done and whether Facebook’s reported acquiescence to the minister was a sell out of my right to information could be the matter of another column. What I wonder about now though, is if the man hours that Kapil Sibal’s staff spent on searching the net could have been put to better use? For instance, some of us who regularly receive information from the government have been bemused for quite a while now about how it is delivered. Till a few months ago it was not unusual to receive an official government press release from a Gmail or a Hotmail account, or from some other free public e-mail address. [caption id=“attachment_155110” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Both Mr. Sibal’s Minister’s of State, Milind Deora and Sachin Pilot don’t have any mail ids listed against their names on the ministry website. Reuters”] [/caption] I must say that it’s not so frequent now. It is possible that an embarrassed government has come down on the practice of mass mailing official releases from free public email accounts after a series of articles following the 13 July bomb blasts in Mumbai this year that killed 21. _Bloomberg_had then run a story on how the Prime Minister’s office had issued a statement condemning the terrorist attacks from a Hotmail address. Okay that was just a press release, so at most it was embarrassing that the PMO preferred using Hotmail to an address created by the National Informatics Center, NIC. But the article also pointed out and I quote; “The Ministry of Commerce sends market-moving inflation data via a Gmail account, and the Indian Air Force uses another to send media updates on competitive bidding for an $11 billion combat-jet program. After a 6 July interview with Bloomberg News, Attorney General Goolam Vahanvati handed out Hotmail and Gmail addresses as the best ways to contact him.” Now the National Informatics Center or NIC comes under Mr. Sibal’s charge, and one of the tasks of at least some his staff is to ensure the use of official NIC email IDs so that government information is not hacked. What his ministry seems to have done since July though is to get rid of some of the evidence. They seem to have ensured that most government websites, not all are scrubbed clean of private email ids. So while just last week a senior cabinet minister sent a colleague of ours an official mail from his hotmail account, his ministry website carries no trace of the account. Meanwhile The Ministry of Commerce, which Bloomberg said was until July sending market-moving inflation data via a Gmail account, also doesn’t have any evidence of any private private mail ids on it’s sites. Their “Contact Us” web page lists only a New Delhi Street address as a means to contact them! Mr. Sibal himself has just one mail ID, mocit@nic.in against his name listed on his ministry’s website. In June Mail Today reported that there were four including kapilsibal@hotmail.com. The problem though is that a mail I sent to mocit@nic.in from my official company id bounced back!! I am sure though I will still be able to reach Mr. Sibal at his hotmail account. Both Mr. Sibal’s Minister’s of State, Milind Deora and Sachin Pilot don’t have any mail ids listed against their names on the ministry website. So presumably the only way you can reach the junior ministers of a ministry that oversees India’s $88 billion I.T industry is on the phone or by regular Postal Mail!! I suspect though, that rather than list an official mail id that doesn’t work all the time Messrs Deora and Pilot just hand out their private mail accounts to those who need to stay in touch with them. And you can’t blame the young ministers for not wanting to use their official NIC accounts. Both of them I am sure use smart phones like millions of other Indians do. So what’s the connection you ask? Well you apparently can’t send out a mail from your NIC account from a smart phone!! The NIC website has an FAQ that tells you why: “ Why I can not send mails to NIC email addresses from NIC email account through my Blackberry: While sending a mail to any NIC email address through Blackberry using NIC email account, Blackberry uses its own outbound server. When that mail reaches the NIC mail gateway, it finds NIC mail originated from Blackberry server, which violates the security policy. Hence the mail is dropped by the SMTP gateway. However, mails sent to a address other than userid@nic.in will be delievered. “ So in short a security precaution prevents government officials from sending messages to other NIC addresses using a smart phone. But it seems it is perfectly alright for them to use public e mail accounts for all manner of communication!! Oh, the mail that I sent to Mr. Sibal on his Ministry listed account wasn’t sent from a blackberry but through Outlook from my Desktop in office. It bounced all the same. So I really don’t blame Mr. Pilot, Mr. Deora or the Commerce Ministry for just dropping their Nic contacts from the site! But, if I were in Mr. Sibal’s place I would rather use my staff’s time to find ways to whip NIC into shape than have them surf the net to spot random comments against my Masters, which frankly very few of us bother to read. Really. There is picture of Rahul Gandhi and a Leggy Friend on a face book group I am subscribed too, I never ever bothered to test the accompanying link till last week. It look’s like Facebook’s been obedient, their cyber bouncers don’t allow you access to the story, unless it was a problem with my iPad, but I didn’t feel deprived, I clicked the link only because Minister Sibal said I shouldn’t! Senthil Chengalvarayan is President & Editorial Director of TV18 Business Media.  Disclosure: Network18 owns Firstpost.