Vimeo, GitHub up again, but 28 websites still blocked

We learned about the Department of Telecommunication’s (DoT) decision to **block 32 websites** last night. Apart from tweets from the head of BJP’s national IT cell, Arvind Gupta, there wasn’t any clear indication as to why these sites were blocked. But in a report in The Times of India, Gulshan Rai, the director India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has elaborated on the matter. He has said that the directions to block the said 32 websites were issued to the ISPs following the directions of a Mumbai additional chief metropolitan magistrate’s November order. Rai added that Mumbai’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) approached the judiciary after interrogating Arif Majeed, a young ISIS recruit from Kalyan who returned to India. Another professional from Bengaluru, **Mehdi Biswas was arrested** for allegedly tweeting out ISIS propoganda on Twitter. According to Rai, the 32 websites in the list of blocked sites were used to spread ISIS propoganda and used to hire youths to join ISIS. CERT-In had contacted the websites in the past to remove objectionable content, but these sites ignored the government’s requests. Rai stated that some of these sites which have been unblocked have agreed to work with the government. When asked about blocking the URLs having the objectionable content rather than blanket-blocking of entire websites, Rai said that individual URLs could not be blocked as the content could easily be removed, copied and pasted elsewhere. This still dosen’t answer the question, what is stopping the so-called propogandists from still going ahead and pasting the removed content elsewhere? Blocking of sites such as Vimeo and Dailymotion, which are video hosting sites similar to YouTube and GitHub, which is a platform for software developers to share code irritated regular users no end. Hacktivist group Anonymous India tweeted as follows.

  Anonymous India even pulled out an old tweet by PM Narendra Modi on the hashtag #GOIBlocks

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 Pranesh Prakash, who released the list of blocked websites on this Twitter account yesterday, had a question for Mumbai ATS. You can find his timeline of tweets on the #GOIBlocks hashtag here.

15. Qn for Mumbai ATS: How were Github Gist and the Sourceforge page for a pastebin clone used to “motivate other Indians" toward terrorism?

— Pranesh Prakash (bsky.pranesh.in) (@pranesh) December 31, 2014

Arvind Gupta tweeted out that action to unblock  weebly.com, vimeo.com, gist.github.com and dailymotion.com has been initiated. According to Gupta and Rai only those sites will be unblocked which will co-operate with the government and remove the objectionable content from its database. At the time of writing, apart from GitHub, we got the ‘URL blocked’ message for the other three websites. If one were to look at spreading of propoganda, two of the largest social media platforms Twitter and Facebook have been left untouched. It is no surprise that a lot of terror networks use Twitter and Facebook to spread their message and for recruitment. Will these sites also be on the to-block list or are they already co-operating with the government on weeding out objectionable content. We will have to wait for more clarity on that. Whatever the case, this particular statement by Prakash tells us a lot about the misuse of certain sections of the IT Act 2000, “The 69A Rules don’t allow for transparency, accountability, time-limits on blocks, etc. So easily misused by govt. + courts + individuals.”