It is the strangest of times in the history of social media in India, when both the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress have accused social media giant facebook of political bias. The latest salvo has come from Union Minister for Information and Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad, who has written a firmly worded letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Prasad has alleged that the Facebook India team has activated a campaign to target those alleged with the “right-of-centre ideology”. 

Ravi Shankar Prasad has told Mark Zuckerberg that there have been “documented cases” of bias and inaction displayed by Facebook. Prasad’s letter to Zuckerberg follows similar missives from the Congress party. The Congress had alleged that there was a “nexus” between the Bharatiya Janata Party and Facebook.

However Ravi Shankar Prasad has now added to Mark Zuckerberg’s confusion and alleged that  “in the run up to 2019 General Elections in India, there was a concerted effort by Facebook India management to not just delete pages or substantially reduce their reach but also offer no recourse or right of appeal to affected people who are supportive of the right-of-centre ideology.” He told  Zuckerberg that he was “also aware that dozens of emails written to Facebook management received no response,” and stated that “the cases of bias and inaction are seemingly a direct outcome of the dominant political beliefs of individuals in your Facebook India team.”

The minister, in what is perhaps the first official government backed ‘warning’ to Facebook, says he wrote the letter “to raise serious concerns, some of which we have also raised in the past with senior officials of Facebook.” He said Facebook should be “visibly seen” as being fair towards “users of diverse beliefs and ideologies” and even though “individuals working in any organization may have their individual likes or dislikes, but that must not have any bearing on the public policies and performance of the organisation.”

He even pinpointed Facebook employees in the India team, “Right from the India Managing Director to other senior officials, is dominated by people who belong to a particular political belief. People from this political predisposition have been overwhelmingly defeated by the people in successive free and fair elections. After having lost all democratic legitimacy, they are trying to discredit India’s democratic process by dominating the decision-making apparatus of important social media platforms. Facebook is the latest tool in their arsenal to stoke internal divisions and social disturbances.”

Prasad said it was “problematic” that “Facebook employees are on record abusing the Prime Minister and senior Cabinet Ministers of India while still working in Facebook India and managing important positions. It is doubly problematic when the bias of individuals becomes an inherent bias of the platform. And it is unacceptable when political biases of individuals impinge on the freedom of speech of millions of people.”

Prasad has also accused Facebook of “selective leaks from within your company to try to portray an alternate reality” and condemned it stating that this amounted to “interference in India’s political process through gossip, whispers and innuendo”.

Here is the letter as shared by Amit Malviya who heads BJP’s Information & Technology wing.

The letter got an interesting response from the Left leadership too. Sitaram Yechury posted:  

“The last resort of the guilty is to hurl baseless charges against the Left. Let a JPC probe the nexus between the Facebook & BJP-Modi government.”

The last resort of the guilty is to hurl baseless charges against the Left.
Let a JPC probe the nexus between the Facebook & BJP-Modi government.
The refusal to constitute a JPC is more eloquent ….. pic.twitter.com/a5lWYaiWwY

— Sitaram Yechury (@SitaramYechury) September 2, 2020

Meanwhile, Facebook representatives are expected to appear before a Parliamentary committee today, September 2. They were summoned to explain their side after allegations were made that Facebook allows hate content posted by those affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the right-wing. Facebook came into the limelight after an expose in the Wall Street Journal over its allegedly selective allowance of hate speech on its platform. Opposition parties demanded a probe and Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information and Technology led by Congress leader Shashi Tharoor convened a sitting. The representatives of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology are also expected to attend.

The Delhi Assembly’s Committee on Peace and Harmony has also  decided to summon Facebook officials in its next meeting following incriminating evidence by witnesses of the social media giant’s complicity in aggravating February 2020 Delhi riots. 

As reported by SabrangIndia before, Facebook has its own community standards that protect public safety, human rights and technology. According to its Community Standards, Facebook considers the public interest value against the risk of harm. It specially mentions that expressions that threaten people are not permitted, it will remove language that incites serious violence. If there is any physical harm or indirect threat to public safety, the social media giant claims it will remove the content and work with law enforcement. But management of the fine balance between free speech and hateful or inflammatory speech requires a greater understanding of India’s diversity, the religious sentiments of people of different faiths and the country’s questionable track record when it comes to communal violence.

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This is what political parties and others are asking: was it a government agency that bought the hacking tools from the Israeli company? And used it against its own citizens? Are we, as Justice Srikrishna said, becoming an Orwellian surveillance state?  Justice Srikrishna headed the committee that gave detailed recommendations on framing a data and privacy protection law. Though its recommendations were submitted in 2018, the government has been dragging its feet over such a law protecting the privacy of its citizens.

If we listen to Ravi Shankar Prasad, the IT minister, it is either the fault of the Congress, who used to bug their opponents phones; or Facebook’s: he has asked WhatsApp to “explain” the hacks. In other words, deflect from the simple and straight forward question, did any central government agency buy or license Pegasus from the Israeli company?

Under the rules of the IT Act, ten central government agencies were notified in 2018, who have powers of interception. The home ministry’s denial on an RTI on whether Pegasus was procured by the government, was limited only to agencies under the home ministry. What about agencies such as NTRO, RAW and CBI, which are not under the home ministry? Why has the voluble Ravi Shankar Prasad, otherwise offering his opinion on everything under the sun, been so coy about providing a straight answer to this question?

The CPI(M) in a press statement raised questions, “The government needs to answer whether any of its agencies were involved in the use of this hacking software, particularly since most of the persons affected were targeted by the government in May last year. Under law, hacking peoples phones would constitute a cyber crime. If the government is not involved in the Pegasus software as it claims, why has it not filed an FIR and started criminal investigations?”

NSO, the Israeli company has claimed that they supply such software only to government agencies. If indeed the Indian government agencies are not involved, then the hacking of peoples smartphones constitute a criminal offence. Why has the government, specifically the IT ministry not filed an FIR and started criminal investigations on this? Blaming the Congress for previous misdeeds including the Emergency, does not absolve this government from performing its constitutional duties. Or is it the IT minister’s kindergarten alibi that “they did first”?

NSO has been notorious for supplying its hacking tools to governments and various spy agencies. Among its buyers have been Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, who have used these tools to hack into their critics phones and computers. It was widely reported that Jamal Khashoggi’s iPhone was hacked by Saudi intelligence agencies using Pegasus, prior to his killing in Saudi’s Istanbul consulate. 

The only legal step that has been taken in this hacking is Facebook, the owner of WhatsApp platform, filing a civil suit for damages against two Israeli entities, NSO and Q Cyber Technologies, in a Federal Court in San Francisco, US.

What is Pegasus “software” and how does it affect the smartphone users, particularly WhatsApp users? The Israeli company supplies hacking tools for various kinds of devices including Android based smartphones or iPhones, who between them have a near 100 per cent monopoly (or duopoly)  over all smartphones. For WhatsApp, which has been widely publicising its 100 per cent end-to-end encryption, it is particularly embarrassing, as it has neglected to tell its users that such encryption does not help if the users’ phones are hacked; such information is available in unencrypted form on the users’ phones. To compound their embarrassment, the Pegasus hacking software used a security hole in the WhatsApp software.

The current security hole has been patched by WhatsApp. But this was only one such hole. There are many others which are not even known. These are called zero-day exploits – meaning that they are unknown to the supplier of such software – and are sold by criminals on the Dark Net. Even companies pay big money to hackers to learn about their security holes, quite often buying such information from the same Dark Net that criminals use.

If this buying and selling of such software are limited to only criminals or companies intent on patching their systems against vulnerabilities, the problems would have been far less than what we face today. This has been made far worse due to government’s intelligence agencies entry into this business. They bring in big bucks, large teams and tap into the leading research institutions in the name of national security.

While the US and the western media has been talking about Russia and China, they are largely silent on Israeli agencies and of course US agencies NSA-CIA, and UK’s GCHQ. These three sets of intelligence agencies have developed the most extensive suit of software tools or attack tools for penetrating computers, smartphones, the switches and routers that are a part of the telecom infrastructure of every country and even in our homes.

In this sense, hacking tools and cyber weapons are not significantly different, only their purpose is different. If anybody hacks into a computer or a phone, the hacker – and not the consumer –  effectively owns the phone as they can control what the device does.

In the US, its domestic laws, permissive as they are under their so-called global war on terror, still has a modicum of protection on domestic surveillance; even under the FISA courts’ very wide latitude given to the security agencies. We know from Snowden and WikiLeaks revelations that the US had penetrated the telecom infrastructure of every country, and had backdoors to US manufactured equipment and software platform for installing its spyware.

The Israeli agencies worked closely with the US agencies. The US could not sell such software or equipment to “friendly” monarchies and fascist rulers as it comes under export control rules. In US, these software are recognised as weapons, and their exports are strictly controlled. No such controls exist for the Israelis, who use a number of companies that are very closely tied to the Israeli military and its spy agencies. NSO and other such companies are essentially the US-Israeli arm of supplying such software tools to other spy agencies of “friendly” governments.

Such sale of software tools to the government of other countries also provide the US and Israel additional intelligence feeds. The countries including India may feel that they have “bought” this software, but all such software operates based on “servers” set up by such companies, which again are linked to Israel. All this information goes back to Israel and the US spy agencies. When governments buy such software from foreign sources, they in effect, are partnering foreign agencies to spy on their own citizens; or help foreign powers shape the domestic narrative. If NTRO or RAW have indeed bought Pegasus, the narrative that such hacking can produce, can be easily manipulated by Israeli or US spy agencies. This is the risk of “outsourcing” intelligence operations and tools. 

According to a Reuters report on the victims of the WhatsApp Pegasus breach, … “a ‘significant’ portion of the known victims are high-profile government and military officials spread across at least 20 countries on five continents. If the NSO’s claims of selling only to governments are correct, either the Pegasus spyware was used by governments to hack each other, or they were victims of Israeli spying. To compound the danger, the NSA’s and CIA’s spyware tools were dumped by hackers on the net in 2017 and are available to criminals. This shows how dangerous such software is for everybody, not just activists.

What make such tools particularly dangerous is that they are not the work of a few hackers but have the resources of a state behind them. These are not hacking tools but cyber weapons. This is why the governments need to sign a moratorium on developing and deploying such weapons, the same as we have on chemical and biological weapons.

First published in https://peoplesdemocracy.in/

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Image: PTI

The admonition was needed, even opportune. But there are some questions. Ravi Shankar Prasad must tell us who exactly he is advising. Those criminals who are celebrating ‘vadh’ of Gouri Lankesh on social media or otherwise are hardened Hindutva practitioners who believe in converting democratic-secular India into a Hindu version of Pakistan, a Hindu theocratic state. In fact, it has been an old practice of Hindutva practitioners to celebrate the killing of opponents as ‘vadh’. They did it after the killings of Narender Dhabolkar, Govind Pansare and Professor MM Kalburgi.

In fact, they also did so after the killing of Gandhiji by ‘Hindu nationalists’. This debased practice was brought to notice by the first Home Minister of India, Sardar Patel. Sardar Patel in a letter dated 11 September 1948 to the then boss of RSS, Golwalkar wrote: “The RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhiji’s death.”

If someone believes that these celebrations took place without the without the knowledge, or sanction of RSS/BJP top leadership, you may actually be grossly mistaken. A prominent Hindutva organization, Hindu Janajagruti Samiti (HJS), allied to RSS has been regularly holding national conventions for the “Establishment of Hindu Nation‟ in India. In 2013, one such convention was held in Goa. Some members of one avtar of the HJS, Sanatan Sanstha have been also found to be indulging in bomb blasts targeting some Muslim institutions and are under investigation for the murder of renowned secular intellectuals like Govind Pansare and Narendra Dhabolkar. This convention started its proceedings with a felicitation message from the then CM of Gujarat, Narendrabhai Modi wishing HJS all success in its project of turning India into a Hindu Nation.
 
Shockingly, from the same dais in this convention from where Modi’s felicitation message was read, one of the prominent speakers, K.V. Sitaramiah, declared that Gandhi was ‘terrible, wicked and most sinful’. Rejoicing in the killing of M.K. Gandhi, he went on to declare, “As Bhagwan Shri Krishna said in the Gita, Paritranaya Sadhunam Vinashaya Cha Dushkritam/ Dharamasansthapnaya Sambhavami Yuge-Yuge (For the protection of the good, for the destruction of the wicked and for the establishment of righteousness, I am born in every age) On…30th January 1948 evening, Shriram came in the form of Nathuram Godse and ended the life of Gandhi.”
 
K.V. Sitaramiah has also authored a book titled ‘Gandhi was Dharma Drohi and Desa Drohi’ in which the text at the back cover, quoting from the epic Mahabharata, demands ‘Dharma Drohis must be killed’ and “Not killing the deserved to be killed is great sin”. He goes to, the extent of warning members of Indian Parliament that “where the members of Parliament seeing clearly allow to kill Dharma and truth as untruth, those members will be called dead”.^[2]
 
Prasad must talk to his mother organisation, the RSS and other Hindutva organizations to discard this inhuman and barbaric worldview that advocates the elimination of political Opponents, even celebrates their deaths.

The post Celebrating “Vadh” (killing) of Opponents is Deeply Embedded in the Politics of Hindutva appeared first on SabrangIndia.

"The government respects faith but worship and social evil cannot coexist," he said.

"I want Akhilesh Yadav, Rahul Gandhi and Mayawati to clarify their stand on the issue of triple talaq. Our (BJP's) stand is very clear. The issue is not related to religion but involves respect and dignity of women," Prasad said at a press conference here.

"We are the only party which respects women. Neither do other parties offer a good place to women nor do they respect them," the BJP leader claimed.

Speaking at a press conference in Ghaziabad yesterday, he had said the Centre might take appropriate steps to ban triple talaq after the Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections as the tradition denies respect to women.

Prasad had said, "every pernicious practice" cannot be part of a religion and the Centre would raise the issue in the Supreme Court on three points — justice, equality and dignity of women.

Referring to the SP-Congress alliance in Uttar Pradesh, he said, "This is an alliance of desperation between two dynastic parties… alliance of desperation between crime, criminals and corruption." 

Ridiculing the pre-poll tie-up, he claimed the "confluence of Ganga and Yamuna" will end up with one party merging with the other after the polls.

"Which party will merge with which party will be seen after the polls. This is nothing but a theatre of the absurd," the BJP leader said.

He also touched upon the salient features of BJP's manifesto and the Union Budget and explained how it would help the poor.

Yesterday, while speaking to mediapersons in Ghaziabad, Prasad had alleged that Samajwadi Party and Congress have entered an alliance as both parties "indulge in corruption, crime and loot".

"Both parties are opportunist and have tied-up with each other just to stop the landslide victory of BJP," he claimed.

Not a single big industry was established in Uttar Pradesh during the tenure of Akhilesh Yadav-led SP government, the BJP leader alleged, adding the funds sanctioned by the Centre for the development of the state has not just due to the feud within the Yadav family.

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Photo courtesy: livemint

Prasad made the remarks at an event organised by the Delhi BJP’s IT cell that lay emphasis on how demonetisation was an opportunity for the country’s transition towards a cashless economy.

However, Prasad said the government’s motive behind demonetisation was “less cash”, not cashless. He criticised the Opposition parties for “not allowing” the Parliament to function.

“People will face a little problem. But the pain is like the one that a woman in labour undergoes. Eventually one will experience the joy like one does hearing the first cry of a baby,” Prasad said.

He asserted that the defunct notes deposited in the banks will be scrutinised and not all of it will be considered “white”.

At the gathering, largely consisting of lawyers, Prasad also took jibes at former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, saying, he was “happy” when Singh spoke.

“I eagerly wait for the speeches of two people. Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi,” he said, and went on to hail Prime Minister Narendra Modi for having “raised” India’s stature in the global community through his foreign trips.

He said the amount deposited in the banks will help in investing in strengthening the Indian Army, assisting farmers, small traders, building roads, adding that “naxals and terrorists” are a troubled lot due to the decision.

Speaking at the event, Delhi BJP chief Manoj Tiwari said politicians like Arvind Kejriwal and Akhilesh Yadav, who are opposing the measure, are actually “aware of its benefits”.

Tiwari also referred to Modi’s statement that former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had “rejected” Wanchoo Committee’s recommendations in 1971 to bring demonetisation.

(With inputs from PTI)

Courtesy: Janta Ka Reporter
 

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