The websites of environmental collectives have come under web censorship over the past week. Among them, IFF is offering advice and support to LetIndiaBreathe.in (LIB) and FridaysForFuture (FFF). We offer help to any civil society activists who require advice and access to a network of counsels and litigators.
Some updates have come in from media reports:
Speaking about the block, NIXI chief executive officer Sanjay Goel told ThePrint that NIXI blocked the LIB and FFF websites on government orders. However, he refused to disclose which ministry gave the block order and when.
He said NIXI doesnât block any website on its own as itâs only a registry. âWe only block a website after getting a government order,â he said.
âWe get orders from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), home ministry and others as well. Our business is to proliferate â.inâ websites, therefore more â.inâ websites only benefit us. We have very little discretion in such matters,â he said.
Goel added that NIXI, which is a non-profit company that works under MeitY, was not given any reason for blocking the two websites. âWe get such orders from time to time,â he said.
Sanjay Dhotre, Minister of State for Communications, which oversees the DoT, told ThePrint that he didnât know about the case of blocking these three websites. However, he explained that a committee handled by the Ministry of Home Affairs, in which the IT additional secretary is also a member, oversees such matters.
âThe committee gets many complaints across states from chief secretaries regarding objectionable content in websites. The committee then oversees the complaint and an enquiry is made. This is a continuous process,â said Dhotre.
Meanwhile, an official of NIXI said that they take action against a website only if asked by a law enforcement agency to do so.
âWe donât take any action on our part unless a law enforcement agency asks us to do so. I havenât looked at the details of these cases but it should be because some law enforcement agency has directed us,â Shubham Saran, General Manager, NIXI said.
Responding to the news of blocking of websites of the three groups, RP Gupta, secretary, environment ministry, said, â âWe are not aware of these developments.â
The events described below, coupled with the documents accessed by HuffPost India and interviews with a cross section of stakeholders, suggest that fears of an âinternet censorshipâ on governmentâs critics such as the environmental collectives campaigning against official policies remain unaddressed. Continued blocking of these websites will ensure that a vast section of Indians accessing information online may remain in dark about how the governmentâs changes to Indiaâs environmental laws could affect their health and safety.
Digital movements leading the campaign against the draft EIA 2020 are inexplicably inaccessible amidst growing internet censorship in the pandemic.
Update No. 2 : As an attempt to further transparency and ensure accountability and a part of our RTI work we have filed RTIs on the censorship of enviromental activism websites. We have inquires, why were these domains seized/held and websites blocked, by whom and under what legal order?
Links at the bottom. We have selected specific authorities based on press responses for which we are grateful to the members of the press.
RTIs have been filed on July 15, 2020 and July 16, 2020 with the Ministry of Forests and Environment, Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Electronics and IT, National Information Exchange of India (NIXI), and the Cyber Crime Cell of the Delhi Police.
The queries in these RTIs are common and seek for transparency on the existence and reason for the domain hold placed on the website. The filing with the Cyber Crime Cell of the Delhi Police has been made due to media comments by persons from NIXI which infer they received a takedown notice from a police agency.
RTIs have been filed on July 15, 2020 and July 16, 2020 with the Ministry of Forests and Environment, Department of Telecom, Ministry of Electronics and IT, and the Cyber Crime Cell of the Delhi Police.
The queries in these RTIs are common and seek for transparency on the existence and reason for the domain hold placed on the website. The filing with the Cyber Crime Cell of the Delhi Police has been made due to media comments by persons from NIXI which infer they received a takedown notice from a police agency.
RTIs have been filed on July 15, 2020 and July 16, 2020 with the Ministry of Forests and Environment, Department of Telecom, Ministry of Electronics and IT, and the Cyber Crime Cell of the Delhi Police.
The queries in these RTIs are common and seek for transparency on the existence and reason for the domain blocks on BSNL and JIO networks as per public reports gathered by us.
Links to the RTIs. Our RTI and Transparency work is headed by @Anushka
Hello,
I am grateful to you and the Internet Freedom Foundation for the great work thatâs being done.
But I have a question: IFF also uses .in TLD and the domain is therefore subject to whim of NIXI. Now that government has shown that it can go to great lengths for enforcing censorship, shouldnât IFF move to some other TLD?