K A L E I D O S C O P E

prime concern: Security
War on the cyberfront
The recent panic among people from the Northeast, caused by morphed pictures on social networking sites, exposed how ill prepared Indian security agencies are on the new medium.
By Ajay Banerjee
Communally offensive, morphed pictures and videos spawning across the Internet and social networking sites in the past eight weeks literally caught the Indian security agencies and police “napping”, at least on three counts — failure to acquire prior knowledge that such rumours were floating on the Internet; absence of a counter-mechanism to prevent the fallout, the resultant communal divide and speedy police action; and it exposed a blind spot in policing that the policeman on the street had no wherewithal to tackle the unprecedented hatred being spread through the Net and SMSes.

last word: Sriprakash Jaiswal
Dial-a-quote mantri with the gift of gaffe
Despite the coal in his eye, Union Minister Jaiswal has weathered the storm over mine allotments with unflinching resolve.
By Anita Katyal
When Sriprakash Jaiswal took over as the Coal Minister last year, he never imagined this relatively low-profile charge would land him in the thick of a raging controversy that has placed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the line of Opposition fire and is fast threatening to derail the UPA government.

prime concern: Security
War on the cyberfront
The recent panic among people from the Northeast, caused by morphed pictures on social networking sites, exposed how ill prepared Indian security agencies are on the new medium.
By Ajay Banerjee

Communally offensive, morphed pictures and videos spawning across the Internet and social networking sites in the past eight weeks literally caught the Indian security agencies and police “napping”, at least on three counts — failure to acquire prior knowledge that such rumours were floating on the Internet; absence of a counter-mechanism to prevent the fallout, the resultant communal divide and speedy police action; and it exposed a blind spot in policing that the policeman on the street had no wherewithal to tackle the unprecedented hatred being spread through the Net and SMSes.

Between August 11 and August 21, about 50,000 people belonging to the Northeast fled from cities in southern and western India following the rumours. India is still seeking help from the US in identifying the cyber troublemakers. So far, not a single case has been registered despite the fact that some 270 web pages were blocked in a frenzied knee-jerk reaction after the Ministry of Home Affairs cracked the whip between August 17 and 19.

Those whose web pages were blocked were questioned in the second week of September. However, six cases have been registered against those who sent out the SMSes and MMSes. The database of subscribers was available with telecom companies in India, but it was not the case with websites and social networking sites.

MoU with US

In hindsight, the cyber warfare launched since mid-July needed to have been tackled with a plan that allowed real-time blocking, monitoring and deletion of communally combustible cyber material. A stringent follow-up action is needed by way of registration of cases against rumour mongers.

Section 153 of the Indian Penal Code empowers the police to arrest persons promoting communal enmity through speeches, letters, words, pictures or graphics. But in case of computer-circulated communal material, it requires technological help to get to the source. Tracking the source of Internet rumours requires cooperation from the US as parent servers of the websites and social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo are located there.

New Delhi and Washington have a memorandum of understanding on cooperation between the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of the India and US, which share information on matters of homeland security. It is part of the strategic dialogue initiated three years ago.

Vulnerable areas

The CERT had a two-day joint exercise with its US counterpart on September 12-13. They will analyse the areas of vulnerability and work out a fresh security programme. Initially, the US companies did not cooperate in identifying the culprits.

While India blamed individuals based in Pakistan for fanning trouble using morphed pictures, the reality was that almost half of the communally sensitive posts were uploaded from within India.

The Home Minister called up his Pakistani counterpart, Rehman Malik, on August 19 and told him that the Internet Protocol (IP) address of several offensive web pages were in Pakistan. But serious questions remain unanswered: If India knows the IP address of those in Pakistan, it would also be aware of the IP address of the posts that originated in India. Why is action then not being taken?

The reality is that an IP address can be misused and even be masked. India could neither have removed /blocked the posts nor the websites. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh flagged the threat from social media to DGPs of all states at a three-day conference (September 6) in Delhi. The Hydra-headed rumour monster and provocative videos were thriving in the cyber-world from July, when clashes broke out between ethnic Bodos and migrant Bangladeshi Muslims in Assam. More than 85 persons were killed and 4 lakh rendered homeless. By the first week of August, miscreants in India and Pakistan had sparked an offensive blame game on social sites.

What really happened

One side projected the Muslims as aggressors who attacked people from the Northeast while the other side blamed “Chinis” (derogatory slang for persons with Mongoloid features) for targeting Muslims. Mumbai faced the first brunt of it on August 11 when a protest march organised by the Raza Academy turned violent with vandals targeting policemen, shops and even a war memorial. Muslim youths in Mumbai had been incited by morphed images showing how Muslims were targeted by the Bodos in Assam during the July riots. Pictures of Tibetan earthquake and Myanmar cyclone victims were used to depict the plight of the “victims”. Also, some pictures of the Assam clashes were morphed to show that Bodos were attacking Muslims.

 

Three-pronged defence Accept limitations The first step is to acknowledge the reality that billions of posts and Net access cannot be monitored. The answer is to identify those users whose Twitter and Facebook accounts periodically spew venom against any community. Such people will be booked. Report mischief The second part is to urge people to report offensive content without identifying themselves and not share such content with others even to express their anguish. Each state will have a specialised cyber police station. Police training The police will be trained by the Computer Emergency Response Team to deal with such incidents. Missing skills Not tech savvy Less than 5% among the 2.2 million-strong police force is adept at computers No connect Monitoring websites and Internet traffic is left to the CERT. There is no connect with what it does and the local SHO who is empowered to register cases under Section 153 of the IPC Training not in place The “thana” level police is not trained in specific skills. Nobody in the police establishment expects a lathi-wielding policeman to read the undercurrents by going through the gamut of social networking sites. The way forward “Banning social network sites will not work. It has to be selective,” says Rahul Prakash of the Institute of Security Studies, Observer Research Foundation. A policy needs to be drafted and Google, Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook should be involved in talks. What a citizen can do In 2011, Vinay Rai, editor of an Urdu daily in Delhi, filed a criminal case and wanted the External Affairs Ministry to serve summons on some websites selling obscene books. The IT Department granted sanction under Section 196, CrPC. Section 79 of the IT Act allows a person to get a site blocked within 36 hours. Rule 3(4) calls upon an Internet service provider to disable access to any content that is obscene or threatens security. In January, the Delhi High Court granted sanction to prosecute Google, Facebook, Yahoo and 18 other social websites for promoting enmity.

last word: Sriprakash Jaiswal
Dial-a-quote mantri with the gift of gaffe
Despite the coal in his eye, Union Minister Jaiswal has weathered the storm over mine allotments with unflinching resolve.
By Anita Katyal

When Sriprakash Jaiswal took over as the Coal Minister last year, he never imagined this relatively low-profile charge would land him in the thick of a raging controversy that has placed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the line of Opposition fire and is fast threatening to derail the UPA government.

As the Coal Minister, it has fallen on Jaiswal to communicate the government’s side of the story on the latest CAG report on the allotment of coal blocks. And the overwhelming verdict is that the quintessential homespun politician from the Hindi heartland has acquitted himself fairly well, dealing deftly with difficult media queries on what has been dubbed Coalgate. Although he stands out in sharp contrast to English-speaking politicos like P Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal, Jaiswal has managed to hold his own in numerous interviews to national and international television news channels.

“Coal ministry was always viewed as a silent ministry, but now suddenly this explosion has taken place,” Jaiswal confesses in his trademark deep voice as he recounts his 35-year-old journey as a junior political activist from his hometown Kanpur to the corridors of power in Delhi. Jaiswal is unfazed at being pushed into the limelight. But then he has had plenty of practice in dealing with the media.

Darling of the media

As Minister of State for Home in the UPA-I government, Jaiswal endeared himself to the media because he was easily accessible and could be counted upon to comment on any subject even if it meant spouting inanities. Known as a “dial-a-quote” mantri, Jaiswal became famous for his well-known opening line to questions ranging from a terrorist attack to a rape case: “Agar apne jo bataya hai woh sach hai, sarkar uski zaroor jaanch karegi.”

Jaiswal admits his five-year stint as a junior minister under Home Minister Shivraj Patil proved to be a great “training period”. Since Patil was not keen on talking to the media, Jaiswal was invariably deputed to face the cameras. That experience is standing him in good stead now. His party colleagues, who have watched him evolve over the years, are not surprised as, they tell you, he always had “the gift of the gab”. Although comfortable speaking in Hindi, Jaiswal has apparently been taking crash courses in English so that he does not feel out of place in Delhi.

But being loquacious also has its downside. Jaiswal has hit the headlines on several occasions for stirring up controversies with his unnecessary statements. He created a stir during the last UP Assembly elections when he said Rahul Gandhi would “remote control” the next state Chief Minister if the Congress was voted to power. He embarrassed the party when he announced that President’s rule would be imposed on UP if the Congress failed to get a majority.

Clearly, Jaiswal has come a long way since he took a plunge into politics in 1977 when he joined the Congress after Indira Gandhi lost the elections; and from the early days when he travelled free to Delhi by train as an attendant to freedom fighter Rameshwar Awasthi. His friends in Kanpur say it was his burning ambition to become an MP as he would then be entitled to a free rail pass.

Fiercely ambitious

Although politics was an unusual vocation for somebody coming from a business background (his family has dal mills in Kanpur), Jaiswal took to it like a duck to water. He attached himself to the UP Congress chief Mahabir Prasad and then to senior leaders ND Tiwari and Madhavrao Scindia; was elected mayor of Kanpur in 1989 and held a series of positions in the party organisation before winning his first Lok Sabha election a decade later. Ask anybody from his constituency and they will invariably describe Jaiswal as an affable and polite person.

But beneath this surface, lurks a shrewd politician and businessman. Deeply into factional politics, Jaiswal successfully divided the Congress in his backyard to make sure no second-rung leader was allowed to flourish. At the same time, he kept a sharp eye on his business interests. Proving to be an adept pupil, he soon learnt to turn an adverse situation to his advantage. For instance, when he learnt he was going to be removed as the UP Congress president in 2000 after a year in office, he preempted the move by handing in his resignation and then making it public. A senior Congress leader explained: “Jaiswal is no visionary … he is essentially a nuts and bolts guy.”

Plain lucky

There is also a lot going for Jaiswal. “There are two good things about him. One, he has never defected from the Congress, and the other, deep down he is not communal,” says Kanpur-based CPM leader Subhashini Ali. This is indeed high praise from a political arrival. But, as she says, he also has been lucky. Contesting his first Lok Sabha election in 1999 when the Congress hit a low in UP, Jaiswal received support from across the political divide as there was a wave against the BJP.

Jaiswal has gone on to win two more elections since. The mantra for his success is accessibility and humility. “I feel incomplete if a single day goes by without meeting members of the public,” remarks the self-confessed grassroots politician.