Internet shutdowns – Page 2 – The Bachchao Project

Tweet thread: Preliminary analysis of first whitelist for Internet access in Jammu and Kashmir

January 28, 2020

Rohini Lakshané (The Bachchao Project) and Prateek Waghre (The Takshashila Institution) conducted a preliminary analysis of whitelist comprising 153 entries issued by the Home Department, Government of Jammu and Kashmir on 18 January 2020, to empirically determine whether the whitelisted websites and services would be practically usable for an ordinary resident. The Twitter thread published here shines a light on the method of testing and the signficant findings. A detailed write-up will be published soon. The dataset comprising test results is licensed and can be accessed here: https://zenodo.org/record/3627665

Thread on the Kashmir Whitelist.

Earlier this week @aldebaran14 and I analysed the 153 websites on the whitelist as per the 18th Jan Order and found that ~80 were not ‘practically usable’. We wanted to understand how these websites will work/look under this whitelist regime(1/n)
— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

So we setup Chrome with an extension to allow access only to the hostnames listed in the order. Now, there are limitations with this method. We did not test on a 2G network. We could not carry out actual transactions and the assessment of usability is a bit subjective (2/n)

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

We looked for whether the website was visually affected, if the images loaded, if the login section was accessible and the main function(s) of the website still worked along with some general navigation to see what was affected (3/n)

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

In perusing the list we found typos, duplicate entries, entries without actual hostnames and some that were indeterminate. After removing these, we were left with 134. Of these we found ~80 websites were not practically usable. Why? (4/n)

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

Well, the way most websites are designed, a lot of content comes from subdomains, CDNs. They also have 3rd party content like analytics services, ads, various libraries that manage the UI etc. None of this worked because there were not on the whitelist (5/n)

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

So most of the websites were broken. Here is an example of https://t.co/lrODnoKXrm. We also pulled a request map to highlight how much content comes from other domains. Different websites were affected to varying degrees depending on how they were designed (6/n) pic.twitter.com/IvNOAXjsjG

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

In case of https://t.co/VZism9Q7nA, we found that though the page was still (sort of) readable, the search feature was unresponsive. The train status feature took us to another link, which of course, was not the on the whitelist. (7/n) pic.twitter.com/CCsuk5L8OA

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

For the ones classified as banking websites, we found that only 2 of the 15 on the list had accessible login pages (eg. For SBI bank, the whitelisted domain was https://t.co/puxIdFlslj, but to login you need to go to https://t.co/Owwg9o3Qth which was not on the list) 8/n

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

The inclusion of streaming services seems absurd because:
1) 2G
2) Most of them use CDNs for delivering video content (as I said earlier, these are not on list).
3) No actual hostnames were given – how does the ISP know what to allow? Are they expected to analyse the apps? (9/n)

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

We excluded these and ‘Jio Chat’, so in reality (esp. over 2G) the number of unusable websites maybe higher than what I said earlier in thread.
Of the ones that worked, 25 were minimally impacted (mainly had textual information). 30 were ‘partially usable’ (10/n)

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

We ended the exercise with more questions than answers. Some of them are:
1) On what basis are these (and future) domains selected?
2) Why are some some sites on the list while others in the same category are not?
3) How will ISPs actually implement this? (11/n)

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

I know the list was updated to approx 300.Haven’t read through it in detail,but a cursory glance was enough to spot duplicates and strange entries (trying hard not to judge).I would love to test the new ones, sadly, we’re caught up with other stuff over the next few days. (12/n)

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

We’ve also done a detailed write-up that we’re hoping to publish soon. Both @aldebaran14 (credit to her for kicking this off) and I are also happy to release the spreadsheet that we recorded our analysis on, in case anyone wants to build off it. (13/n)

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

Correction for #8. The whitelisted domain for SBI is www_onlinesbi_com (I’ve replaced the . with _ because twitter drops the www automatically)

— Prateek Waghre (@prateekwaghre) January 25, 2020

Dataset: Analysis of whitelisted URLs in Jammu and Kashmir (order dated 24 January 2020)

January 27, 2020

This preliminary analysis was conducted by Rohini Lakshané (The Bachchao Project) and Prateek Waghre (The Takshashila Institution) from 22 and 26 January 2020 IST, to empirically determine whether the whitelisted websites and services would be practically usable for an ordinary resident of Jammu and Kashmir at the time of writing.

This dataset contains an analysis of a whitelist comprising 301 entries issued by the Home Department, Government of Jammu and Kashmir on 18 January 2020 [Order number: Home-05 (TSTS) of 2020]. The department issued an order with the accompanying whitelist in response to a Supreme Court judgement dated 10 January 2020 (Anuradha Bhasin vs. Union of Indian and Ors.) that directed the Government of India to review the blanket suspension of Internet services in Jammu and Kashmir since 5 August 2019. The first version of the whitelist (dated 18 January 2020), and this dataset by extension, comprised 153 entries. The Home Department states in its orders that this whitelist will be continually updated; the next update may be issued on 31 January or earlier.

A Chrome browser extension was used to simulate access to only those URLs that are mentioned in the government order. A detailed description of the method, its limitations, and the full analysis of the findings has been published on Medianama (Even the 301 whitelisted sites in Jammu and Kashmir are not entirely accessible: An analysis).

For information on how to read this dataset, refer to the tab entitled “About this sheet”. A numerical summary of the findings of this analysis is present in the tab entitled “Summary of findings”.

Data is provided AS-IS, without warranty as to accuracy or completeness.

This dataset has been released under the Creative Commons-Attribution-Share Alike (CC-BY-SA) 4.0 International License. All uses of the accompanying data and modifications and derivatives thereof must contain the following attribution: “By Rohini Lakshané and Prateek Waghre (2020)”.

This dataset was first published here on Zenodo.

Version 2

Lakshane_Waghre_Analysis of whitelisted URLs in Jammu and Kashmir, 27 January 2020

XLSX format: Lakshane_Waghre_Analysis of whitelisted URLs in Jammu and Kashmir.XLSX,_27 January 2020_CC-BY-SA-4.0

ODS format: Lakshane_Waghre_Analysis of whitelisted URLs in Jammu and Kashmir.ODS,_27 January 2020_CC-BY-SA-4.0.

Version 1

Lakshane_Waghre_Analysis of whitelisted URLs in Jammu and Kashmir, _24_January_2020

XLSX format: Lakshane_Waghre_Analysis of whitelisted URLs in Jammu and Kashmir.XLSX, 24_January_2020_CC-BY-SA-4.0

ODS format: Lakshane_Waghre_Analysis of whitelisted URLs in Jammu and Kashmir.ODS, 24_January_2020_CC-BY-SA-4.0

Last edited: 12:58 a.m., January 29, 2020, IST to add Version 2 of dataset.

[Podcast] Rohini Lakshané on intentional Internet Shutdowns in India

December 23, 2019

Rohini Lakshané of The Bachchao Project spoke with Salil Tripathi, Senior Advisor, Global Issues, Institute of Human Rights and Business, about intentional Internet shutdowns in India, corporate responsibility, and some of the findings from our 2018 research report “Of Sieges and Shutdowns“: https://www.ihrb.org/focus-areas/information-communication-technology/podcast-rohini-lakshane

The Bachchao Project at Rightscon 2019

June 29, 2019

Members of The Bachchao Project spoke at two sessions at RightsCon held in Tunis, Tunisia from June 11 to 14, 2019.

Rohini Lakshané spoke in the session “Studying the impact of shutdowns from the lens of gender, conflict and ethnicity” on June 13. The workshop was organised by The Bachchao Project to elucidate on the research methodology adopted for the study entitled “Of Sieges and Shutdowns“, which draws upon 16 qualitative interviews and as many first-person accounts to unravel and document how unreliable mobile networks and intentional Internet shutdowns affect the lives of women in Manipur, India. Other speakers were: Jan Rydzak (Associate Director for Program, Standford Global Digital Policy Incubator) who presented the research methodology he employed in the quantitative study “Of Blackouts and bandhs: The strategy and structure of disconnected protest in India“.
Rohini Lakshané was a speaker at a session organised by Least Authority and moderated by Betsy Bramon of the Kronia Collective. The session entitled “Is Open-Source Your Unicorn? Dialogue on the sustainability, data security, and ethics of human rights apps” was in the fishbowl format and found rich engagement with the participants. Other speakers in the session were Georgia Bullen (Simply Secure), Lauri Hmel and Liz Steininger (both from Least Authority).

“Studying the impact of shutdowns from the lens of gender, conflict and ethnicity”, Rightscon 2019

June 9, 2019

We are publishing the plan for our Rightscon session entitled “Studying the impact of shutdowns from the lens of gender, conflict and ethnicity”.

Details: https://rightscon2019.sched.com/event/Pvrh/studying-the-impact-of-shutdowns-from-the-lens-of-gender-conflict-and-ethnicity, Thursday, 13 June 2019, 5.15 pm to 6.30 pm, Hannibal, Laico Hotel, Tunis.

Speakers: Rohini Lakshané (also facilitator), Jan Rydzak, Unnamed speaker

Chatham House rules apply.

Main goal of the session: To equip the audience with skills and knowledge about devising studies on intentional Internet shutdowns while factoring in the intersections of gender, conflict-strained geographies and ethnicity. We would like the audience to be able to modify and adapt the study for their contexts and employ the lessons for the workshop for research or advocacy or both.

Description: A skill-building and knowledge-sharing workshop for activists and researchers who are investigating the impact of intentional Internet shutdowns from the lenses of gender, ethnicity and conflict. The methodology and the complete research report are available at: http://thebachchaoproject.org/of-sieges-and-shutdowns

We would elucidate on the methodology we employed in an exploratory study in northeast India in late 2017 about the impact of shutdowns on the lives of women entrepreneurs and feminist activists belonging to India’s ethnic minorities. We carried out qualitative interviews with 16 women residing in different districts of the state of Manipur. The activists in the control group and their organisations work in different areas of empowerment of women and girls: relief for victims of domestic abuse, increasing the number of women in governance, economic independence of women, and child trafficking. Some of them also run small or medium businesses.

Awareness of digital rights, cybersecurity and online privacy in the state is little, leaving citizens vulnerable. This intersection of gender and ethnicity is further complicated due to the suspension of civil rights in the region since the 1980s. Owing to the complexity of the topic, an individual directly affected by the shutdowns in Manipur would start the session with an introduction of the demographic and the region. Rohini Lakshané of The Bachchao Project would then speak about the research methodology, its evolution through the course of the project, and the differentiators from other interdisciplinary and qualitative studies on shutdowns, while trying to achieve a level of abstraction high enough for the methodology to be applicable to other, similar demographics and regions. Jan Rydzak, Associate Director for Program, Standford Global Digital Policy Incubator, would follow by speaking about the research methodology he employed in the quantitative study “Of Blackouts and bandhs: The strategy and structure of disconnected protest in India“. The study examines how structural and strategic characteristics affect collective action responses during a network shutdown in an extreme case via statistical analysis.

Session on Internet shutdowns, ICT4D Conference 2019, Uganda

May 22, 2019

Slide deck_Of Sieges and Shutdowns_ICT4DCon_2019

Rohini Lakshané of The Bachchao Project spoke at a session entitled “Impact Of Intentional Internet Shutdowns And Unreliable Mobile Connectivity On Women In Conflict-Strained Manipur” at the ICT4D Conference 2019. The session was featured under the “Humanitarian Response and Resilience” track. In the session, Rohini presented the most significant findings of the study “Of Sieges and Shutdowns“, which she conducted with Chinmayi S K in late 2017 in Manipur, India. The exploratory research project was aimed at studying the impact of intentional Internet shutdowns from the lenses of gender, conflict and the status of ethnic minority.

Read the full report of the study at: Of Sieges and Shutdowns

The conference was held from April 30 to May 2, 2019 at Kampala, Uganda. Details: https://www.ict4dconference.org

Op-ed: Internet shutdowns in India only fuel the fires of violence

May 21, 2019

An op-ed authored by Jan Rydzak and Rohini Lakshané on the topic of intentional Internet shutdowns in India was published in the Hindustan Times on May 3, 2019. Jan Rydzak is a research scholar and Associate Director for Program, Global Digital Policy Incubator (GDPi), Stanford University. Rohini Lakshané is Director (Emerging Research), The Bachchao Project.

Shutdowns have caused billions of dollars in economic damage and deeply impacted lives and livelihoods across India. However, rarely do we hear a more fundamental question: do shutdowns achieve their intended goals? Research suggests that it doesn’t.

The social media shutdown that followed the recent terror attacks in Sri Lanka was no isolated incident. On a global level, more than 40 countries have executed more than 400 blackouts of social media or Internet access since the Arab Spring. India accounts for an overwhelming majority of this tally. Nearly half of the estimated 306 shutdowns executed in India over the last seven years occurred in 2018, amid the surge of lynchings attributed to the circulation of violent content on WhatsApp.

Shutdowns have caused billions of dollars in economic damage and deeply impacted lives and livelihoods across India. But rarely do we hear a fundamental question: do shutdowns achieve their intended goals? State governments in India routinely frame deliberate blackouts as either a public safety response to agitations or a preventive measure to restrain disinformation on social media and communication apps. Not a single time have they provided more than anecdotal evidence that a blackout successfully prevented the escalation of protest or curbed the spread of false information with the potential to stoke violence. The effectiveness of shutdowns in protecting public safety tends to be perceived as an indisputable truth, both in India and abroad.

Complete article: https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/internet-shutdowns-in-india-only-fuel-the-fires-of-violence/story-7Lf7o6Sq0q6xwfbWk0WoTM.html

Archive URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20190503153444/https://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/internet-shutdowns-in-india-only-fuel-the-fires-of-violence/story-7Lf7o6Sq0q6xwfbWk0WoTM.html

Panel discussion on intentional internet shutdowns at Digital Citizen Summit 2018

November 3, 2018

Rohini Lakshané of The Bachchao Project was a speaker on a panel on the topic of intentional internet shutdowns at the Digital Citizen Summit held in New Delhi on November 1-2, 2018. The panel discussion entitled “Living in Digital Darkness — Internet Shutdowns in India” was organised by the Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) and Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC).

Lakshané spoke about the findings from The Bachchao Project’s research report entitled “Of Sieges and Shutdowns” on the impact of intentional Internet shutdowns on the lives and livelihoods of women in Manipur, India.

The other panelists were Prashanth Sugathan (SFLC), Tripti Jain (SFLC, moderator), Nikhil Pahwa (Medianama) and Mansi Kedia (ICRIER).

View conference agenda.

View event report by the organisers [PDF].

Of Sieges and Shutdowns

June 9, 2018

How unreliable mobile networks and intentional Internet shutdowns affect the lives of women in Manipur

By Chinmayi S K and Rohini Lakshané

Of Sieges and Shutdowns draws upon 16 qualitative interviews and as many first-person accounts to unravel and document how unreliable mobile networks and intentional Internet shutdowns affect the lives of women in Manipur. The Bachchao Project conducted this study in late 2017 in Manipur with the support of Integrated Rural Development Service Organisation (IRDSO).

We invited women entrepreneurs and activists working in different areas of women’s empowerment to participate in this study via in-person interviews and a two-day exploratory workshop. This preliminary study is an attempt to probe their use of information communication technologies (ICTs) in professional and everyday contexts, the impact of Internet access issues on their lives, and their experiences of intentional Internet shutdowns.

Of Sieges and Shutdowns (2018), research report by The Bachchao Project [PDF] — View and download the report [PDF]

View a summary of findings of the report [PDF].

View a conference handout [PDF] based on the report.

Ninglun Hanghal reviewed the report for GenderIT.org in December 2018: How Internet Shutdowns Affect The Lives of Women in Manipur

Workshop Design for Feminist Investigation of Access

June 9, 2018

By Chinmayi S K and Rohini Lakshané

We are publishing this design document to serve as a guideline for conducting an interactive event or a workshop to understand and document how intentional Internet shutdowns affect the lives of women, especially those living in sensitive geographies. It takes into account the best practices and principles of organising feminist meetings and is especially focussed on researching questions about women’s access to the Internet.

We first conceptualised and used this design for a two-day interactive and exploratory workshop held in 2017 in Manipur, India in partnership with the Integrated Rural Development Service Organisation (IRDSO). The workshop was a part of a pilot project to research the effects of unreliable mobile networks and intentional Internet shutdowns on the lives and livelihoods of women in Manipur. 16 women activists, NGO workers, and entrepreneurs from Manipur participated in it. A report entitled “Of Sieges and Shutdowns” comprising the findings from this workshop and subsequent research activities was released at RightsCon 2018 in Toronto, Canada.

The event in this document has been envisaged for interacting with activists and organisations functioning in different areas of empowerment of women: human rights; relief for victims of domestic abuse; economic independence; access to education; increasing the participation of women in governance; and so on. This methodology can be used to investigate these questions:

What are their patterns of Internet usage?
How have intentional Internet shutdowns impacted their lives?

We are releasing this document under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license so that other feminist groups conducting research and advocacy on related topics could adopt this design into their pursuits. Feedback, suggestions and comments that could help us enrich this design for future use are welcome and much appreciated. If you would like our help in applying this design to the context of your research or advocacy, please email us: theteam [at] thebachchaoproject [dot] org

Workshop Design: Of Sieges and Shutdowns