Connected to: Harsh Kapoor

Harsh Kapoor is a renowned Indian Internet activist, engaged in the defense of democracy and tolerance in South Asia. Recently, he took a stance against the Government of India's move to block the DAWN Internet Edition. Initially trained as a sociologist, he has been interested in social implications of new technologies and their democratic use. He has helped set up the South Asia Citizens Web; a Web site that provides visibility to dissenting opinions from within South Asian civil society. He has also helped set up South Asians Against Nukes, a citizen's platform on the Net. Here he talks to SPIDER about the nature of cyberwars, the VSNL ban on DAWN, and what South Asians can do to keep the Internet free.

SPIDER: Firstly, do you believe that information and communication technologies will change how conventional battles are conducted?

HK: The Internet itself is a product of the defense projects in the US. Information and communication technologies are profoundly remolding all facets of life and work, altering not only the way information is transmitted but also the use of this information. Computers and their use has intensified all across the command structures of our economies. In that sense they are clearly shifting the nature of the conduct of war. Computer failure can cause breakdowns of signals for power transmission, so defense strategists are increasingly spending time and money to figure ways of protecting computer networks, and of course seem equally interested in controlling and monitoring to intercept and also to interrupt these when needed to cause damage.
The FBI has supported the development of the project called ECHELON - designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals in virtually every country. It potentially affects every person communicating between (and sometimes within) countries anywhere. Rand Corporation, an American establishment think tank, was commissioned some years ago to produce work on information warfare, which showed attempts at blocking of entire domains as a symptom of where things are headed.

SPIDER: Can you imagine information warfare reaching the point where one side tries to manipulate foreign media?

HK: Yes, since this has already been a part of propaganda work practice in the past. Greater speed and ease in the possibility of misinformation and of planting stories, of false leads to wire services are all happening. At times journalists, for lack of precious time, don't fully verify and investigate the source, and fall prey to rapidly available electronic matter. There also has been a proliferation of Web sites containing matter which is intended to provide government friendly versions of truths.

SPIDER: Can you give us a detailed account of the VSNL ban of the DAWN Web site? How did you come to know of it?

HK: My attention was first drawn to the possible blocking of the DAWN Web site by peace activists in India who were regularly accessing the site. An informal verification was attempted to confirm what we suspected from June 27 to July 2, 1999. Finally on the July 3, Siddarth Vardarajan of the Times of India broke the story.

SPIDER: Considering the fact that VSNL mainly controls the international gateway to the Internet in India and exerts strict vigilance on the flow of information, do you think that this monopoly violates the ideology of visibility and access to information for all?

HK: Absolutely! But the situation is likely to change in the coming years. A number of private operations are likely to emerge with their own direct satellite links to the US. VSNL's monopoly will surely disappear as India further liberalizes its telecom industry.

SPIDER: What in your opinion was the objective that VSNL (under the Ministry of Communication's instructions) was trying to achieve by stopping Indians from reading Dawn?

HK: VSNL officials just blindly obeyed orders from the Communications Ministers office. The ban was never made official by VSNL in my knowledge. They had no clear-cut policy objective; otherwise they wouldn't have banned Dawn, the most forward-looking Pakistani newspaper but rather some conservative publication's site. Neither VSNL nor the communications officials concerned obviously had any advice from the India's Foreign Affairs Ministry in this matter. On the whole, the move to ban Dawn was very clearly a total failure. The only thing it managed to successfully achieve was to technically prove they could block a certain Web site when needed, and create a bad precedent in democratic India.

SPIDER: What technical steps were taken to ban the DAWN site by VSNL and what was the counterattack strategy?

HK: VSNL blocked access to DAWN IP address for all VSNL subscribers in India, as it remains the largest ISP in India. The counterattack was e-mail posts on lists (both my distribution list and on Listserve lists) and the use of anonymizer to access the blocked site. I also helped set up a Web page on South Asia Citizens Web to protest the VSNL ban.

SPIDER: What was your role in helping Dawn? And what prompted you to help the Dawn site?

HK: Over the years I have occasionally posted matter from Dawn on to the Indian listserves, so when I heard from friends in India that they suspected they couldn't access Dawn, I advised them to contact some of my more Web savvy acquaintances in India to use route tracer to figure out what was going on. Upon confirmation of the blocking I shared this information with a number of Indian human rights activists and the member of the Pakistan-India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy (a citizens platform for peace
between our two countries).
As soon as a leading Delhi journalist broke the story in The Times of India, the respected Indian Journalist N. Ram, the editor of Frontline, approached me and so did S.P.Udaykumar (the founder of Communalism Watch and Governance Monitor - also an e-mail diffusion service) to collect matter from DAWN to post to people in India. I immediately made an e-mail post with instructions to Internet users in India on how to beat the Indian government ban and access the Dawn site with relative ease.

SPIDER: What approaches did you use to fulfill this role?

HK: First of all I contacted leading Indian journalists soliciting their intervention in the form of protest. I then launched a 'Beat the Ban' series of e-mail broadcasts, containing stories and op-ed pages from Dawn across India on to my dedicated list (running into several thousand addresses in India and abroad) till the ban was lifted). I got valuable support from a prestigious Indian newspaper, which provided help by re-mailing these Dawn stories through its own lists. I also posted Beat the Ban series on to 12 different Indian and foreign list serves. This allowed me multiply the outreach significantly. Each message contained a request to recipients to forward copies to other Indians so that they could read DAWN. This way a lot of people joined in both to express their disapproval of the Indian government's ban and also to express solidarity with Dawn as a prestigious and liberal paper.

SPIDER: Do you think that your efforts managed to circumvent the Indian government's attempt to dominate the information spectrum?

HK: I made my modest contribution and several thousand people had access to DAWN stories despite the Government of India's 'unofficial' ban. The response was overwhelming with 211 new people writing in (between July 8 and July13) requesting for the Dawn Op-Eds. But in my opinion Indian journalist's community played a very important role to put pressure on the Government of India to roll back its move. Also perhaps the bad international publicity generated by this move accelerated the termination of the ban.

SPIDER: Do you think that the Indian Government's ban on Dawns Web site and PTV broadcasts were an attempt to initiate information-based warfare?

HK: I don't think there was a very clear backing in the bureaucracy to initiate the unprecedented ban on PTV and even more so on the not so official blocking of the DAWN Web site. The motives here cannot be attributed to some clear policy regarding information warfare. This was just brazen jingoism of the Hindu far right wing hotheads in and out of the BJP caretaker government in India. The PTV ban was for just domestic political ends and used to as a propaganda ploy to whip up sentiments against Pakistan. This is of course a policy strictly adhered by the Hindu fundamentalists, not the civil servants. The call by sections of the Sangh Parivar for a nuclear strike on Pakistan, the demand for an end to cricket contests and cultural exchanges, the banning of PTV and VSNL's blocking of Dawn's Web site all did serious damage to India's image as an open and mature society.

SPIDER: Given the need to restrain the proliferation of information warfare capabilities, where should the focus be and what are the prospects for the future?

HK: Restrain whom? The government or military or intelligence agencies? They all have the means and they will move in to restrain the rest of the society. Vigilant citizen actions can restrain them by blowing the whistle and also by engaging in electronic civil disobedience. Obedience to law is not freedom under all circumstances, especially if it's a Martial law situation. Citizen's actions on the Net can be very useful in spreading vital information to campaign for greater democracy and transparency.

SPIDER: Can we expect the Net to be a democratic medium or is it going to consolidate the established powers? Is it true that he who owns the server (read "the network") controls the Net?

HK: The Internet continues to offer a wide democratic space despite its dramatic commercialization. In Indonesia, Malaysia and China where official information has been controlled, the Internet has offered a powerful means of breaking the monopoly on truth. Internationally, NGO activists, human right groups and minorities are networking via e-mail. The Internet's inherent anarchy, its decentralized nature and freedom from official control have paradoxically made Internet an efficient medium to take on the ravages of globalized communication. For example, take the creation of a Federal Intrusion Detection Network, or Fidnet, to gather data at the National Infrastructure Protection Center, an interagency task force housed at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The plan focuses on monitoring data flowing over government and national computer networks. But there is hope, despite all of this, that if Internet user communities bond and join in to defend their right to freedom, to privacy and right to information, we can beat the Big Brother rule.

SPIDER: Any parting thoughts for all cyber warriors out there?

HK: The Internet offers a unique opportunity for us South Asians to democratize information by giving a voice to diverse groups in our societies. Activists and the media have found this medium to be an effective means to counter the mainstream agenda in these dangerous times of nukes and religious jingoism. Let's do our bit as citizens of the region to help promote greater Internet literacy with a socially useful objective. Let's push our states to cut down the defense budget. Our huge defense spending can provide thousands of schools, infrastructure, modern telecommunication facilities and more. Let's connect across borders for peace and for things that interest us, let's not wait for our politicians, they might take forever. Let's build our platform on the Net. And when needed, jam the pipes by collective resistance.