In Flux: a technology policy podcast by the Centre for Internet and Society, India

In a continuation from the last episode, in the final episode of the 2020 season of Influx, Shruti Trikanad and Yesha Paul speak to Shweta Mohandas, and Arindrajit Basu, taking them through several law and policy questions around the conceptualisation, implementation, and impact of digital identity projects around the globe, along with the interests, actors and politics at play!

With the recent widespread proliferation of Digital Identity systems across the globe, the amount of impact these systems have has only become more and more apparent. While examination of the policies governing these systems is important, it is also essential to understand how these systems are designed, and how their design frameworks can be improved. In the first part of our season 1 finale, Pooja Saxena and Saumyaa Naidu speak to Pranav M B about the design aspects of the Digital ID research project at the Centre for Internet and Society. Reading list: (1) https://digitalid.design/evaluation-framework-02.html; (2) https://digitalid.design/research-maps/uk.html; (3) https://digitalid.design/research-maps/estonia.html

How is the AI ecosystem evolving? How do different individuals and organisations perceive Artificial Intelligence? Does “Ethical AI” miss the hills for the trees? Do techies and lawyers talk enough? In this episode, Shweta Mohandas addresses these questions and more, while re-examining the body of work on Artificial Intelligence policy, and use cases she has built over the past three years. Reading list: (1) https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/artificial-intelligence-in-india-a-compendium; (2) https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/niti-aayog-discussion-paper-an-aspirational-step-towards-india2019s-ai-policy; (3) https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/people-driven-and-tech-enabled-2013-how-ai-and-ml-are-changing-the-future-of-cyber-security-in-india; (4) https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/comments-to-aiforall-pdf

Where must we locate our right to privacy in times of a crisis? How much information about ourselves do we give up? Is spying on a neighbour justified in an attempt to contain the spread of a disease? In our ongoing conversations dealing with various aspects of surveillance, Shweta Reddy and Mira Swaminathan speak to Torsha Sarkar about the topical issue of balancing a public health objective with protection of our fundamental rights. They offer various privacy principles and ethical considerations that any initiative trying to institutionalize surveillance must take into account, with the goal of ensuring that short term solutions do not become the long term features of an organized society. Reading list: (1) https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/essay-watching-corona-or-neighbours-introducing-2018lateral-surveillance2019-during-covid201919

On May 19th, a few weeks after we recorded this episode, the German supreme court held that extra-territorial mass surveillance on foreigners is unconstitutional. This was a massive victory, particularly for global south citizens who have unwittingly been the target of illegal western mass surveillance for years. Human rights law has glaringly been unable to prevent this abuse of global power, particularly by the US. In this episode, Torsha Sarkar speaks to Arindrajit Basu about the reasons behind this incapacitation of international human rights law, and what we can do to fix it. Reading list: (1) https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/EN/2020/bvg20-037.html (2) http://nujslawreview.org/2019/12/27/extraterritorial-algorithmic-surveillance-and-the-incapacitation-of-international-human-rights-law/

Cities around the world are increasingly adopting closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras for surveillance. In this episode, Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon discuss their research on the deployment of CCTVs in New Delhi, a city infamous for high rates of violent crimes against women. Using critical feminst studies, they investigate the narrative that greater surveillance equals increased security for women. Through interviews with women, police personnel, and government officials, they uncover the contradictory motivations and objectives of the program, and how its impact is mediated along the axes of gender, geography, and class. Reading: https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/development-informatics

With the proliferation of social media and digital platforms, user data has grown exponentially accompanied by a growing recognition of the uses of such large data sets. While demographic inference from big data sources is emerging as a significant use case of big data systems, the detection of a person’s gender and/or sexuality is often viewed as a key and foundational component, that is also uniquely problematic. This episode accompanies a survey that was undertaken to provide an approachable overview of the various methods researchers and other actors are using to infer gender and sexuality from large data sets, and explores the numerous problems and curiosities present in these methods. Reading: https://cis.pubpub.org/gender-sexuality-identification-methods-survey

Web censorship in India marks a fundamental threat to the freedom of speech and expression online. While there is excellent scholarship and activism that has highlighted the legal and societal implications of this censorship, the technicalities, have however largely remained unclear and opaque. Gurshabad Grover’s recent paper, written with Kushagra Singh and Varun Bansal attempts to change this. Reading list: (1) https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/how-india-censors-the-web

The past year has seen vigorous activity on the domestic cyber policy front in India. On key issues, including intermediary liability, data localization and e-commerce, the government has rolled out a patchwork of regulatory policies, resulting in battle lines being drawn by governments, industry and civil society actors, both in India, and abroad. Among emerging economies, India is uniquely positioned to exercise leverage over multinational tech companies due to its sheer population size, combined with a rapid surge in users coming online and the country’s large gross domestic product. India could, and possibly should be doing more on the global front. Torsha Sarkar and Pranav MB are in conversation this week with Arindrajit Basu to find out how. Reading list: (1) https://www.lawfareblog.com/indias-role-global-cyber-policy-formulation; (2) https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/the-localisation-gambit.pdf; (3) https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/the-retreat-of-the-data-localization-brigade-india-indonesia-and-vietnam/

Ever wondered why you never get to listen to news or current affairs on FM channels? The government of India, for the last two decades, has persistently refused to allow community and private FM channels from broadcasting news and current affairs. In this episode of In Flux, Torsha Sarkar and Gurshabad Grover discuss their work on this news broadcast ban, and go on to speak about the constitutional ethos of media freedom and free speech, and propose an alternative regulatory framework to govern speech on FM channels. Reading list: (1) https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/ban-of-news-on-radio.pdf