IT Amendment Bill 08: Passed but paused
By Pulkit Sharma

Late 2008, the Indian Parliament passed the Information Technology Act amendment bill 2008.  The President had given her assent to the Act on Feb 5, and it only needed a formal ‘Notification’ to be implemented as law. This Amendment Bill passed in 08 had been devised to cater for modern crimes like Cyber Terrorism, Cyber stalking, Cyber bulling, Phishing and the like.

But powerful business forces have been working behind the scenes to repeal parts of our new IT law.  (In February, 2009, techgoss had reported on how fake comments are being left in news website and blogs to marshal public opinion against aspects of the law).

Now it turns out that even though our Parliament has passed the law and President given the okay in Feb 2009, a formal notification by Ministry of IT will only be given in October, 2009.  This has lead to the bizarre situation where police are arresting cyber criminals under the new law which has yet to undergo all processes to come into affect.

Indian Cyber expert and activist Naavi has promised to organize a nationwide campaign if the Ministry of IT continues to delay it even after October, 2009

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The history of the amendments indicates that there must be vested business and political interests working at delaying the process of notification and probably engineer a dilution of some of its provisions on security.

While this statement is welcome, it is necessary to reflect if the notification actually required so much of time.

All those who have followed the history of these amendments are aware of the influence of vested interests in escaping “Due Diligence” responsibilities. The most visible intermediary who was responsible for even initiating the amendment process itself to dilute the then existing provisions was baazee.com (now ebay.in). Fortunately, the amendments were saved in the last minute by the Nikhil Kumar Parliamentary committee and were drafted with some emphasis on security. This necessitated greater responsibility for Intermediaries and the dreaded “Due Diligence” remained in the statute along with “Reasonable Security Practices” to be notified.

The unreasonable delay in notification has already given room for speculation that there must be some arm twisting going on in the drafting of the rules so that “Intermediaries” so that intermediaries are provided some freedom to “Do Business without Responsibility”. In the meantime Police are already booking cases under the new provisions (Refer Case against Air India official reportedly booked under Section 66 C and 66D of ITA 2008) which when questioned in the Courts would look awkward. Many in India are now under the impression that “Cyber Terrorism” is covered under law. The department must realize that the delay in notification has been providing a greater leeway to Cyber Terrorists.
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(Techgoss had run the following story on Feb 28, 2009)

IT law debate gets dirty
By Pulkit Sharma

Cyber law expert Na.Vijayashankar, also known as Naavi in Cyberspace, is one of the most respected names in the Indian tech world.  As Chairman of the Digital Society Foundation and as a Director of Cyber Law College, one of Naavi’s life mottos is “Let’s build a responsible Cyber society”.   Naavi’s views are highly regarded and he is regularly quoted by Indian media.

Late 2008, the Indian Parliament passed the Information Technology Act amendment bill 2008.  The President has given her assent to the Act, and it has now become law.

Naavi has now blogged about how a small section of Cyber Law observers and business interests are working to repeal the law.  Navi wrote: “There is a group of Cyber Law observers in India that are trying their best to spread a rumour that the Act would be withdrawn. Supported by the vested interests in business who are opposed to the security oriented provisions of the Act, these observers are undertaking a media campaign which includes planting of stories in Internet complete with posting of supportive comments in different names. This campaign has the effect of misleading the industry that they need not respond to the proposed amendments.”

Ideally, in a democratic system, laws are proposed by the Government and fine tuned by experts.  There is public debate and discussion (and all manner of lobbying) before our elected representatives (politicians) vote for and against it.  If the politicians and public are not happy, any law can be changed or repealed.

The ground realities are when such important laws are changed, than the lobbying can be quite bitter.  Techgoss had first hand experience of this ‘fake attacking comments planted as personal, informed views’.   Techgoss received a comment attacking Naavi’s public exhortation to business to implement the security measures under our new laws.

When we tried to contact the person who sent the comments, his email turned out to be fake.  Techgoss will never publish any ones name if they prefer anonymity, but we prefer to do basic checks to ensure that discussion and debate remains civil.

Techgoss note:  Techgoss has never had any business or personal equation with either sides of the argument.  We do not understand the complexities of the laws enough to make informed comment.  But we know that posting fake comments is not conducive to a healthy debate and discussion.