The  “Jallianwalla Bagh massacre”  in which General Dyer opened fire on a  peaceful assembly resulted in the death of more than a  thousand people. This incident, that shook the nation was a result of the inhumane colonial British policy that sought to divide us and continue to rule. Today, we are witnessing a revival of the same divide-and-rule policy, enforced through the systematic spread of misinformation and the forcible imposition of Internet Shutdowns.

On the 26^th of January,   farmers of India undertook a massive one lakh tractor parade from all over the country towards the national capital. This is the culmination of the long and arduous struggle they have been leading since November  2020, against the new Farm Laws which seek to privatize the Indian agriculture sector and destroy the farmers’ livelihood.

On the day of the tractor parade, the farmers were stopped from entering the routes planned for the rally, attacked with tear gas shells, and treated with nothing but brutal violence injuring thousands in the process. During the rally and in the aftermath, the central government imposed an Internet Shutdown in parts of Delhi followed by the state government of Haryana suspending internet services in 17 (out of 22) districts. SMS services have been stopped too.

In 2019, India topped the list of countries that shutdown Internet with 121 shutdowns [1].

What do Internet Shutdowns achieve ?

The govt says that it is suspending the Internet to protect  ‘law-and-order and regulate misinformation in social media. If that is the intention,  Internet Shutdowns are vague as they cannot tackle specific cases of misinformation and completely ineffective tools as they completely block the exchange of information  Regulation of social media and spread of fake news can be achieved by implementing a strong data protection framework with precise laws and commensurate measures.  No effort has been made in this regard even as the spread of misinformation on platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook continue to plague us. Moreover, Internet Shutdowns make it difficult for people to communicate and avail necessary resources such as food and medical supplies of which the farmers are in great need.

Internet Shutdowns violate the freedom of speech guaranteed in the constitution of India. The Supreme Court of India ruled that an undefined restriction of internet services would be illegal and that orders for internet shutdown must satisfy the tests of necessity and proportionality. The court said that the government must establish a  possible goal and assess the existence of any alternate mechanism in furtherance of the goal and impose a shutdown only as a last resort. The goal of ‘maintaining law-and-order during a peaceful protest and the hasty imposition of the shutdown both, go against the ruling of the apex court [4].

Misinformation – no, Mal-information.

While the govt cautions us of misinformation, what we are indeed seeing is a case of rabid mal-information. This is nothing but misinformation deceit purposely cloaked as information and news. The recent accusations that the farmer's movement is a front for Khalistanis and that they are  Pakistani terrorists [7], the public media-trial on the death of the actor Sushant Singh Rajput orchestrated on TV channels, are the prime examples of mal-information, It has become impossible for anybody to access even a glimmer of objective truth because we are bombarded constantly with a barrage of mal-information by TV news channels. The seeming choice we have in these channels is but an illusion as all these channels are owned by a handful of media corporations. Reacting to the farmers protesting against Reliance, the company said that ‘it had nothing to do with the farm laws’. It is evident that this statement was a lie and the farmers were impeccably prescient in this issue as  Network-18, the largest news network owned by Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man [2], with all its media outlets, enthusiastically participated in maligning the farmers’ movement.

The Internet as it exists today is a more democratic medium than the TV  but, let us make no mistake, the digital monopolies act as restrictive and manipulative gateways to it. With Google showing each individual different information for the same query, we are already put in  ‘filter bubbles filled with repetitive content. Facebook on the other hand has recently blocked without any warning, the page of ‘Kisaan Ekta  Morcha’ represents the farmers’ movement and has lakhs of followers. Whatever information that could seep out of an ever-tightening filter can be censored arbitrarily lawlessly by these social media companies.

While the mal-information is being systematic disseminated and broadcasted,  the Internet shutdown makes it extremely difficult for the farmers to  provide any information about the events unfolding during the protest.

Internet Shutdowns in the Age of Mass Surveillance

Not only was the internet suspended in the midst of a peaceful protest on Republic Day but, this was also accompanied by anti-riot drones [5].  Suppression of freedom of speech is not the only issue here but,  stifling farmers’ voices while deploying military-grade surveillance on them coupled with tracking their online activity creates a situation where the protesters can neither coordinate among themselves nor communicate with people outside the location. At the same time, it gives the government unprecedented control over the protesters and the narrative.

Our online social media activity includes the Facebook pages we like, the friends we talk to, the events we attend, the places we visit, the news we read, the terms we search, the videos we watch, and much more. All this activity is used to build a profile on us. With this profile and the profiles of those who are associated with us, our behavior can be predicted accurately. This is the data that the social media companies use to show us advertisements and sell us products. As they also share this data with the government, on the day of protest, while the farmers themselves are deprived of the internet and hence made information blind,  the government already has detailed profiles of all of them and the movement as a whole. The government can anticipate the immediate future of the situation and control it whereas the farmers are kept in the dark.

The farmers need not be enclosed by walls for the govt to exert this level  of control, just by suspending the internet they can largely achieve it.  This is a prison in all but name.

Internet Shutdowns as a tool to crush protests : A threat to our unity

The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919, popularly known as the Rowlatt Act,  was introduced to crush even the whisper of Independence. The British formulated this to label any and every activity, even a peaceful gathering as a ‘conspiracy’ and used it to justify numerous arrests, impose severe restrictions, and suppress any activities of the Independence movement brutally. Crucially, press freedom was severely curtailed and no information about any of these activities was allowed to be published.

“  … The spread of revolutionary propaganda must be checked forthwith;  violent and seditious crimes must be promptly punished; the men behind  them must be removed and interned; the mischievous activities of  newspapers must be curtailed, and every precaution must be taken to  ensure that the poisonous teaching of open rebellion was kept both  from the army and from the people .. ” - General O’Dwyer  Lieutenant  Governor of Punjab, quoted in The Anarchical and Revolutionary  Crimes Act of 1919, popularly known as the Rowlatt Act

The restriction of the Independence movement became indistinguishable with the surveillance and censorship imposed on the people. Even under such repression, protests continued with vigor and hunger for national integration and unity. Hiding under the shadows of this act, On  13^th April 1919,   General Dyer and his troops opened fire  in Jallianwalla Bagh on a  peaceful gathering resulting in the death of a  1000 people.

The horrific incident of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre isn’t an aberration or an isolated incident but it is a result of the British policy to keep India in shackles at all costs. The mass firing of peaceful protesters was in fact repeated by the British in Ireland and Kenya. The  Jallianwalla Bagh massacre itself is an act of brutality carried out as a result of colonial determination to divide the increasing unity of the Indian people across the religious differences and rule them in the ensuing chaos.

The divide-and-rule policy was then carried out to create chasms between Hindus and Muslims. Today, these Internet shutdowns and mal-information campaigns intend to make it impossible for us to know the ground truth and interact with the farmers. It precludes the possibility of an ‘informed’ citizen which is the foundation of our democracy. With allegations that the whole movement is a conspiracy  [6], denouncing farmers for their supposed lack of patriotism,  attributing violence to a peaceful protest, today’s situation is reminiscent of the days of the colonial past. The new divide-and-rule policy effectively divides the citizens at large and the farmers who are struggling for their rights. That the government chooses to divide us on Republic day while boasting empty words of patriotism is a cruel irony.

Censorship of press suppresses freedom of speech by arbitrarily deciding what can be published and what cannot be. An Internet shutdown during a protest is a blanket suppression of the voices of protesters. It isn’t just a censorship, it is a declaration of a martial law on information. It is effectively, an imposition of Emergency. At this time, it falls on us to oppose this inherently divisive move and a terrible restriction on the people. We have to demand that the shutdowns be lifted and that further shutdowns are never imposed.

Please sign FSMI's statement condemning the use of Internet Shutdowns to suppress Farmers' protests : https://struggles.in/MobilisationCampaign/StopInternetShutdown

Akhil Reddy Patolla

Business Intelligence, often called BI, is the process of exploring precious insights or trending in data to make more efficient decisions in the business/organization.

Primary component to implementing a BI solution is the raw data. This data can be anything like sales data, log level data, advertising portfolio etc. Then a data warehouse is the logistics platform that connects to all the different operational databases withholding the above-mentioned raw data and allows use to create relationship between them. Once all the data is connected and communicating to each other in different data models, it is time to analyze it and extract actionable insights. This step often blends well when a BI tool is overlayed on top of this because of the ability to present the tabulated data in a pictorial format. This interactive dashboard enables us to perform business decisions and the ability to track, monitor and report on our data.

How are BI tools applicable in a real-world use case?

BI tools are correct example of the “80-20 Principle”. In an organization/business 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions/platforms. Implementation of a BI can enable and guide one to decrease the amount of time it takes to do a sale, identify customers purchase behavior, planning successful marketing strategies, Improve operations etc.

Using BI tools to build modern analytics Platform.

Problems in Solutioning a modern Platform

A human mind holds more data through examples and visuals when contrasted with perusing or considering numbered documents. In the business world, perception is basic in understanding the importance of information. Let us comprehend with a model.

An online business organization gets a huge number of requests every day. For considering the week by week execution, a graphical plot demonstrating the quantity of requests every day will bring about quicker understanding than a bookkeeping page including the request subtleties.

Subsequently, visual information portrayal is a ground-breaking strategy. It helps organizations in dissecting patterns and increasing important experiences which further aides in dynamic.

Open-source Business Information platform like Redash, Metabase, and Apache Superset are picking up fame as the expectation to learn and adapt is not steep for non-specialized clients. Countless new businesses are utilizing Metabase, Redash, and Superset to question, work together, and envision.

In the above scenario maintaining an open source BI also enable the organization to make better decisions which will help the organization to grow.

Powering BI requirements

• Democratize Analytics and Enable Self-Serve
• Ease of Use and Low Learning Curve
• Speed and Connectivity to Varied Databases
• Build a Modern Client Facing Platform
• Provide Actionable Insights on Platform
• Decrease Development Time
• Maintain Metrics Integrity and Reduce Copies

Platform Development Requirements

• Ability and Ease of Embedding – A BI tool should be able to export the charts that are created via iframe or JavaScript rendering
• Flexibility in Embedding Dashboards / Charts –
• Ability to Appear Native – User Experience should be as seamless as possible.
• Cross Chart Interaction –
• Ability to Pass Filters to Preload Data –
• Chart Customization –

How to select a BI Tool? (Tool selection methodology)

BI tools must be chosen based on final desired design / goal of the platform. Here are few examples of the features that you might need to look to select a BI tool for your use case. Keep in mind that they might vary based on your end goal / platform.

• Mobile Friendly – Charts should be responsive when embedded and viewable on a mobile device.
• Easy Chart Building – level of complexity to build and develop charts.
• Cross Chart Interaction – charts ability to Interact with the users actions.
• Coolness Factor – This is purely a UI / UX choice.
• Connection to Live DBs – Tools ability to connect to multiple databases such as mysql, postgres, druid, mongo etc.

• Embedding  – Ability / options to embed the charts on a Web Platform.
• Speed  – Loading time for a chart when embedded.
• Stability – How stable are the charts when embedded. One must be cautious of any Error message that is being displayed from the Embedded chart.

Solutioning the Analytics Platform

• Embed Charts with Parameterized Filters -
• OAuth 2.0 Authentication
• Angular 8 / REACT + NODE (Tech Stack)

Solutioning Open-Source BI tools In Contrast to other Enterprise tools:

Domain of data & business intelligence have emerged rapidly for the past few years and this unfold a new chapter of enterprise and open source alternatives. For an example Tableau is an Enterprise BI tool and Superset is an excellent alternative to it. Here is an one to one comparison of the tools features and pricing.

Authentication is an important element for reception of BI dashboard into an endeavor. Here is an outline of upheld verification backends.

Pricing might vary based on multiple factors, but according to multiple source the below mentioned is an average quote.

Superset – FREE

Tableau Desktop - $35 per user per month (billed annually)
Tableau Desktop Professional - $70 per user per month (billed annually)
Tableau Server - $35 per user per month (billed annually)
Tableau Online (hosted server) - $42 per user per month (billed annually)

Conclusion

• Model Data in Warehouse before Ingesting/Presenting in  a BI tool is the key to be able to have a successful and smooth presentation.
• Design & Speed is Bound by the Embed Strategy
• Choosing right BI tool with required Embed strategies is the Key
• One can Leverage a BI Tool to Release Analytics Platform in Record Time as well as maintain.
• Embedding is Powerful and Easy to Use

(Akhil has been associated to Swecha since 2012, currently working with Madison Logic for more than 2 years, and dons both a Big Data engineering and Data Science role. Prior to Madison logic, Akhil was working as a researcher at US department of Energy: Argonne National Laboratory. He graduated with a Masters in Data Science from Northern Illinois University. His expertise are in NLP, game designing, and building analytical platforms. Akhil has developed analytical packages for the MIRA supercomputer.)

Hari Sai

Code For Change (C4C) is an initiative of Swecha - with an aim to develop and increase the usage of free software based social projects in the public domain. Why Free Software? Incorporation of free software based technologies is the only way for progressive development of the society. As part of C4C, there are many projects related to each and every section of society. These projects are developed by Students and IT developers. Here are a few projects which have been initiated under Swecha:

Swecha OS:
Swecha is a project that aims to localise GNU/Linux and other Free Software to Telugu. The project bridges the language barrier that is a major reason behind the digital divide.

We have a working system in which most common tasks like writing and printing documents, browsing the web, sending/receiving emails, chatting, editing graphics etc. can all be in Telugu. The screen shot below shows you the Swecha desktop, a GNOME desktop localized to Telugu. Most of this work will ultimately reach all the GNU/Linux distributions. It is also packed into an easy to use LiveCD distribution. The project has also developed a Telugu text-to-speech system and integrated it with the desktop. Since, one can hear the text on the desktop or web page by pointing at it, illiterate people may use it to access the desktop, read news on the web etc.

BalaSwecha OS:
BalaSwecha is a Swecha initiative which focuses on bridging the digital divide at the school level. The primary objective of BalaSwecha is to bridge the growing digital divide in education between privileged and underprivileged in India. Schools for the underprivileged in India, for example the government schools, face a lot of problems including lack of continuous electricity, infrastructure and personnel. However, the government has invested in providing computers and other infrastructure to some of these schools. Proprietary software have been installed on these computers, the licenses for which have expired a long time ago. Teachers in corporate schools are equipped with digital resources to teach students, while the teachers in the schools for the underprivileged do not have access to such resources and the students from government schools do not have access to computer-aided-education which enables an experiential approach to learning.

BalaSwecha is a GNU/linux based operating system which is developed by students under the guidance of academicians and IT employees. It is packaged with multimedia content and GPL applications which create interactive lab environment. Students are exposed to interactive applications which provide them with an opportunity to learn and explore beyond their books.

Eswecha OS:
We know that colleges spend huge amounts of money on purchasing licenses for the proprietary OS and tools. E-Swecha is an operating system for the engineering students, by the engineering students. It consists of all the free software stack required by the engineering students of all disciplines. E-swecha is an operating system which can be used by engineering students to IT professionals

At this stage it aims in covering all the syllabus of JNTU and it has the plans of generalising it for all the universities. This project consists of reading material for all the branches along with lab manuals and free software tools for simulations such as octave for signal processing, vscodium ide, free cad etc.

For details: Visit Here

Free Software Conferencing and Streaming:
A greater portion of the world’s work is moving onto digital platforms and tools that facilitate connection and productivity: video conferencing, messaging apps, healthcare and educational platforms, and more. It’s important to be aware of the ways these tools may impact your digital privacy and security during the COVID-19 crisis.

Remote work has become an integral part of our life during this pandemic. This has been enabled by conferencing and streaming solutions. However, the privacy and security concerns of proprietary platforms are striking and are of great importance. At Swecha, we enriched the existing Free Software conference technologies and built a completely free software streaming solution.

virtual.swecha.org is a BBB(BigBlueButton) instance which is a Free Software web conferencing tool. This has a wide variety of features for online conferencing. Our work developed a low latency live conference tool which runs seamlessly on any device which can handle thousands of users.

For Details: visit here

(Harisai is a coordination committee member at Swecha and a Software Engineer)

Ranjith Raj

To study any program to know it works, access to source code is a precondition. While we enjoy many features of popular apps, it is intrinsic that to verify the privacy claims of these apps is by exploring their source code, for which public access is a precondition. We never know what's being tracked, and what's being not tracked if it is proprietary software where source code is not available.

Users have to be cautious about the dangers of proprietary software seeping into the 'privacy market' with vicious claims of not collecting the user's personal and sensitive data, but their actions say otherwise. With growing resistance against surveillance capitalism, corporations instead of offering them actual privacy alternatives, they are jumping into aggressive marketing sprees to deceive people, in various forms, like dubious & unsubstantiated claims or half-lies.

Starting with dubious claims of making source code publicly available, but indeed never doing what's publicly announced. Let's look at the famous case of Aarogya Setu app which has more than 160 million downloads.

Aarogya Setu is a contract-tracing app released by Govt. of India in partnership with Private parties.  The app didn't solve the problems that the govt. claims it can (it's design technically can't achieve the stated purpose), and the government's mega-campaign to force feed it to citizens by making it mandatory (to an extent services are denied for not installing it) is a live example of how the state gaslights its own citizens to push them into a dystopia built on the fabric of surveillance capitalism.

To avoid the criticism coming from strong resistance movement against force-feeding, led by hacktivists demanding to make the source code public, the CEO of NITI Aayog performed a fake PR stunt to deceive people that source code is made public, but indeed hacktivists have exposed the fakery by finding out that the android version source code released is different from the app in Google Playstore; and from the release it's turned out to be a dead repository on the very first week with no pull requests merged.

(https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/aarogya-setu-not-open-source-in-real-sense-claim-cybersecurity-activists-say-server-code-must-be-made-public-8480011.html)

Let's assume someday soon with increasing pressure from hackitivists, the govt. might make the source code of the client-side software publicly available, still the problem won't be solved. The server-side code of Aarogya Setu is not yet released, and no one exactly knows if it will be released ever. Aarogya Setu is not alone in following such model or pioneer of this trend.

Here we come to look at next-level of same problem, in which 'Only client-side code is public, but never the server-side code' : Welcome to the world of 'proprietary platforms'

To understand this model, we can consider NewPipe & Invidious, which are best examples of clients with publicly available source code to access the proprietary platform Youtube. It's good that at least in-app tracking can be avoided by switching to these apps, in unavoidable conditions where we don't have an option to skip platforms like YouTube.

Here comes the Unicorns like Telegram & VC-funded DuckDuckGo trying to seep into 'privacy market' by piggy-backing on user's everyday struggle to protect them from surveillance dystopia we are living in. It should be seen as malicious attempts by these corporations to dilute the widely growing movements against the surveillance capitalism and to curb the trend to switching to Free Software alternatives, and deceive people by making them believe in illusionary sense of privacy offered by these services, by their 'creative' marketing campaigns.

Shady networks of monopoly-backed 'privacy organisations'  NGO/NPO-Industrial Complex) and media outlets play key role in increasing the credibility of these proprietary apps by funding them (or promoting their fund campaigns), and promoting these proprietary applications in their circles in the garb of privacy alternatives.

The widely growing privacy awareness is an outcome of struggle of hacktivists in people's movements across the globe and can't be allowed to be appropriated by the same surveillance capitalism mafia which benefits from doing aggressive surveillance on general public.

Proprietary Software and Surveillance Capitalism mafia - aka Digital Monopolies are co-opting the movement and iconography of the same people it marginalised and oppressed (before they were seen as profitable) in order to de-fang free software movement and preserve their own hegemony. We can't allow this. It's our responsibility as hacktivists to educate the larger sections of society about everything these monopolies do under their criminal business models to hinder the progress of our society.

(Ranjith Raj is an Executive Committee Member of Swecha and a General Council Member of Free Software Movement of India. He is currently a researcher at International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad)

M V Sri Harsha

Introduction

Consuming large sets of data isn’t always straightforward. Sometimes, datasets are so large that it’s downright impossible to discern anything useful from them. This is where Data Visualizations come in. The most integral part of data visualization is to present the data in such a way that it can be easily understandable and interactive to non-technical professionals.

Creating data visualizations is rarely straightforward, it will take dozens of hours with a dataset having thousands of entries to create visualizations from scratch. That’s where data visualization tools come in.

Data visualization tools provide data visualization designers with an easier way to create visual representations of large datasets. Apache Superset is such a data visualization tool with easy to use and customizable data visualizations.

Apache Superset

‌                                              ‌

Apache Superset (incubating) is a modern, enterprise-ready business intelligence web application. It is fast, lightweight, intuitive, and loaded with options that make it easy for users of all skill sets to explore and visualize their data, from simple pie charts to highly detailed geospatial charts.

Apache Superset is a Free Software application under the Apache 2.0 license which is written by the Apache Software Foundation. It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license.

‌    

Key features of Superset

• An intuitive interface to explore and visualize datasets, and create interactive dashboards.
• It has a wide array of beautiful visualizations to showcase your data.
• Easy, code-free, user flows to drill down, slice and dice the data underlying exposed dashboards. The charts act as a starting point for deeper analysis.
• SQL editor/IDE exposes a rich metadata browser, and an easy workflow.
• Integration with major authentication backends (database, OpenID, LDAP, OAuth, REMOTE_USER, ...)
• A lightweight semantic layer, allowing to control how data sources are exposed to the user by defining dimensions and metrics
• Fast loading dashboards with configurable caching

Privacy and Scalability

Since Superset is a Free Software application. Unlike other data visualization tools, it can be deployed on your machine(s) which ensures that your data stays private.

Scalability is the biggest concern today as the datasets are huge. Hence Superset is designed to scale out to large, distributed environments and works very well inside containers. You can try superset simply from your laptop to deploying it in a complex distributed environments. There’s virtually no limit to scale out the platform.

Superset users in the wild

• Airbnb
• Faasos
• Lyft
• American Express
• Netflix
• Udemy
• Twitter‌‌The list goes on…

Where can I use it today?

Let's take an example of COVID-19. Since the pandemic started, many government agencies and data scientists started to map and build dashboards of the COVID-19 data to see and predict its growth. Now as a data science enthusiast, even we can build a simple COVID-19 dashboard using Superset.‌                              

With 3 Steps let's build a simple dashboard. Upload, Visualize Table and Publish

Step 1: Loading CSV Data

Upload the CSV dataset, enter the Table Name and click on the Save button.‌                          

Step 2: Table Visualization

Step 2 is more of a two part series

Step 2.1: Import datasource and Select chart

To create a new chart, select New > Chart then choose a data-source (in our case covid_data) from the dropdown list.

‌Now select the visualization type, then select Create new chart to go into the chart view.

Step 2.2: Choose filters or Run Query

Now apply the filters or run custom queries on the data. Here, a saved query is called a Slice. Select Run to see the visualization.

Now click the Save as button near  top-left corner . A up should appear, asking to name the slice, and optionally add it to a dashboard. Since we haven’t yet created any dashboards, we can create one and immediately add our slice to it.

Step 3: Publish

Now that you have the dashboard ready with the line chart. It's ready to get published so that it's available to other users. To Publish simply select Draft next to the title of your dashboard on the top left to change your dashboard to be in Published state.

Hurray!!! We have created a COVID-19 Dashboard...

This example is just taken as an introduction to Superset. There are many more charts to explore which are beyond the scope of this article.

Tags

• Data Visualization
• Apache-Superset

M V Sri Harsha,
Hacktivist at Swecha,
Data Engineer Newsclick

Bhuvan Krishna

We live in a digital world and constantly consume or create data. Under the hood there is software which makes it possible for the data to be created or consumed. This software, in other words, apps, tools, programs etc are the creation of and by people over a period of time (generally it takes years for a piece of software like Operating system to evolve). In this process developers and users of the software get into an agreement which governs the use, modification and redistribution of the software also called license agreement.

When it comes to Free Software licenses the users and developers have the freedom to do what they wish to do in contrast proprietary licenses restrict users/developers are are told what they can not do.

Other than these two variants of licenses there is a third category of licenses called Open Source licenses. OSS (Open Source Software) claims that their licenses are more open and less restrictive than FS (Free Software) licenses, But the reality is that these licenses are created in such a way that the parts of software created with these licenses can be closed giving a huge advantage and control to the giant corporations which mix OSS with propitiatory software. OSS licenses were derived from Free Software licenses. It is these licenses which are popularised widely undermining the importance of ideology of Free Software.

In the age of data the underlying license matter since its not just about using, modifying or redistributing the software but also the data which is generated using the software. Take for example Android OS the underlying software starting from Linux kernel to various apps though released under some sort of Free Software or OSS license the data that is generated or consumed is not protected or is not in the interest of the user along with some parts of the software like drivers for modem, camera various sensors. When a user first switches on the smart phone a series of Agreements show up and we are forced to agree them without which the full potential of the smart phone can not be used. Though in the recent times Google, Facebook, Apple claim that they are very concern about privacy of the user but in the license agreements that they claim to take user data and store it with them. Users don’t have a choice or even if a choice is given its hard for a normal users to opt out of the situation where these companies collect data.

Free Software licenses on the other hand are more user/developer centric and give more flexibility for the user/developer to not only develop the software but also protect user privacy. The core freedoms that govern Free Software licenses are.

Free Software means users have four essential freedoms:

(0) to run the program of any purpose,

(1) to study and change the program in source code form,

(2) to redistribute exact copies, and

(3) to distribute modified versions.

Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These facilities are why software is useful; we believe a program's users should be free to take advantage of them, not solely its developer.

Software licenses can be broadly categorised in this way

GPL-Compatible Free Software Licenses

These licenses qualify as free software licenses, and are compatible with the GNU GPL like.

GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3

This is the latest version of the GNU GPL: a free software license, and a copyleft license. We recommend it for most software packages.

Please note that GPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2 by itself. However, most software released under GPLv2 allows you to use the terms of later versions of the GPL as well. When this is the case, you can use the code under GPLv3 to make the desired combination.

GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2

This is the previous version of the GNU GPL: a free software license, and a copyleft license. There are some limitations which are covered under GPL v3 and it is always recommended to use GPL v3 instead of GPL v2.

GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3

The GNU Project has two principal licenses to use for libraries. One is the GNU Lesser GPL; the other is the ordinary GNU GPL. The choice of license makes a big difference: using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs.

GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3

This is a free software, copyleft license. Its terms effectively consist of the terms of GPLv3, with an additional paragraph in section 13 to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. We recommend that developers consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network.

Other noteworthy licenses include Apache License, Version 2.0, FreeBSD license (This is the original BSD license with the advertising clause and another clause removed.), Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 2.0

GPL-Incompatible Free Software Licenses

The following licenses are free software licenses, but are not compatible with the GNU GPL.

Affero General Public License version 1, Apache License, Version 1.1 and below, Eclipse Public License Version 2.0 and below

Nonfree Software Licenses

The following licenses do not qualify as free software licenses. A nonfree license is automatically incompatible with the GNU GPL.

Apple Public Source License (APSL), version 1.x, Microsoft's Shared Source CLI, C#, and Jscript License.

Licenses For Documentation

These licenses cover for documentation of the software.

Free Documentation Licenses

GNU Free Documentation License, FreeBSD Documentation License

Licenses for Works of Practical Use besides Software and Documentation like artwork images, music, videos etc.

GNU General Public License

The GNU GPL can be used for general data which is not software, as long as one can determine what the definition of “source code” refers to in the particular case. As it turns out, the DSL (see below) also requires that you determine what the “source code” is, using approximately the same definition that the GPL uses.

GNU Free Documentation License

The GNU FDL is recommended for textbooks and teaching materials for all topics. (“Documentation” simply means textbooks and other teaching materials for using equipment or software.) We also recommend the GNU FDL for dictionaries, encyclopedias, and any other works that provide information for practical use.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (a.k.a. CC BY)

This is a non-copyleft free license that is good for art and entertainment works, and educational works. It is compatible with all versions of the GNU GPL; however, like all CC licenses, it should not be used on software.

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(Bhuvan Krishna is the General Secretary of Swecha, and the lead developer of e-Swecha)

Bhavabuthi Bobby

Normalizing through shocks:  A global strategy

Every few years, there will be a media sensation that will tremble the society. Be it Cambridge Analytica or the Aadhaar data breach. The news on how corporations are indulging in dark patterns to collect data. The news on how data breaches leading to sensitive data of users being exposed in internet. The list goes on.

This has become so prevalent that it became a norm in the digital era. The practice of media resorting to shocking people for the sake of sensation creates despair and is pervasive. There are several instances in our conversations with engineering students that we see this despair and helplessness. We see that they are reliant on the internet for many of their necessities. But due to proprietary technologies engulfing discourse of the commons, they are finding it difficult to explore alternatives.

The corporate media went hand in hand with these corporations to supply stories that might be presented to be most shocking but doesn't address the over arching problem. They end up suggesting limitations in social media usage. The same thing happened in a recent popular Netflix documentary 'The Social Dilemma'.

This is definitely against the logic of human interaction. For example, you want to meet and talk with your friend and call them over to a place. If the place is noisy, would you abandon the place and go to a less noisy place or would you abandon the talk altogether? A person with common sense would choose another place with less chaos to have conversation with their friend. This is somehow missing in the conversation when they sensationalize the news. The pervasive data collection by the corporations for profits at the cost of our sensitive data is being normalized by blaming people for their social media usage.

Do companies like Facebook snoop on us? This question has been answered in 2013. We don't need an answer every year or two! Snowden revelations have shown us that companies like Google, Facebook and Apple are complicit in sharing data to NSA without the consent/knowledge of users around the world.

Pervasive corporations is not a new phenomenon

Corporations taking data for their profit even at the cost of people's lives is not a 21st century phenomenon. It has been there since the early age of corporations. A very good example is one of the most powerful corporations in the mid 20th century, IBM.

You would have read about a German leader, Hitler, who killed millions of Jews. Hitler created a plethora of prison factories to support his War economy (which boomed during WWII). These camps were for forced labor which is literally work to death. This massive data of prison labor was tough to organize and maintain on paper. It needed 'smart' computation to organize the data and hence organize the labor. And IBM, a powerful corporation, came to his rescue with its Hollerith system. This system is used to collect, identify, sort, assign and transport millions of people in Europe during the Holocaust.

Privacy by Default

The fight for privacy in this context would not just be about individual for their sensitive data but would also be about communities fighting against the model of monetizing through privacy invasive micro targeting.

Corporations have been trying forever to narrow down the fight for privacy to individual responsibility. To confuse people, there is a set of people (of course backed by corporations) who brought the slogan "Privacy by Design". This is a deceitful slogan as they advocate the design of privacy code but they  support the method of opt-in. It resulted in design of privacy extensions or software to be explicitly opted by users who in many cases will not be aware of them. This is not a privacy-first approach. Its very important for us to embrace the slogan "Privacy by Default" which means that privacy for an individual should come out of the box.

"Privacy by Default" over "Privacy by Design".

Privacy ultimately is a collective effort. If I'm using a free software that doesn't spy on me but my mom uses an Alexa for home assistant then the outcome is that I'm being spied along with my mom. Hence narrowing the responsibility of privacy to an individual defeats the purpose of the privacy movement itself.

(Bhavabhuthi Bobby is a Co-ordination Committee member of Swecha, a hacktivist and works as a Software Engineer at a multinational firm)

People around the world continue to look towards Aaron Swartz and take inspiration from him. For people who don't know Aaron, he was an important figure in the open access movement. Aaron contributed his life for the movement and his tragic death was an important loss for the movement. His contributions to the internet and commons were large and is known for helping create creative commons license, RSS (Rich Site Summary) spec and was one of the co-founder's of reddit.

Aaron is also known for writing the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto in July 2008, an important work that continues to inspire people around the world. The Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto was a call for scientists, researchers and intellectuals to fight back the anarchic system which was locking up all the knowledge and culture in the world. In Aaron's words:

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier”.

There is a Telugu proverb written by the great poet Gurazada Apparao “మతములన్నియు మాసిపోవును - జ్ఞానమొక్కటి నిలిచి వెలుగును” which translates into “All religions shall fade away but knowledge will flourish”. This along with one more saying was something common in our household "seek knowledge and not money, as it is something people can't steal from you". In this information age of social media, people in power don’t want you to be aware and want to stop spreading knowledge, it serves their political interest to have ignorant people. It is in the vested interest of large corporations and politicians to decide who can have access to information. Again in Aaron’s words, you will agree to this, but what then?

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Yes we can fight back, there is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time we fought back, we declared our displeasure with the system and its functioning. Research budgets of several universities are from government funding, not-for-profit foundations primarily and yet all the results of research are closely walled within foreign and private gateways. Who are these firms to decide who can have access to the work done by our colleagues, countrymen with our own tax money? It is time for Guerrilla Open Access and in Aaron's words:

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerrilla Open Access.”

As we fight for open access for knowledge and research carried out for the progress of humanity, we need to remember that misinformation is the new normal of our generation. It becomes important for us to not only open up information locked up in silos, but also important to spread scientific temper and tackle misinformation. We need to identify misinformation farms and develop guerrilla practices to stop them. Specially when BigTech profits from these practices and will not stop the spread of anti-scientific propaganda and misinformation.

BigTech is as much a threat to our society as large publications are, they have successfully evaded all legislations regulating them and have claimed protections of software patents and copyright. Their censorship of the web under copyright act while ignoring to censor any hate speech or Fake news has caused enough damage already. Digital Publishing houses with help of digital rights management (DRM) are gaining monopoly over knowledge.

BigTech has gained virtual monopoly over information and internet infrastructure. With the push of the Internet.Org Facebook is becoming a gatekeeper for the internet in third world nations. India has shown the way to challenge these systems and we need to continue to spread these practices across the World. Indian copyright act too doesn't support publishers rights over education of the masses. We can build a future in India where knowledge is free and accessible while promoting scientific temper.

To build this future for our society, we need to adopt Guerilla Open Access Manifesto to inverse the information asymmetry between citizens and Big Tech, Big Government. This can only happen if we build alternative networks of information infrastructures that support open access. These information networks can’t be built overnight, but we need to strive towards it. Sci-hub, LibGen are some of the examples of these information infrastructures and not only we need to support them, we need to build more of these.

Gorla Praveen* and  Dr. Sridhar Gutam**.

Free and openly available scholarly literature is called Open Access literature which is almost free of copyright restrictions. The open scholarship arising from the public funds is public good and should be available to the public without any charge and technical and legal barriers.

Free software movement whose objective is to build and make the software which is free to use, study, share and build upon is helping Open Access, Open Data, Open Education etc.

Many of the Open Access Initiatives across the world had expressed the need for having supported “tools and assistance" for the establishment of repositories (literature archives and data archives), and to launch open access journals, as many as possible. However, the need for complete freedom to publish and disseminate the knowledge resources without the restriction is only possible when the end-to-end system is built on the principles of Free Software and Knowledge commons. Although, initially the DSpace and Eprints were created as free and open-source software for repositories and the OJS (Open Journal Systems) for journals. The Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which had released the OJS as Free Software in 2001 under GNU General Public License has become the default and widely used publishing system for any Open Access Journal. Currently, OJS is released as OJS 3.2.1 version and is available in eleven languages besides development in other 25 languages including Hindi.

With the growing momentum of Open Access, the communities and organizations who believe in Open Scholarship and Public Good are contributing for the development of e-infrastructure which is available as free as in freedom.

Now there are a growing number of authors who are sharing/releasing their first draft of the manuscripts before submitting the journals with an aim to share their research findings with the world as soon as they are ready via Preprint Repositories. The recent release of Open Preprint Systems (OPS) by the PKP is another milestone in the scholarly communications after OJS.

With the Public web, Public Software, Public licensing and Public infrastructure, we see there are no barriers for the open scholarship unless the authors are willing otherwise.

When we speak about Knowledge, we speak about sharing it without restriction. When we speak about  Knowledge sharing, we are referring to its progress. When  we refer to Knowledge progress, we are referring to societal progress. Like all, Aaron Swartz is the one who has spoken about it deliberately.

Aaron Swartz in the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (2008) writes “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations”. He then ends asking us to join him and others to “send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge’.

Lets join and build the tools and means for making ‘Open Scholarship as Public Good’.

*Research Fellow, BITS-Pilani, Working Group Member, Open Access India.

**Senior Scientist, ICAR - Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Working Group Member, Open Access India.

Prabir Purkayastha

Digital Monopolies are being increasingly recognised as threats to democracy. The US Congressional Committee’s Staff Report [1] this month on anti monopoly practices of the big four—Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple, who collectively have a market valuation in excess of 5 trillion—stated:

Nearly a century ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote: “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” Those words speak to us with great urgency today.

The Report further says:

“Although these four corporations differ in important ways, studying their business practices has revealed common problems. First, each platform now serves as a gatekeeper over a key channel of distribution. By controlling access to markets, these giants can pick winners and losers throughout our economy...the dominant platforms have exploited their power in order to become even more dominant.”

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), UK, in its Report[2] on Online platforms and digital advertising dated July1, 2020, has also come to similar conclusions, that these big on-line platforms are abusing their market power to wipe out competition, and promote point/points of view favourable to their business interests. CMA has recommended,

“Both Google and Facebook grew...are now protected by such strong incumbency advantages – including network effects, economies of scale and unmatchable access to user data – that potential rivals can no longer compete on equal terms...The concerns we have identified in these markets are so wide ranging and self-reinforcing that our existing powers are not sufficient to address them. We need a new, regulatory approach...

The four major tech companies — Google-Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple — are globally on the radar for their monopoly power and their ability to drive out competition. The recent hearings in the US Congress Committee on the Big Four were followed by a staff report of the Committee, which recommended appropriate legislative action to break-up or limit these companies. Facebook has additionally come under the scanner for being an instrument of hate speech, helping the formation of violent militias, and promoting conspiracy theories, including Covid-19 conspiracies. A Delhi Assembly Committee—Committee for Peace and Harmony—is investigating Facebook's role in Delhi's communal riots this year (full disclosure: I also deposed before this Committee).

Advertising Muscle and Discrimination

International marketing intelligence service WARC indicates in the nearly $600 billion advertising market, the digital advertising revenue today is equal, if not more than that of all other media combined. Google and Facebook alone command nearly about 35% of the global advertising revenue, and about 70% of the digital ad revenue. The business model’s for Google and Facebook are based on advertising revenue. For Google, advertisements are about 83% of its total revenue, and for, Facebook more than 98%.

The key difference between other media companies and the digital platforms is their ability to micro-target their users. Facebook has 50,000 unique categories in which it places its users. In India, the Free Software Movement of India had found that Facebook has data even on caste of its users. Facebook does not ask for caste of its users but uses algorithms with a database of caste names in a given area to identify caste. A similar exercise identifies religion as well. Just as Facebook has this ability to micro-target its users, so has Google. Google collects all the data of our searches, browsers, android if we use an android-based mobile, location, and all the sites we have viewed, left a comments, the list goes on. It has gigabytes of data on each of us who use Google services or own an Android based mobile phone. It is this ability to micro-target its users, identifying what a person could be looking for and showing them relevant advertisements that make Google and Facebook an attractive platform for advertisers.

Google and Facebook have one similarity. Neither of them generates any content; they show you content generated by others. Their entire business model is capturing our eyeballs so that we, or our attention, can be sold to advertisers. Those who create content may get a small fraction of the ad revenue that Google generates, but the bulk of the digital revenue is appropriated by Google as the major gatekeeper of the digital world. Similarly for Facebook, all its content is generated by its users, with Facebook acting as giant billboard of content that it thinks that particular users would like to see. And because people stay on the platform and Facebook knows its users, it can target ads much better than print or television media can.

Google on the Monopoly Radar of the US Government

The US Department of Justice has recently filed a lawsuit against Google-Alphabet (Alphabet is Google's parent company) for using a range of anti-competitive practices using its monopoly power in the search market. It is the only major action in the US against tech monopolies in recent years, the last one being the 1998 action against Microsoft. Eleven state attorney generals have joined the Department of Justice suit, with more expected to follow.

Google currently has a market share in online searches globally of more than 92% that rises to more than 98% in countries like India. The only market in which it has virtually no market share in China, where it shut shop for its search engine in 2010.

According to the Justice Department, Google uses its monopoly over the search engine and its other Google properties to grab over 30%—$103.73 billion in 2019—of the global digital ad revenue pie. Facebook has a little over 20%.

We may ask how does Google gets so much of the ad revenue? Does its search engine not show other sites, which the person searching on Google would also visit? And therefore would not these sites also get a share of online advertisements?

Visiting other sites via Google searches is decreasing year by year. In 2004, Lary Page, the co-founder of Google had stated in an interview, 'We want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want...We want to get out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible." Rand Fishkin, a leading expert on Search Engine Optimization shows us with that this is not the case anymore; if it ever was.

The majority of searches on Google lead to no further clicks on the links in the displayed search pages (zero clicks). Zero clicks happen because Google increasingly curates the results of the queries, displaying the required information on the search result page itself that most searchers do not go further. Even Wikipedia is worried, as its clicks from Google are dwindling.

In the browser market, around 51% of searches generate zero clicks on the search result page links. If clicks do occur, a significant share of such outgoing clicks is only for other Google sites such as YouTube, Google Maps, etc. Clicks on search pages leading outside the Google universe are dwindling every year. The situation is worse in mobile searches, where Google has an even more dominant position. We might think that Apple mobile phones should be independent of Google and therefore people might fare better in Apple's ecosystem of iPhones, iPad, etc. It is not. Google pays 8-12 billion dollars, nearly 20% Apple’s annual profits, for Apple to carry its search and maps as Apple’s default.

These figures are of search engine outputs and the resulting clicks. What about the proportion of web traffic referrals that sites receive, meaning when sites are visited from other sites, where do they come from? 70% of such web referrals for any site still come from Google properties. Annoy Google and your site will fall into a deep black hole, which only the faithful will visit.

As a result, if we want our sites to be visited, we have to configure the site in a way that Google can catalog all our content easily. If we want our videos to be viewed, our only realistic option is YouTube. And there is no way we can fight with Google even if our share of ad revenue dwindles. Google holds all the cards!

Even when queries lead to other sites, quite often it leads to Google properties as it promotes either sites, or content on its sites, e.g., YouTube videos on the search page, such that people do not visit the world outside Google. The rules of ranking that it imposes on others, do not apply to Google properties and sites, which have consistently higher rankings on Google searches than searches on other search engines like DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc.

According to Rand Fishkin,  the rules of ranking are only for outsiders! As Fishkin puts it, the answer to the question of how to be ranked number one on a Google search is an easy one: be owned by Google!

The European Union regulators have penalized Google on occasions, but Google has been happy to pay the fines, as the monopoly it has achieved through its anti-competitive action cannot be reversed. It is like license fees that telecom companies pay to secure the monopoly of the airwaves! In India too, Google has been fined, but the amount of the fine was a paltry $21 million. It does not even count as a rap on the knuckles for Google.

These tech monopolies are also facing action in the European Union and Australia and even in the UK. In the UK, the Monopoly and Mergers Commission (now renamed as the Competition and the Markets Authority) was replaced with a weakened Competition Commission in 1999, a step which India quickly copied in 2002. Even with this weaker regulatory framework than the earlier anti-monopoly regulations, UK's Competition and the Markets Authority in its recent reporthas argued for a new, regulatory approach to address these monopolies. India has been charting a very different course. Not only has the government and its regulatory agencies sheltered Reliance Jio in becoming the national telecom monopoly, but it has also 'blessed' huge investments from Google and Facebook of $4.5 billion and $5.7 billion respectively, helping cement all three of their monopolies. While all other technology partners bring in their technology tools and platforms, Jio's key to success is its old fashioned monopoly over India's telecom network. India is slated to the world's biggest market after China in the coming decades.

Hate as an Instrument of Facebook’s Virality

Facebook rise has not only led to becoming a global media giant with 20% share of the global digital ad revenue, but also a major carrier of fake and hate news on its platform.

In a UN Report[3] dated 12^thSeptember, 2018, Facebook was strongly criticised for its providing a platform for hate speech and its refusal to cooperate with the UN investigations on the genocidal violence against Rohingyas in Myanmar. Even after this criticism, Facebook failed to take action against T. Raja Singh, a BJP MLA from Telangana, whose posts against Bangladeshis and Rohingyas had been flagged by Avaaz in its Report Megaphone for Hate[4]. This was the same Raja Singh who had been widely reported in the media for a Facebook video where he stated[5], "If Rohingya and Bangladeshi immigrants do not leave India, the government should shoot them. Only then the country will be safe."

Equality Labs have also done a detailed analysis[6] of Facebook’s use as a platform for hate speech and its threats to minorities – religious, caste and queer communities – in India. Their Report pointed out that 93% of all hate speech posts reported to Facebook remain on Facebook. This includes content advocating violence, bullying and use of offensive slurs. Nearly half of the hate speech Facebook initially removed was later restored; 100% of these restored posts were Islamophobic in nature. 40% of all casteist hate speech on Facebook India is preoccupied with India’s affirmative action policy, known as “reservation.”

The Wall Street Journal in its news report[7] stated that T. Raja Singh, the BJP MLA was among the three BJP figures,  flagged internally by Facebook’s team implementing its policy on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” as worthy of a permanent ban, as was done in other countries including the United States. The other two flagged internally were Anantkumar Hegde, a member of Parliament from Karnataka and Kapil Mishra, a former Delhi legislator. T Raja Singh was only banned on September 4^th2020, after WSJ’s expose quoted above and the sharp reaction of a section of the Facebook staff[8] to its India policies.

The Wall Street Journal’s article quoted above goes on to say:

The company’s top public-policy executive in the country, Ankhi Das, opposed applying the hate-speech rules to Mr. Singh and at least three other Hindu nationalist individuals and groups flagged internally for promoting or participating in violence...(She) told staff members that punishing violations by politicians from Mr. Modi’s party would damage the company’s business prospects in the country, Facebook’s biggest global market by number of users, the current and former employees said.

Advertisements depend on the number of views, and the virality of posts, and the engagement—the amount of time a viewer spends on the post or related posts—are the main drivers of Facebook’s revenue model. Facebook has discovered, as MIT researchers did[9], that hate and fake news posts drive virality, and therefore it has no incentive to curb such posts. While it has professed lip service for community standards and healthy discourse, the driving force of its business empire comes from its need to have more eyeballs, and these eyeballs to spend more time on Facebook. This is what an internal study had flagged to its senior leadership[10], “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” The above article quotes another internal study[11]that had found that 64 percent of members who had joined extremist groups did so thanks to Facebook’s recommendation tools.

This pathology of social media is not limited to Facebook. Google’s search engine has shown similar problems, as has its image recognition algorithms. But undoubtedly, Facebook has been the leader in spreading hate politics and fake news in the world.

Media, Democracy and Monopoly

While the digital monopolies do not create any content themselves, their ability of micro-targeting helps them become the key players in advertising. The digital monopolies such as Google and Facebook not only have enormous power to sell goods, but also to sell candidates/parties in elections. Cambridge Analytica had only a small fraction of the data that Google and Facebook have. Their ability to sway peoples opinions are far more than any other media platform in the world. They can destabilise countries and create a climate in favour of a party. Bolsonaro, Trump and Modi have benefited from their WhatsApp and Facebook campaigns. The 2016 elections in India saw Google ads used extensively to sway the Indian voter.

The role that Facebook played in politics was identified by In a 2017 Bloomberg article[12], Lauren Etter, Vernon Silver, and Sarah Frier wrote:

“ ...(that Facebook) actively works with political parties and leaders including those who use the platform to stifle opposition—sometimes with the aid of ‘troll armies’ that spread misinformation and extremist ideologies.” They also wrote that “a little-known Facebook global government and politics team… led from Washington by Katie Harbath, a former Republican digital strategist who worked on former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign,” has helped specific political parties “from India and Brazil to Germany and the U.K.—the unit’s employees have become de facto campaign workers.”

In 2018, a five-article series for Newsclick by Cyril Sam and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta ahead of India’s 2019 general elections investigated the close ties between Facebook executives and the BJP, particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s team, and found that the ties went far beyond Facebook’s relationships with other political parties in India.

Unfortunately, the interests of tech these behemoth digital companies are less and less often aligned with the interests of society. Thomas Carlyle had called the press the Fourth Estate in a democracy. It has a social role and therefore needs to be regulated[13]for public good. The Press Council of India, however weak it might be in actual practice, has a code[14]that the press is expected to follow. In the U.S., cross-holdings between different kinds of media are regulated.

The global anti-monopoly actions show that we are witnessing is a tectonic shift in the way big tech and their owners are being viewed. Not as Ayan Rand's imaginary captains of industry who through super-manlike powers are creating a new world, but simply as venal and predatory monopolies. Even in the fractured politics of the US, there seems to be a bipartisan consensus that monopolies are inherently dangerous to consumers and competitors alike. Otherwise, why would a Justice Department under Trump file a case against Google-Alphabet, in which, according to its spokespersons, nothing—presumably even breaking up the monopolies as advocated by Senator Elisabeth Warren—is off the table.

(Prabir Purkayastha is the President of the Free Software Movement of India and Editor-in-Chief at NewsClick)

[1]     Investigations of Competition in Digital Markets, Staff Report of the  https://judiciary.house.gov/uploadedfiles/competition_in_digital_markets.pdf

[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5efc57ed3a6f4023d242ed56/Final_report_1_July_2020_.pdf

[3]     https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/FFM-Myanmar/A_HRC_39_64.pdf

[4]     https://avaazpress.s3.amazonaws.com/FINAL-Facebook%20in%20Assam_Megaphone%20for%20hate%20-%20Compressed%20(1).pdf

[5]     https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/shoot-rohingya-bangladeshi-migrants-says-controversial-bjp-mla-1301394-2018-07-31

[6] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58347d04bebafbb1e66df84c/t/5d0186a58ed02e000158542a/1560381096481/Facebook_India_Report_Equality_Labs.pdf

[7]     https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-politics-muslim-hindu-modi-zuckerberg-11597423346

[8]     https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-staff-demand-policy-changes-on-india-hate-speech-11598008322

[9]     https://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308

[10]   https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

[11]   https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1

[12]   https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-21/inside-the-facebook-team-helping-regimes-that-reach-out-and-crack-down

[13]   https://www.mediareform.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/The_Elephant_Next_Door-A_Survey_of_International_Media_Ownership_Regulations.pdf

[14]   https://tinyurl.com/yy4bo78p

Editorial

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of this noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil..." Appears to be so prophetic and penned down describing today's order of things. Charles Dickens in the 1800s while describing the times unfolding of the French Revolution! It was dusk for the old feudal order and the dawn for a new order shaping itself.

Now we have innovation disrupting the old order of production-distribution. With "tech as its core" - the highest abstraction of human labour is being appropriated away from the commons.

The best of the times is the innovation and the worst of the times is the alienation, the age of wisdom is where we have the choice while the institutional mechanisms of the corporations push people towards foolishness, it is an epoch of belief that problems of commons can be solved, while the subversion by the corporations pushes the the world towards incredulity, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Springs, Anti-Corruption movement were the spring of hope with tech as a core for organisation while Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Google in Elections is the winter of despair in subverting the democratic process.

The order of the day is now manifested by corporations, where they reached the levels of predicting and influencing the commons, to suit the behaviour of the markets. Data being primary and being termed as the new oil of this era has become central. Privacy of people is being violated to extract this data. There is a 360 degree profiling of the individual by the corporate-autocracy and shared between the state and the corporations - on the one hand to protect the interests of the free market and on the other to subtly negate the possibility of any protest arising as a fallout. Silencing the commons covertly and overtly is being aided through regressive legislations.

Digital India Initiative that was launched with much fanfare and with a claim to move towards self-reliance has ended up being hollow and lame. Rather than working for digital inclusion through self-reliance, the Indian government ended up paving the way for Reliance emerging as a monopoly and it becoming sub-subservient to the data oligopolies like Facebook and Google.

"Freedom Matters" which is being launched today, on the 8^th of November 2020, vows to carry forward the legacy of the struggle in the interest of the commons. We remember Aaron Swartz on this day, whose death was nothing but an institutional murder on the part of corporate-autocracy to silence him. Aaron, if he were alive, would have been with us, working together for the emancipation of mankind and led the struggle for freedom from tyranny and for a peoples democracy.

Ganesh Katrapati

Picture this - two war helicopters in the air, see some civilians on the ground. Immediately, they start shooting at them even though the civilians were just walking around. They have neither time nor space to escape. Throughout this non-stop firing, we hear the soldiers foully abusing their victims. Bone chillingly, we hear them saying 'keep shooting', 'keep shooting', 'keep shooting'. This horrific incident happened during the Iraq war where More than a dozen people were killed, two children wounded. Among those were two journalists who were completely unarmed - their cameras were mistaken for arms. Now, this is what they call a 'collateral' murder - just a nice way of masking the fact that unarmed civilians were killed in a military encounter.

All of this was kept secret. Chelsea Manning, a US soldier at that time, saw this video and many other relevant documents, felt responsible, and sent it Wikileaks - a platform dedicated to bring out the truth about war crimes, spying, corruption and other injustices, increasing transparency so that, we are all aware of them.

Putting out the truth about incidents like this and others is the sole reason why Julian Assange - the founder of Wikileaks is in jail today, in the cruelest and harshest environment. Initially, Julian was charged for a trumped-up case with no evidence (this was eventually dropped). Since 2012, he took asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy (UK) without access sunlight or fresh air - he could not step out of the building because then the UK govt would arrest him. This is exactly what happened as soon as the asylum period ended. He has since been dragged into a maximum-security prison with inhumane conditions - denied basic necessities and put in solitary confinement leading to acute deterioration of his mental and physical health. The US desperately wants assange to be extradited (transferred) from the UK to America where he will possibly spend his whole lifetime in jail. Even at the court trail, he is kept in a glass box and not permitted to talk to his lawyers.

What crime did Julian Assange commit ?. He did not kill anybody. He did not rob, steal or swindle. He did something far more dangerous. He exposed the criminal secrecy of the corrupt and the powerful. He laid bare the workings of the evil empires. That is why he was brutally dragged out of the embassy by the police. That is why he is put in a prison reserved for criminals who are "highly dangerous and threat to national security". That is why, he is put in a glass box during the trial. They are doing this because they are afraid of Julian Assange, Wikileaks and us knowing the truth.

Governments, armies and corporates persecute whistleblowers for exposing information that should not be kept secret but, they have no problem in extracting our data, commodifying it and spying on us. There is a meme that contrasts Assange and Zuckerberg that gives you an apt snapshot of what I just said.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter & Reliance - These digital monopolies constantly gather our data behind our back, enable mass govt surveillance, sell, share this data to whomever they want and worse, they microtarget each and every single one of us to study our online behaviour, predict it and even modify it !. All the information we access passes through atleast one of these companies - They are gateways to our internet. Whatever news we see, fake or otherwise, has to come from them. Which ever product you buy has to be bought on their platforms. Our thoughts, opinions, actions all, are not just monitored but, at times decided by them - From buying a T-Shirt to voting in an election (Cambridge Analytica). This is the totalitarianism Julian was talking about and, he was right. But, of course, you don't see Pichai or Zuckerberg in belmarsh prison or in glass cases !

It is right that we talk about Julian Assange, his work and the Internet's infection of digital monopolies on Aaron Swartz's birthday. Like Julian, Aaron dedicated his life to the principle of equal and open access to public information. He is involved in creating the RSS feed format, Reddit, Creative Commons and many others. He thought scientific research should be freely accessed without any restrictions. Being a exemplary technical genius, he found a way to do it. Instead of celebrating his initiative, he was sentenced to 35 years in prison. At the age of 26, he took his own life.

The murder of all those innocent civilians, the suffering and indictment of Julian Assange and the death of Aaron - None of them are 'collateral'. Something is only collateral if it is incidental (by chance). In these three cases, it is clear everything is intentional.

Ganesh is a Free Software Activist, Executive Committee member of Swecha and is currently pursuing his PhD (Computational Linguistics) at IIITH. He is interested in data, AI/ML and the interplay between technology and society.

I entered college in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. In a few years, we would see how the Occupy movement unfolded in the United States. In my understanding, it was the time when a generation realized how unchecked concentration (of wealth), more often than not, leads to a situation where the damage is extensive and devastating.

It was around this time when I got introduced to this collective of Hacktivists, who stood for a society where the software, computing, and knowledge and access to it remain Free (as in freedom) and not restricted to few. Where Users control the software and not the other way round. It was in this context that I had first heard the saying, "If the service is free, you are the product.". That was the year 2010.

Ten years later, uncannily enough, in 2020, the essence of our struggle remains the same: build resistance against new monopolies: Data monopolies. And the saying "If the service is free, you are the product." is all the more relevant now. In these ten years, the shift in the computing landscape has been immense. In these ten years, we have seen the big tech companies (like Google, Amazon, Facebook etc.) take a stranglehold on how data is generated, routed, and monetized. Every aspect of human life is digitized, aggregated, and analyzed. "To what end?" one might ask. Depending on one's understanding of tech and its relationship with society, the answer will range from "to enhance the user experience" to "to undermine every trait that makes us human". Cambridge Analytica, Snowden's revelations and Wikileaks revelations, and many such examples, nudge us toward the later.

At the core of this are systems that prioritize corporations and their monetary/political interests over their users' interests. Systems that will collect user's behavioral data to make predictions on user's behavior and build an ecosystem of services that can be monetized.

There is a reason why Amazon would like you to see book on how vaccination is harmful to you. Or why Facebook will enable entities to harvest user data and micro-target citizens for ads so that elections can be meddled with. Algorithms will control which post you see first on your timeline, which post sits on top of your timeline to influence what you read and eventually how you vote. And that reason is profit maximization over fundamental user rights. Because for the big tech companies, profit maximization prevails over a scientific temper or a functioning democracy. We will be forced to see algorithmically amplified "Free Speech". Do these algorithms prioritize users' privacy and users' democratic rights or cater to a corporation's priorities? All the evidence points to the latter. Do we, as users, have any control / say in what these algorithms do? No.

We have seen cases where big tech companies listen to conversations through your Home assistant or that they read mails under the pretense of "annotations to improve user experience". Without looking into the design and code, there is no way of knowing what else is getting compromised. And the big tech would have us believe that they are protecting their intellectual property by keeping it a black box, only to infringe on users' privacy and safety. Data monopolies are probably the only ones who can be fined $ 5 billion for violating the user's privacy, and not one person is held accountable.

To understand how hand-in-glove is government's relationship with data monopolies, we need to only look at

a) the influence of the ruling dispensation on how Facebook's hate speech regulation,

b) how the Data Protection legislature is being formulated and delayed, and how government, the same government that is expected to protect its citizen's rights, willingly sold Vaahan data, and we have seen instances of its usage for nefarious activities.

The same government encouraged everyone to install Aarogya Setu and today answers to RTI, saying it has no clue who is the developer of this software. With increasing data collection in projects like Aadhaar, compulsory FastTags, portals like Dharani portal, coupled with a lack of strong pro-people Data Protection legislature, it is hard not to be extremely worried about your future.

"When you scraped all the websites and called it a search engine, it was progress, but when I wanted to scrape your search engine to make a better search engine, it was theft.", I remember someone saying. The creation of tools is a collective process. They start as a community effort, where a group of people brainstorm and contribute to its creation and development. But at some point, it is enclosed in the name of "Proprietary System" and "Intellectual Property". This makes access to this technology difficult, inevitably leading to the concentration of tools in the hands of a certain few and creating big tech monopolies.

In essence, the rallying call for our resistance remains the same: move tech closer to people and not towards concentration in the hands of few data monopolies.