In less than two weeks after implementing censorship over Pastebin, The Piratebay and Vimeo and blocking them, again they left unblocked and are available to over every ISP in India. At first, I thought the censorship was all over the India and later realized/reported that this censorship was among some particular ISP’s including Reliance. The censorship not only shocked the internet users across the country, but also rude from both the Dept of Telecom, Reliance and other ISP’s to censor the aforementioned websites without any notice or public announcement.
I’m not sure about what made Reliance to unblock these censored sites again. Although it could be because of a huge disappointment from Indian internet users and their opposition to the censorship, there are two other reasons that could be considered over the withdrawal of this censorship.
First, the opposition and attack from Anonymous, a loosely organized group of internet hactivists. Anonymous, certainly is a type of group which opposes internet censorship heavily and supports internet users who wants their online privacy to be protected although they have an army of dangerous hackers on their board.
via @f1msftw: Tango Down DOT.gov.in Reason: Ordered #ISPs to #block file sharing sites. #Anonymous #Anonops
— AoS (@AnonOpsSweden) May 15, 2012
The Anonymous group, which considers DDoS attack (distributed denial-of-service attack) as a digital protest already brought the Dept of Telecom website of India down through DDoS once. Also, their list got a little longer with three new govt websites added to DDoS and bring them down to show their opposition to the censorship ordered by Indian govt. By the time I’m writing this post, tec.gov.in was inaccessible.
TARGETS: dot.gov.in ,mit.gov.in ,indiagovernance.gov.in ,tec.gov.in
— Anonymous Own3r (@AnonymousOwn3r) May 15, 2012
What they quite didn’t get is, it is not Indian govt’s sole decision to censor the Pastebin or The Pirate Bay. It’s the Reliance who filed a case against those services and succeeded in getting a John Deo order that has the power to force the ISP’s to block the particular websites in the favor of content owners. So, Indian govt became the villain, while Reliance went away without any trouble but succeeding in censoring the Patebin, The Pirate Bay and Vimeo to reduce the circulation of pirated movies they produced.
The other reason I believe could be a the “Netsweeper Inc.” who were given the job of monitoring and effectively blocking the aforementioned websites. Yeah, the truth I believe is, “Netsweeper” cannot monitor a huge traffic from Indian internet users towards the censored sites and block them effectively. As, I myself sometimes accessed Pastebin for some few particular minutes but very often, even when the censorship was in effect to rest of the users. Sometimes, instead of the message saying “This site has been blocked as per instructions from Department of Telecom (DOT)” while I try to access the blocked sites, Netsweeper ended up showing me a database error.
It seems like that Reliance or Indian govt cannot effectively censor just a three popular services from its country internet users because of a huge volume of traffic they had to monitor for the censorship process. It remembers me a quote from Guardian that, “To block even one high-profile filesharing website would quickly require apparatus as sophisticated as the great firewall of China” by James Ball to which I totally agree with.
Update: Still some users face problem in opening The Pirate Bay. Also, it seems like the file sharing service was inaccessible not only by Reliance ISP customers but also by other ISP customers including BSNL and TATA. Some even suggests me that there could be a DDoS attack over The Pirate Bay, which could have brought the site down. If you are encountering a problem on opening The Pirate Bay, then please let us know in comments.
