Hillhacks

A Talk by Pranesh Prakash, at Main Conference

This talk will explore the central contradiction of surveillance in India: great amount of transparency coupled with very little accountability. It will introduce participants to the law and the tech behind state surveillance in India, and will explore the question of whether we should trust the government when it comes to being motivated by citizen interests.

This talk is based on years of research on surveillance in India. I will first explain what all we know about the CMS, Natgrid, TCIS, CCTNS, and other such acronyms, then go into the laws that regulate surveillance including the Telegraph Act, the Information Technology Act, and the various licences that govern telecom providers in India. I will then proceed to explain the various categories of surveillance that we have known the state to have engaged in since the 1970s, and then end on a pessimistic note on why bringing in accountability to surveillance will be a tougher battle in India than it has been in the USA or in Germany.

Pranesh Prakash is a Policy Director at — and was part of the founding team of — the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-profit that engages in research and policy advocacy. He is also the Legal Lead at Creative Commons India, and was till recently an Access to Knowledge Fellow at the Yale Law School's Information Society Project, and on the Executive Committee of the NCUC at ICANN. In 2014 he was selected by Forbes India for its inaugural “30 under 30” list of young achievers, and in 2012 he was nominated as an Internet Freedom Fellow by the U.S. government.

His research interests converge at the intersections of technology, culture, economics and the law. His current work focusses on interrogating, promoting, and engaging with policymakers on the areas of access to knowledge (primarily copyright reform), 'openness' (including open government data, open standards, free/libre/open source software, and open access), freedom of expression, privacy and Internet governance. He is a prominent voice on these issues, with the newspaper Mint calling him “one of the clearest thinkers in this area”, and his research having been quoted in the Indian parliament. He regularly speaks at national and international conferences on these topics.

He has a degree in arts and law from the National Law School in Bangalore, and while there he helped found the Indian Journal of Law and Technology, and was part of its editorial board for two years.