Dear Indians,
The upcoming IT rules have the potential to severely restrict your freedom of speech. Any content you put up can be taken down on the basis of a complaint by anyone for any of the reasons from the graphic in this post. You may think if you don’t own a blog, your content is safe, but you may have made an update on Facebook, for example. The new rules will mandate that your content will have to be taken down by Facebook, for example, if someone sends them an electronically signed email.
There is no authority that will accept such complaints and pass orders. Anyone who encounters any content offensive, blasphemous, hateful, and so on can get it removed by law. This process bypasses the judiciary completely. No kind of content is protected, no kind of verification is required, no appeal process is specified. From receiving the complaint to its removal will be 36 hours by law.
We are announcing “OPERATION INDIA” as a form of awareness raising protest. What you have to do is whenever you find anything you don’t like, or for that matter, anything you’d like to target to make a point, write an email to the support and/or administration of that site, and inform them that you find the content in violation of the proposed IT Rules and that you expect it to be removed within 36 hours of getting the email. If you have a problem explaining why the content is a problem, feel free to default to “offensive” – that is our national mantra anyway. Here are some sample notifications to get you started.
Add a link to your email saying “For more information, please read this post” or similar – which links to this post So you got an Operation India Notification so that people understand that they don’t have to take down content – that this is a India only.
Try to aim for government and media sites – the first to give them a taste of what they want to do to us, the second for publicity, but really, anything is fair game. Here is a handy graphic with reasons to complain:
If you own a website and get a request for removal of content, try to put up a small alert on the top of that page saying that that content is flagged for remova and create a page to publish all the requests you receive. We suggest using this box:
The page you are viewing has received a complaint against it as a part of Operation India, to create awareness on how easily content could go (and goes) missing if they are not annulled in the Parliament. This page could vanish off the internet.
Do not take this lightly, because our very right to say things others don’t approve of is under threat. This is not democratic, it is a violation of our fundamental rights.
Sample targets:
- Article in newspaper calling Pakistan a state sponsor of terror – complain against that page for defamation and insult to another nation, since it isn’t officially declared that (yet).
- Someone making a post about some religion – find something to disagree with, and complain about that page for being offensive and hateful.
- Someone being happy when you are in a sad mood. – This is hurtful, ok?
- Some article complaining about the foster system in Norway – this can harm friendly relations with that foreign state.
- Any article where our government refuses any country anything – can harm friendly relations with that foreign state
You get the idea. Haunt press release pages of government sites. Complain to newspapers about their content not being appropriate for our laws.
That is all. It is easy. Do it. Do it often. Find the outrage in you. Find that part of you that sees a page and knows what is wrong with it.
Do it for the freedom of your country.
Free Speech Supporters