In yet another case of mass blocking of websites, the Department of
Telecommunications (DoT) has issued an order to block as many as 32 websites
including popular sites such as SourceForge, DailyMotion, GitHub, Pastebin and
so on. The DoT has issued the order under section 69A of the Information
Technology(IT) act, 2000 and the IT act Rules, 2009.
The Section 69A of the IT Act, 2000 states “Power to issue directions for
blocking for public access of any information through any computer resource”.
Based on the DoT directive internet service providers have blocked access to 32
websites.
According to Arvind Gupta, the national head of BJP’s IT cell, the said
websites have been blocked due to security reasons. He tweeted out
the reasoning behind DoT’s decision to block the said sites.
The entire order to block the sites was shared by policy
director at Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society Pranesh Prakash on
his twitter account.
While security concern is a valid point, the idea of blocking particular
objectionable URL’s (that is again, debatable as ‘objectionable’ is quite a
vague term) rather than entire websites seems a bit odd. And we have, in
the past, seen websites as well as torrent sites being blocked based on John
Doe orders.
In the current batch of blocked websites we have Vimeo and DailyMotion-
which are YouTube like video sharing websites; GitHub is a forum
where software developers host and share programming code and so on.
According to Gupta, Vimeo.com has been unblocked some hours ago and should
be accessible. He said that websites which will comply with the Anti Terrorism
Squad directives will be unblocked
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