Mumbai Police can now nail web offenders

Found on Indian Express on Monday, 12 March 2007
Browse Censorship

Anti-Shivaji forums or anti-Ambedkar postings or "hate India" campaigns on Google's social networking site, Orkut, have been confounding our authorities for quite sometime now. Other than blocking the objectionable forums, the Mumbai Police could do little—except wait for the next one to pop up on the web, say, a "fan club" of wanted underworld dons like Dawood Ibrahim or Chhota Shakeel.

Following a meeting between representatives of the site and the Enforcement Directorate last month, the Mumbai Police and Orkut have entered into an agreement to seal such cooperation in matters of objectionable material on the web.

"Early February, I met three representatives from Orkut.com, including a top official from the US. The other two were from Bangalore. We reached a working agreement whereby Orkut has agreed to provide us details of the ip address from which an objectionable message or blog has been posted on the site and the Internet service provider involved," said DCP Enforcement, Sanjay Mohite.

A long, long time ago, Google was nice. Now it collects all your information and shares them with almost everybody. Google once said they cannot remove sites from the search index; but then they started the censorship in China. Now they hand over IP addresses to authorities (what produces tons of false positives, see the RIAA lawsuits) who then hunt down people and cripple free speech.