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KOLKATA: From censorship problems to gender politics, from the freedom from the male gaze to patriarchy - the run-up to the release of ' Lipstick Under My Burkha ' had the entire nation debating on these issues. In a free-wheeling conversation during their Kolkata trip, directors Prakash Jha and Anlankrita Srivastava have an uncensored chat on patriarchy, power and a lot of other issues in between. Excerpts:

Why do you insist that there is a relationship between patriarchy and censorship? Alankrita: This I noticed from the time my film, 'Lipstick Under My Burkha', was refused a certificate. I realised the whole thing happened because of a patriarchal mindset.

Prakash: If you read the observations of the Central Board of Film Certification using phrases like 'lady-oriented film', 'female fantasy' and 'audio pornography' in the context of this film, you will realise that they have completely missed the whole track. What they can't tolerate is a little struggle of these women and looking at things or hearing things from their points of view. Male gaze and what Pahlaj Nihalani has done in his own films are permitted. The moment you turn and look at things from a female perspective, they can't tolerate it. But have they ever thought what are these women wanting? It's not that they are trying to be rebellious. It's not that she (Konkona Sen Sharma's character) is trying to put her husband in place. Even that isn't permissible. That's because the CBFC or the government or the people with the authority has a patriarchal attitude. In our society, we look at everything from that point of view. The moment your upset that balance, they feel everything will fall.

Is that the reason that time and again the committees formed to amend the Cinematograph Act haven't been able to achieve much success?

Prakash: Eventually, it all boils down to 'should we lose our authority over it?'

Why are the committees then formed? Is there at all any intention to change?

Prakash: There must be some intention to bring about a change. That's why the committees are formed. But the government develops cold feet when they realise what it might mean. They won't allow you to have that freedom.

There is a counter argument that states censorship might not be too bad an idea in times of intolerance and with people being touchy about many issues. Do you buy that argument?

Prakash: But there will always be touchy people in society who are stronger than the government. Here in India, even the fringe elements are strong when it comes to being touchy. Some 15 people can barge into Sanjay Leela Bhansali's sets and disrupt shooting. The government can't do anything about it. Society in India is always stronger than the government. But the sum total of the matter is that unless and until you have the freedom, it doesn't work. You can always classify films. You can create more number of grades. But let people have their choices.

CBFC members have pointed out that if someone comes up with documentary that shows footage of riots and asks for a certification, it wouldn't be wise to oblige. They insist that society also has people who can be worked up by such footage...

Prakash: But the material is available in any case. It's just that today one is seeing more of polarisation. Social media highlights activities quickly and people begin to react. But that's no reason to censor anything. How can one stop if someone makes a documentary with such footage and uploads it?

Recently, when director Suman Ghosh had uploaded the uncensored trailer of his Amartya Sen documentary, Pahlaj Nihalani had called it a 'mistake' insisting that exhibiting something online is also public exhibition and hence needs certification. Is there a norm that says one can't upload an uncertified film online?

Alankrita: There nothing governing content online. I keep on hearing new things that CBFC is doing every other day. I heard that there was a poll to decide if a certain word can be used in a trailer. Where's that written? Then, there would be so many polls. If there is a law, we should be clearly told that. I don't think India is a country where someone can just announce something and it becomes a law. Can you just turn around and say that you can't post anything online that isn't certified? Can you just tell someone that he or she can't show films at festival abroad without certification? I don't think we can just announce laws this way.

Prakash: The law has to clarify that. What if somebody uploads it to a different land? Your law doesn't apply to that land. What will you do?

Alankrita: I think, it is totally absurd and makes no sense. If we are living in a matured democracy, we shouldn't even entertain such stuff.

Prakash: Society has to accept that people will have different views, will think differently and will have choices. You can't tailor-make choices for them. You can't govern their thinking. You can't tell people to eat what, wear what or think what.

After your experience with 'Lipstick Under My Burkha', did you feel that something like what had happened in the Amartya Sen documentary was bound to happen?

Prakash: It's not just about Amartya Sen. Why don't we talk about what happened to Anand Patwardhan's documentaries?

Akankrita: The problem lies in the fact that India as a nation has always accepted censorship. That's why have had had two flowers and pigeons flying to express love. There is so much self-censorship that film-makers are in any case doing that the mind doesn't even go into certain spaces since we know that we will not be able to show so many things. We just accepted it and now these things are coming to the fore because younger film-makers want to express their stories in a certain way. That's when we are realising that we can't do so many things. Hence, we are having these conversations. Today, we are being a witness to a wakeup call but fact is as a society, we have been okay with someone telling us that this is where to draw the line.

Now, do you feel people are more aware about censorship issues than ever before?

Alankrita: What's interesting is that so many college-goers are now so aware about censorship issues. I was not aware about CBFC when I was in college. India is changing and that is good. Earlier, there used to be a custom like Sati that people accepted. Then, they realised that it needs to be stopped. It's the same with censorship. We have to realise that if we are truly free then there is no space for censorship. The problem in India is also that nothing is clearly defined. In Iran, there is a clear line that says one can't show physical contact between a man and a woman on screen. Keeping that line in mind, a new movement of cinema emerged in Iran. They have figured out a way of story telling where they show so much without any sexual content. In India, sexual content is great if it is from the male point of view and shows male fulfilment. It becomes problematic when it is shown from a woman's point of view. If there is a standard for censorship, it should apply to everybody.

Are lines deliberately kept blurred?

Prakash: Society's mindset is patriarchal. There is a genetic indoctrination that women are supposed to be good, decent, silent, sacrificing and subservient to men. Women are praised if they can produce children and manage a job simultaneously. Women are trained to be this way. But people still feel if women are allowed to speak even in an enlightened society, the whole balance changes. Even in an enlightened society if a women starts thinking or saying much, she will have to hear things like: 'aha, sochne lagi aajkal?' To take one decision, she has to think about five men. In order to change this mindset, one has to start educating people.

While society thinks in a certain way, there are many women who endorse this idea too...

Prakash: Absolutely.

Alankrita: The other day, Ratna (actor Ratna Pathak Shah) was describing patriarchy and she said that it uses women as guard dogs. Women are taught to pass on patriarchy from one generation to another.

What's your reaction to the 'Indu Sarkar' controvery?

Prakash: When protests over 'Indu Sarkar' happened, I didn't like that. I tweeted that too. But then, I thought this has always been the case. As a film-maker or writer, you can't take any names of people, caste, ideology, party... You can't show anything of that sort in movies. When MF Husain did a painting, people objected. Someone wrote a poem and there were objections. When I had made 'Aarakshan', 1000 people landed in my office and started pelting stones.

So, the censorship row over 'Lipstick Under My Burkha' shouldn't have surprised you?

Alankrita: I wasn't expecting this.

Prakash: The blanket refusal to entertain the film was something I wasn't expecting. By writing that letter the CBFC turned suicidal.

More people are now intrigued to watch the film because of the censorship row. That is navigating a lot of audience to the film...

Prakash: Such a controversy will only work if the content is good.

Alankrita: The good that came up is that so many conversations started. That includes representation of women in cinema, the male gaze versus female gaze and gender politics in popular culture. Such conversations are long overdue. We need to acknowledge the lop-sided gender representation in popular culture. So many young girls are now writing blogs. It is the purpose of all art to put out a mirror to society.

Do men and women approach art differently. If Prakash Jha was directing 'Lipstick under ', would you have done it differently because of your gender?

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'Censorship results from a patriarchal mindset' - Times of India

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's top cyber authority ordered the country's top tech firms to carry out "immediate cleaning and rectification" of their platforms to remove content deemed offensive to the Communist Party and the country's national image, it said on Wednesday.

The watchdog held a meeting with representatives from firms including Tencent Holdings Ltd, Baidu Inc and Sohu.com Inc, on Tuesday where it gave them a list of specific errors, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a statement on social media.

The violations include distorting Chinese history, spreading fake news, misinterpreting policy directives and failing to block content that subverts public stability.

"[The sites] must adhere to the correct political line and moral norms," the statement said.

Chinese authorities have recently cracked down on platforms that allow users to share media from outlets that are not sanctioned under state-issued licenses, amid a wider censorship campaign spearheaded by President Xi Jinping.

On June 1 the CAC ushered in new regulations requiring all offline and online media outlets to be managed by Party-approved editorial staff. Workers in the approved outlets must receive training from local propaganda bureaus.[nL4N1I42ID]

In the wake of the new regulations several sites have been targeted with fines and closures under the watchdog's orders.

In specific examples, the CAC criticised one platform that failed to censor articles that "seriously deviated from socialist values" by saying China benefited from U.S. assistance during conflicts with Japan during World War II.

Other examples included a story detailing alleged affairs by party officials, an opinion piece that decried China's death penalty and an article that urged readers to invest in speculative real estate projects.

The CAC said the firms were required to immediately close offending accounts and strengthen "imperfect" auditing systems to avoid future punishment.

Reporting by Cate Cadell; editing by Susan Thomas

Original post:
China's cyber watchdog orders top tech platforms to increase self-censorship - Reuters

Imagine trying to do online research on breast cancer, or William S. Burroughs famous novel Naked Lunch, only to find that your search results keep coming up blank. This is the confounding situation that faced Microsoft Bing users in the Middle East and North Africa for years, made especially confusing by the fact that if you tried the same searches on Google, it did offer results for these terms.

Problems caused by the voluntary blocking of certain terms by intermediaries are well-known; just last week, we wrote about how payment processors like Venmo are blocking payments from users who describe the payments using certain termslike Isis, a common first name and name of a heavy metal band, in addition to its usage as an acronym for the Islamic State. Such keyword-based filtering algorithms will inevitably results in overblocking and false positives because of their disregard for the context in which the words are used.

Search engines also engage in this type of censorshipin 2010, I co-authored a paper [PDF] documenting how Microsoft Bing (brand new at the time) engaged in filtering of sex-related terms in the Middle East and North Africa, China, India, and several other locations by not allowing users to turn off safe search. Despite the paper and various advocacy efforts over the years, Microsoft refused to budge on thisuntil recently.

At RightsCon this year, I led a panel discussion about the censorship of sexuality online, covering a variety of topics from Facebooks prudish ideas about the female body to the UKs restrictions on non-conventional sex acts in pornography to Icelands various attempts to ban online pornography. During the panel, I also raised the issue of Microsofts long-term ban on sexual search terms in the Middle East, noting specifically that the companys blanket ban on the entire region seemed more a result of bad market research than government interference, based on the fact that a majority of countries in the MENA region do not block pornography, let alone other sexual content.

Surprisingly, not long after the conference, I did a routine check of Bing and was pleased to discover that Middle East had disappeared from the search engines location settings, replaced with Saudi Arabia. The search terms are still restricted in Saudi Arabia (likely at the request of the government), but users in other countries across the diverse region are no longer subject to Microsofts safe search. Coincidence? It's hard to say; just as we didn't know Microsoft's motivations for blacklisting sexual terms to begin with, it was no more transparent about its change of heart.

Standing up against this kind of overbroad private censorship is importantcompanies shouldnt be making decisions based on assumptions about a given market, and without transparency and accountability. Decisions to restrict content for a particular reason should be made only when legally required, and with the highest degree of transparency possible. We commend Microsoft for rectifying their error, and would like to see them continue to make their search filtering policies and practices more open and transparent.

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Microsoft Bing Reverses Sex-Related Censorship in the Middle East - EFF

Users of WhatsApp in China and security researchers have reported widespread service disruptions amid fears that the popular messaging service may be at least partially blocked by authorities in the world's most populous country.

WhatsApp users in China reported Tuesday on other social media platforms that the app was partly inaccessible unless virtual private network software was used to circumvent China's censorship apparatus, known colloquially as The Great Firewall.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook and offers end-to-end encryption, has a relatively small but loyal following among users seeking a greater degree of privacy from government snooping than afforded by popular domestic app WeChat, which is ubiquitous but closely monitored and filtered.

Questions over WhatsApp's status come at a politically fraught time in China. The government is in the midst of preparing for a sensitive party congress while Chinese censors this week revved up a sprawling effort to scrub all mention of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died Thursday in government custody.

A report this week by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab detailed how Chinese censors were able to intercept, in real time, images commemorating Liu in private one-on-one chats on WeChat, a feat that hinted at the government's image recognition capabilities.

It appeared that pictures were also the focus of the move to censor WhatsApp. Late Tuesday, users in China could send texts over WhatsApp without the use of VPNs, but not images.

Nadim Kobeissi, a cryptography researcher based in Paris who has been investigating the WhatsApp disruption, said he believed The Great Firewall was only blocking access to WhatsApp servers that route media between users, while leaving servers that handle text messages untouched. He said voice messages also appeared to be blocked.

But there was no evidence to suggest that Chinese authorities were decrypting WhatsApp messages, Kobeissi added.

A Chinese censorship researcher known by his pseudonym Charlie Smith said authorities appeared to be blocking non-text WhatsApp messages wholesale precisely because they have not been able to selectively block content on the platform like they have with WeChat, which is produced by Shenzhen-based internet giant Tencent and legally bound to cooperate with Chinese security agencies.

Because WhatsApp content is encrypted, "they have moved to brute censor all non-text content," Smith said in an email. "It would not be surprising to find that everything on WhatsApp gets blocked, forcing users in China to use unencrypted, monitored and censored services like WeChat."

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said he had no information on the issue when asked by reporters on Tuesday.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. WhatsApp is one of the world's most widely used messaging services, with over 1.2 billion users.

Signal, another encrypted messaging service, appeared to also have patchy service with significant delays.

China has long blocked Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, with officials arguing that foreign social media services operating beyond their control pose a threat to national security. But authorities in China, as with other governments, are paying increasing attention to encrypted messaging apps.

After Beijing waged its largest-ever crackdown on human rights lawyers and activists in 2015, the People's Daily newspaper, the ruling Communist Party's official mouthpiece, singled out Telegram as the platform where lawyers the coordinated their activities. And in closely orchestrated and televised trials, the arrested lawyers read scripted confessions explaining how they used the apps to communicate freely with collaborators overseas.

Telegram has since been blocked, with many Chinese dissidents switching in recent months to WhatsApp.

The progressive tightening of messaging apps forces Chinese users to resort to domestic apps such as WeChat "to simply function and have day-to-day communications," said Kobeissi, the security researcher. "Then they can be monitored en masse."

Follow Gerry Shih on Twitter at twitter.com/gerryshih

Read more:
China users report WhatsApp disruption amid censorship fears - ABC News

(Image: Citizen Lab)

Researchers at Citizen Lab have noticed a censorship crackdown on WeChat and Weibo in wake of the death of Nobel Peace Prize winner and human rights campaigner Liu Xiaobo last week.

The research group within the University of Toronto used a set of phones registered to WeChat with mainland Chinese phone numbers, and another set registered with numbers outside China.

By sending a number of messages to test which words were blocked, Citizen Lab concluded censorship from Beijing was "more expansive and blunt".

"Before his death, messages were blocked that contained his name in combination with other words, for example those related to his medical treatment or requests to receive care abroad," it said. "However, after his death, we found that simply including his name was enough to trigger blocking of messages, in English and both simplified and traditional Chinese."

"In other words, WeChat issued a blanket ban on his name after his death, greatly expanding the scope of censorship."

Citizen Lab also found Tencent-owned WeChat was blocking images referencing Liu Xiaobo throughout its services, and for the first time censoring messages between users.

The group's results showed 74 images were blocked on WeChat Moments, 26 blocked within group chats, and 19 blocked in direct messaging between users.

"It is unclear why only a subset of the images blocked on group chat were also blocked on one-to-one chat," Citizen Lab wrote. "It would be technically convenient to enforce censorship of the same sets of images in chat functions."

"One possible explanation is that censorship in smaller, more private spaces is most disruptive and noticeable to users as opposed to ones with larger audiences."

In all instances of censorship occurring on WeChat, the user is not informed that content is removed, Citizen Lab said.

The Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Weibo was found by Citizen Lab to be even more heavily censored.

Meanwhile, AP is reporting WhatsApp is partially blocked in China, with users unable to send images or voice messages via the service.

One service already banned in China, Telegram, had the prospect of a ban in Indonesia floated last week by Jakarta.

Telegram had too much content promoting radicalism, extremism and "hatred belief", and needed to be blocked to safeguard the "integrity" of the republic, Indonesia's communication ministry announced on Friday.

The web version of the messaging service can no longer be accessed in the archipelago, with preparations to also shut down the application if the company does not prepare standard operating procedures, the government said.

Telegram's CEO Pavel Durov said on Sunday the ministry had contacted them with a list of public channels with terrorism-related content but his team was "unable to quickly process" them.

Those channels are now blocked and it is forming "a dedicated team of moderators with knowledge of the Indonesian language and culture to be able to process reports of terrorist-related content more quickly and accurately".

Telegram, he added, had "several million" users in Indonesia.

As for the western world, Australia has made the running for the Five Eyes nations -- the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand -- on the topic of encryption and the problems it poses for law enforcement in recent weeks.

Last week, Australian Attorney-General George Brandis said draft legislation was being written to compel technology companies to turn over the content of end-to-end encrypted messages by the end of the year.

"Last Wednesday, I met with the chief cryptographer at GCHQ ... and he assured me this was feasible," Brandis said.

"What the government is proposing to do is to impose upon the companies an obligation conditioned by reasonableness and proportionality."

Brandis stated he believes the process of breaking into end-to-end encrypted messages can be done in almost real time, since GCHQ has told him it is possible.

On Friday, Turnbull told ZDNet that the laws produced in Canberra are able to trump the laws of mathematics.

"The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that," he said. "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia."

With AAP

Here is the original post:
Chinese censorship cracks down on WeChat, Weibo, WhatsApp - ZDNet