Rebutting “Not By Proxy”

Pune techie, Mohsin’s murder has little to do with the IT Act, social media or IT security loopholes.

WrittenBy:Siddharthya Roy
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The article “Not By Proxy” which tries to tie up India’s IT laws with the murder of Mohsin Sadique Shaikh in Pune is at best confusing and at worst misleading.The blurb on the NL homepage and the tweet that links to the article reads “The Pune IT professional’s murder throws up many IT security issues which India needs to tackle”. Even the author of the article, Shashank Pandey, tries to tie in the murder of the 28-year-old techie with a vague narrative of IT security and the Indian IT Act.

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But the fact is Mohsin’s murder has little to do with the IT Act or even posts on social media for that matter and, least of anything, about IT security loopholes.

I’m a resident of Pune and have followed the debate and investigations around Mohsin’s murder in detail (The Citizen). I’ve also volunteered with the Pune police’s cyber crime department and was an active member of citizens’ outreach efforts during the 2012 Assam riots and the resulting exodus of North Easterners in Pune. Which is why I’m appalled at the cut-paste narrative that has been presented in the article.

First, let us revisit the murder.

Mohsin was picked up randomly from the street by a marauding bike riding group that calls itself the Hindu Rashtra Sena. They were out to “seek revenge” after claiming to have taken umbrage to the actions of some unknown people who made Facebook posts lampooning Shivaji Maharaj and Bal Thackeray. Mohsin’s murder was preceded by widespread rampage with the Shiv Sena pelting stones and damaging hundreds of public buses and private vehicles across different cities including Pune.

This act of wanton destructive violence under the name of hurt sentiments is nothing specific to the internet or social media. Across India, and especially in Maharashtra, books have been burnt, ancient mansucripts have been trashed, movie theatres have been vandalised, art galleries have been ransacked, artists and writers hounded, young women wearing pants have been roughed up for wearing pants of an unacceptable fabric. All because they allegedly hurt someone’s sentiments.

In Mohsin’s case, the Pune police explicitly stated that Mohsin had nothing to do with the posts. So where does the question of IT laws or IT security come into play in this murder?

In fact, Pandey makes his pitch in the first paragraph and moves onto a completely unrelated discussion thereafter, quoting a Supreme Court advocate-cum-IT law expert. The advocate speaks on a range of topics from proxies to Section 66A of the IT Act but doesn’t once state how anything he presribes would have helped prevent Mohsin’s murder – which curiously enough is the raison d’être of this article.

There is a case made for “bringing proxy servers to India” and how that would make post facto investigation easier. The fact is, technically it won’t do much (if anything). Most private companies and organisations who provide professional anonymous proxies, virtual private networks (even ones used by companies) and similar privacy services do not maintain logs. Most of them don’t even link client credentials to usage so there is no track of who has accessed when, so even zeroing in on the hour and timezone is impossible.

Second, SOCKS proxies and VPN, as opposed to HTTP web relays, only set up connections (like a switchboard) and have nothing to do with the data that is transmitted between the client and the web server in question. More often than not these connections are encrypted end-to-end so there is no question of the proxies tapping the data that is transmitted.

In simple words, say for example Mr Jon Doe uses a SOCKS proxy or a VPN proxy to connect to some facebook webserver in some datacenter somewhere in the world, the proxy will only connect Mr Doe’s computer to the webserver like an operator. It does not receive the data from the facebook webserver. And when connecting to facebook, Gmail, Twitter et al, one has to only look at the “s” following the “http” in the address bar to know that this is an encrypted connection. There was a time when this was optional but isn’t anymore.

In effect, even if a lawyer, a court or the police were to approach them with a request, there is next to no chance of them getting any data that can pin down a random post to a person.The bulleted points in the article about The Opportunity Cost, Security Threat, Tax Evasion all give an air of information and gravity to the article but not one single point has anything to do with Mohsin’s murder.

During my own coverage of Mohsin’s death, I had the misfortune of coming across many political leaders big and small who are “fed up of this facebook and Whatsapp”. Problem is they do not understand the phenomena nor do they have the patience to – and to make matters worse they can’t seem to control it. So their despise for the internet is often direct and unveiled. Sadly, the police bureaucracy is not far behind, and quick to blame the trouble on what they do not understand, they ask for a “ban on these nuisances”.

The lethargy of the administration in India to understanding and accepting new technologies is legendary. Yet, it certainly isn’t too much to expect Supreme Court advocates and bloggers writing on the subject to get their facts and theorisations right.

Mohsin’s murder, random violent acts like rape, hate crimes in the name of identity, terrorism in the name of religion and any such other act are acts born of and seeking justification in a crop of flawed politics that says “might is right”. A form of politics that is gaining unprecedented ground in India. This points to a severe lacuna in the social security net of this country and the negative role played by the administration in catalysing this process.

But they have nothing to do with the IT security or laws pertaining to that. Trying to suggest so, as the article has done, is at best barking up the wrong tree and at worst a perfect recipe for inviting even more draconian policing and curbing of speech in the name of strengthening IT laws and patching up flawed security.

To view the original article, click here: NOT BY PROXY

To read more about section 66A of the Information Technology act, click here: SECTION 66A

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