Blogger Blocked In India

The Indian government has instructed Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block 12 websites. The order has come in the wake of the Mumbai bomb blasts, and these websites are perceived to be anti-India. Unfortunately, one of these is blogger or blogspot.com, a Google affiliated site which hosts millions of blogs worldwide.

Sources in the government said that a circular was issued by the Home Affairs Ministry three days back asking the Ministry of Information and Technology to block the 12 websites which posted content maligning India. Hundreds of netizens tried unsuccessfully to log on to blogger.com on Monday. These bloggers exchanged flash messages to discover that none of them were being able to log on to the website.

Officials defended the decision saying, "We would like those people to come forward who access these (the 12) radical websites and please explain to us what are they missing from their lives in the absence of these sites."

MUMBAI, NEW DELHI, JULY 17:The fast-growing community of online bloggers has borne the brunt of the government’s decision to block some 20 websites in a post-Mumbai show of force. Some of the websites that have been blocked are Dalitstan.org, Clickatell.com, Hinduhumanrights.org and Hinduunity.com.

But the most harried Internet users were the bloggers, who couldn’t access Blogspot.com, Typepad.com or Geocities.com pages. Sources in ISPs in Delhi as well as Mumbai confirmed that the one blog government has asked them to block is Princesskimberly.blogspot.com.

It seems the order posed technical problems, resulting in a blanket ban on all blogs. ‘‘You cannot block a single page on blogspot.com, which is why all of them are getting blocked,’’ said Neha Viswanathan, Regional Editor, South Asia, Globalvoicesonline.org from London.

The Indian order was issued on July 13, sources in the Ministry of Telecom confirmed, though the Computer Emergency Response Team (India), part of a global cyber-security network set up three years ago, did not announce the bans officially.

Only sources in several ISPs such as Spectranet and Airtel confirmed that they had received the site-blocking order. R Grewal, a spokesperson for Spectranet confirmed: ‘‘We received a list of over 20 websites to block from the Department of Telecom, and this (Blogspot.com) was one of them.’’

Apparently, all the websites blocked are said to express “extreme religious views.”

MTNL officials said they were handed a 22-page document detailing the sites to block a month ago. “It came from the National Informatics Centre (NIC). It was the first time that they had done something of this nature,’’ says RH Sharma, sub-divisional engineer for MTNL in Delhi.

Government sources confirmed late in the evening that some websites have been blocked based on police reports that they were fuelling hatred. They denied that the Mumbai blasts had anything to do with censorship and that security checks on the blocked sites were on since before the terrorist attacks.

SULAKSHANAGUPTA@expressindia.com

I cannot create hyperlinks that's why I had to post these articles.
links from where you can get a lot more:
http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2006/07/17/india-blocking-access-to-blogs-on-blogspot-and-typepad-in-india/
http://www.withinandwithout.com/?p=854
http://nonedone.blogspot.com
You can get to almost all the blogs and links you need to from these three.

Bypassing the ban: You can use http://www.ninjaproxy.com/OR http://pkblogs.com, to view ANY blog.