Who is the competent authority to block websites in India

Dear Gii-ites,

[Hope the list still works]

A few years back Naavi had posted this [http://www.bloggernews.net/124423]
Are there any updates to this question.

The background is that an emerging political party (!) has recently decided
to form various Cab Driver and Auto Chaalak sanghs nationwide. Their
acronym is "CDAC" (Cab Driver Auto Chaalak). They initially booked an .IN
domain name "CDACPUNE.IN" and intended to setup user sub-domains for
user-blogs like blogspot and tumblr etc. do.

On 2.Aug.2014 (when the domain got activated) I offered to test it out
(during the 5 days "Add Grace Period" allowed for domain tasting by .IN
Registry policy) by installing a stripped-down open-source highly SEO
friendly tasting "*TextPress* <http://textpress.shameerc.com>" blog "
natgrid.cdacpune.in" developed by an Indian coder in God's own country,
which is viewable by simple DNS redirects to wherever the blogs are
actually hosted, in this case to "natgrid-cdacindia.rhcloud.com", to see
how search engines like Google index it. Google indexed it very fast and it
was no.3 for "Natgrid" within 24 hours.

2-3 days later I got some phone calls from NATGRID that publication of *any*
material about NATGRID is a violation of Official Secrets Act, and that
*nothing* about Natgrid can be published in public domain since Natgrid is
an exempted organisation under RTI Act etc. I disagreed with their
interpretation as almost all the material is compiled from reliable 3rd
party sources which are easily accessed online - such as DoPT's website,
Rajya Sabha reply to questions, and former NATGRID CEO Raghu Raman's own
blog in Livemint.

So the "Joint Secretary" Natgrid (which is under MHA) has apparently issued
a letter, as did also C-DAC, to NIXI (which has been illegally operating
the IN Registry since 2005 as I have established using RTI), and a FIR for
impersonation of NATGRD has been filed in Pune by CDAC, and the domain has
been shut down by NIXI by deleting its root domain records on 6 August 2014
while still under the AGP period.

No attempt was made to contact the Registrant (an auto chaalak) in this
entire process, and the block was all done unilaterally and secretly. The
Registrant has thereafter made several complaints to NIXI and CERT-IN but
they are evading replying under which provision the domain is disabled or
who authorised it or if it was done u/s 69 IT Act.

The blog is still accessible at *natgrid-cdacindia.rhcloud.com
<http://natgrid-cdacindia.rhcloud.com>* and CDAC / India Against Corruption
are planning to fight this one out and get C-DAC's own website taken down
under IT Act and file our own IT Act complaints. The political wing shall
probably take a .US domain name and also sue NATGRID and MHA in USA.

We infer that what has actually upset "NATGRID" is that we incidentally
posted that the concerned JS is a "superannuated officer" who was last
posted as JS in DoPT and also worked on the proposed Privacy Law there. Now
Natgrid has apparently also been hiring and rehiring PSU people at
astronomical salaries to "nobble" them.  So I filed an online RTI using
DoPT's portal for this at 1:53 PM on 6-Aug-2014 to MHA which was
automatically forwarded to this officer. Within 5 hours he gets the blog
shut down at NIXI level. Highly suspicious what ?

Sarbajit Roy

_______________________________________________
India-gii mailing list
India-gii-IAPFreCvJWP2/[email protected]
https://lists.india-gii.org/mailman/listinfo/india-gii