This is shock­ing! I thought one site was down till I read this story. I hope it gets resolved soon. I can’t access any blogspot blogs as of now…

And till then, you can use this URL to access blogspot blogs.

From Mutiny.in: “Two sources, one inside the Gov­ern­ment of India and the other kind of inside/outside have con­firmed to the Mutiny, that ISPs are being instructed to ‘con­trol’ access to blogspot. It seems that some blogs are being used by some ter­ror units (read SIMI) to communicate.”

Here’s the blog­ger col­lec­tive group that has been formed.

Jace is fol­low­ing the ban and writes: “Get this, folks. This isn’t about cen­sor­ing blog­gers. This is about cur­tail­ment of civil rights of all inter­net users. That is what we should be fight­ing against.”

More on Boing-Boing.

Shivam Vij is fol­low­ing through on the phone.

A list of ISPs that seem to have blocked blogspot blogs.

And Anand man­ages to cling on to his sense of humour and the Great Bong hasn’t lost all his rea­son­ing either! Don’t we need in the face of what’s going on?

A huge col­lec­tion of links and dis­cus­sion on Neha’s blog.

This from a Hin­dus­tan Times report that I found a lit­tle hard to swal­low: “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.…” 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.”

DNA India reports: “The block­ing of the blogs seems to be the result of well-intentioned polic­ing gone awry. Sources say the list of blocked web­sites included the names of spe­cific blogs, but ISPs seemed to have blocked the ser­vice all together.”

Amit Varma writes: “Now, inter­net users across India have been unable since this week­end to access any sites hosted on Blogspot or Type­pad, two pop­u­lar domains for India-based blogs. (Geoc­i­ties is also blocked.) Again, it seems that there isn’t a blan­ket ban on these blogs, merely a gov­ern­ment order to block of cou­ple of blogs that has gone awry.”

I am still shocked that they can take a deci­sion to block blogs with­out any warn­ing what­so­ever. And more so because of the absolutely base­less rea­son given (SIMI activists pass­ing infor­ma­tion via blogs?!) So shouldn’t they be ban­ning emails, going by that logic? And maybe even news sites which ter­ror­ists use to send sub­lim­i­nal mes­sages to unsus­pect­ing readers?

Also, it’s not just Indian blogs. It’s blogs on the blogspot domain which have been tar­get­ted. The reas­sur­ance how­ever is that every­thing will be back to nor­mal soon. But the very fact that they’ve been able to do some­thing like this brings to the fore the fact that we can take noth­ing for granted in this coun­try. We might as well be liv­ing in a Com­mu­nist China or a Saudi Ara­bia or Pak­istan for that mat­ter. They might as well tell us to stay indoors (no crime), not watch tele­vi­sion (no evil influ­ences) and stay off the inter­net, email (no ter­ror­ism!). And there you go, the gov­ern­ment would have done its job. Right.

What next?

Update (July 19): I’ve been offline the whole day until now but Ravi tipped me off the fact that metblogs.com is also down. Metblogs.com is a com­mu­nity of city based blogs and some of us belong to the Ban­ga­lore com­mu­nity. I do sin­cerely hope that this is not a part of the whole blocking/banning exer­cise and I’m also won­der­ing if they are going to ban any­thing with the word blog on it now. It all gets more and more unbe­liev­able by the day!

Here is a detailed post about “Using the Right To Infor­ma­tion Act to find out if and why the GOI has blocked blogs in India”.

Update as of 9.45 pm: Metblogs.com servers have been down so that seems to be another unre­lated prob­lem and we can heave a sigh of relief.

Just watched over NDTV, (around 9.15 pm report), which inter­viewed a few blog­gers includ­ing Dilip D’Souza. The DoT appar­ently is now trans­fer­ring respon­si­bil­ity to the ISPs now. Accord­ing to the news report, the gov­ern­ment had asked a few web pages on cer­tain domains to be blocked (hinduunity.org and exposingtheleft.blogspot.com being named as a few of them in a TOI report today), while the ISPs decided to imple­ment a blan­ket ban on the domains instead.

Either out of their lazi­ness or out of igno­rance (both of which are a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to believe). It seems to be a case of cat and mouse, with no one now want­ing to take respon­si­bil­ity or deci­sions to revert the ban. While they try and work out who’s respon­si­ble, blog­gers can in the mean­while use the Right of Infor­ma­tion Act (link above) to ask for some jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for this unwar­ranted and totally unde­mo­c­ra­tic action.

Kiran Karnik is reported to have said on the side­lines of the HR sum­mit of Nass­com that the Inter­net being a free media, any attempts to block out some web­sites is not desirable.

I hope more influ­en­tial folks are able to put pres­sure on the gov­ern­ment to stop this unde­sir­able and uncalled for action on blogs. In fact, if they are doing it with blogs today, what are the chances that they will not turn to all web­sites tomor­row? In fact, what is the guar­an­tee that they don’t stop all email ser­vices so we can no longer com­mu­ni­cate. And maybe they should stop tele­phones too going by their totally screwed up logic.

Jace has also writ­ten an arti­cle for the TOI about cir­cum­vent­ing cen­sor­ship. He’s writ­ten in detail about how to deal with your ISP block­ing sites using Tor­park. Another way, he writes, is to use Shy Surfer if you are behind a cor­po­rate fire­wall. More guides are avail­able here.

As of now (10.15 pm) I am not able to access pkblogs.com or inblogs.net. Have they got­ten to those too?

July 20 — Update: 12.11 am: Shivam Vij has some encour­ag­ing news at rediff.com, which reports that the blog ban will be lifted in 48 hours. This is accord­ing to what Amitabh Sing­hal, a spokesper­son of the Inter­net Ser­vice Providers Asso­ci­a­tion of India (ISPAI) told him today. Quot­ing from the arti­cle: “Sing­hal said rep­re­sen­ta­tives of var­i­ous ISPs met on Wednes­day to dis­cuss the issue after the media took it up ear­lier this week. He acknowl­edged that some ISPs — he insisted it wasn’t all — mis­took the Depart­ment of Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions (DoT) notice and blocked entire blog domains, adding that it was tech­ni­cally fea­si­ble to block a sub-domain and leave oth­ers still accessible.”

A list of 17 sites on the blocked list, with a few strange inclu­sions like princesskimberley.blogspot.com
which appar­ently has not been updated for a few years. And Expos­ing the Left, writ­ten by some­one in South­ern Illinois.

Read the whole report here.