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In a nutshell: A company called Copyright Labs gets a court order from Chennai High Court to block websites pirating movies that Copyright Labs represents interests for. Consequently, Copyright Labs forwards the court order to internet service providers and a whole load of torrent and video sharing sites get blocked. Internet users in India collectively feel they have fire ants in their trousers. Anonymous, or its Indian faction, sets up a Twitter account @opindia_revenge and starts taking down Indian government sites through distributed denial-of-service attacks. We are Legion. Expects Us. Etc etc.

Here are some of my thoughts.

A lot of the online commentary I hear is that “the Indian government is practising censorship!” or “With problems like poverty and corruption, the Indian government thinks preventing movie downloads is more important!”

The Indian government has nothing to do with it. India, like many democracies, has separation of powers between the legislature and the judiciary. As this was a court order issued under existing laws of India, where exactly does the question of “the government” censoring the Internet come in?

The court order was requested by a private company representing the interests of film studios and issued by the Chennai High Court. So, if at all anyone is to be angry, they would be angry at these three parties: Copyright Labs, Chennai High Court, film studios who have contracts with Copyright Labs. In the list of websites DDoS’d so far by Anonymous: Congress Party, BJP, Supreme Court of India, Ministry of Information & Technology, Department of Telecommunications. Notice how none of these people were actually involved with the blocking order? “To be fair” – and I use this term loosely – Anonymous also took down Reliance Big Entertainment (one of the film studios who have previously engaged in taking down sites) and Copyright Labs’ website, the latter being not particularly impressive since it’s a shared hosting account on Bluehost. Anonymous India’s (whoever they are) takedowns don’t sound that impressive either when by their own admission they are able to effectively DDoS site for only five minutes.

I don’t believe in the way Anonymous’s hive mind goes about picking it targets. That said, a lot of its targets in the past – while targetted through technically illegal methods – could still be said to be somewhat “morally pardonable”. Perhaps Sony deserved it for adopting poor security practices…but none of the users of the PlayStation Network deserved to have their personal financial details released. Anyway, more often than not, Anonymous have indulged in what can objectively be called vandalism with quite a sense of self-entitlement.

Don’t forget that India’s a country where copyright violation and piracy is de facto. Anonymous’s hive mind seems to lashing out with the same twisted logic and sense of self-entitlement that it typically does. More tellingly, a lot of the outrage that I see online is of people being unable to access pirated content in the guise of “Internet censorship” than anything else. You know what’s going to happen once the dust settles? These actions are going to fast-track even more restrictive IT laws that have allowed such a court order to be issued in the first place.

What would help is to resort to measures within the existing judicial system to see how such a far-reaching court order was issued in the first place (my understanding of the Indian IT Act is it does indeed allows this), and lobby for free-er Internet laws.

Yeah. Like that’s going to happen now after giving the government a reason to enact even tougher laws.

I’ve had the weirdest dream ever last night. I was in post-apocalyptic Delhi, which looked much like a landfill, and was being chased by a pack of vicious and rabid street cats. I ran for a long time and lost them, came to this clearing were two big black bears were attacking a tiger. The tiger was losing. I hid behind a pile of garbage and was watching all this.

The tiger somehow escaped, and there was Pierce Brosnan in his James Bond character also standing nearby so the two bears set upon him instead. Brosnan / Bond started dancing, and the bears started dancing along with him. Like on two feet. That kept Brosnan/Bond safe for a while.

Then, he noticed me hiding in the garbage. So he decided I think the best idea would be somehow get the bears to eat me instead of him. So he took out a tranquilliser gun and shot a tranquillizer dart at me. Missed. I started running again, Brosnan/Bond started running after – while dancing, to keep the bears distracted – and the bears followed while dancing. I kept swerving and dodging while running but Brosnan/Bond kept shooting tranquilliser darts at me laughing a maniacal laugh that he’s had “enough shooting practice in the movies”.

I ran into a mall to lose them. It was full of Chinese people, for some reason. I knew I was conspicuous in that crowd so to push through the crowd and reach the elevator, I was crawling on the floor between their legs, shouting the only bit of Chinese that came to my mind at that time: “Taigo lo!” (which I think means “It is too expensive!”)

I pushed my way through the crowd to the front where the elevators were. They were made of a glass cylinder reinforced on four sides with a golden-coloured steel bars. The elevator was free hanging in the air, like, not in an elevator shaft, it was just hanging in the air. And then, it fell and smashed right in front of my eyes. Then my dad walked out of the crowd from nowhere and asked me what was the password to login to Tata Sky’s website so that he could renew the annual subscription pack. (I told him it was “tatasky”.)

Then, in my dream, I cut away to a different scene. I am watching a documentary about how (my dream world’s) economy works. The financial power of countries in my dream world, and I quote the exact words here, is “measured by the magnitude of a normal vector drawn on the political map of a country”. And then the documentary shows this animated map with a single, normal vector sticking out of each country, each with a varying magnitude.

“The magnitude of the normal vector is determined by how much cumulatively a country’s population score in the popular game of Minesweeper.”

Not on a computer of course. Instead of laser quest and paintball venues like these days, in the dream world, there are Minesweeper parlours where friends go to have fun and play Minesweeper on actual tiles by stepping on them. Fake tiles of course with computer-generated displays, no real mines. And yet, even though people pretend they are having fun, it’s a dystopian society where they know that what their game scores affects their economic rating and thus their economy. Of course, people in wealthier countries can play Minesweeper more so they get higher ratings. This whole Minesweeper parlour franchise as well as the rating system is owned by one private corporation.

This is where my dream sequence ends.