-The Telegraph   Social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google have refused to buckle under pressure from the Indian government to take down content that telecom minister Kapil Sibal and the babus on Raisina Hill find objectionable. Sibal told reporters the government wanted the Big Boys of Cyberspace to remove “abusive” comments and images that could ignite a tinderbox of passions in the country but they had refused to do so...

India is one of only four countries which, during the first half of 2011, requested Google to remove content on the basis that it was critical of the government. Google refused to comply. The other countries were Thailand and Turkey -- where Google restricted local users from accessing the offending content -- and the United States, where it refused. According to Google's Transparency Report for January to June 2011, the Internet...

DR EDGAR WHITLEY is Reader in Information Systems at the Information Systems and Innovation Group in the London School of Economics and Political Science. He has a PhD in Information Systems from the LSE. His research and practical interests include global outsourcing, social aspects of IT-based change, collaborative innovation in an outsourcing context, and the business implications of cloud computing. He is also an expert in identity, Privacy and security...

At the technical level, the question is whether the technology deployed for identification will return answers that are unambiguous. THE Unique Identification (UID) project, the national project of the Government of India, aims to give a unique 12-digit number – called Aadhaar – to every citizen of the country, a random number that is generated and linked to a person's demographic and biometric information. The key word is “unique”. Launched in...

CHANDRAWAL, India—Satbir Sharma's wife is dead. His family lives in fear. His father's left leg is shattered, leaving him on crutches for life.   Sharma's only hope lies in a new law that gives him the right to know what is happening in the investigation of his wife's death. Most of all, he wants to know what will happen to the village mayor, now in jail on murder charges. He talks quietly, under...