RTI on all censored websites between - 2014 and 2015

Answer 1: Since, January 1, 2014 till December, 31, 2014, January 1, 2015 till March, 31, 2015, Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY) has issued directions to block a total of 2341 and 143 URLs respectively. A total of 2091 and 143 URLs were blocked on the orders of the Court and remaining requests were by security agencies.

Answer 2: Direction to block URLs were issues either based on Court order or on the request of security agencies. Details of the URLs blocked and justifications to block on the requests of security agencies is confidential and as per RTI Act section 8(1) is under exemption and hence details cannot be provided.

Nice work! Do you think they would provide a list of the sites blocked by way of court order?

It's hard to say. Its very unlikely as most things are controlled by the parliament / politicians - and they don't want anything that can potentially scrutinize them.

In my experience, when I worked at a certain place - I found out that most websites blocked are generally religious hate sites. Though often they will block genuine social movements such as indymedia.org.

One of the reasons they would refuse to provide the list(apart from politics) is that people could then simply access them using VPN's - thereby making the ban ineffective.

EDIT: The Home Ministry censors websites too -however I have not asked for any information from them.

And since we are on that note, can anyone confirm if you are able to visit websites using a non-Indian based DNS? i've tried changing the DNS to non-Indian ones here in 2-3 different locations(but from the same ISP) and it seems to be blocked. - I can only use Indian DNS services.

They say above that the only URL's exempt from disclosure under the RTI act are those that are requested by security services - so surely they should disclose the rest?

For some reason https://www.indymedia.org/or/index.shtml works 4 me.

Indymedia was banned some time ago, but they lifted the ban. The group which used to publish articles on Indymedia for India has also been dispersed, so there's probably no reason to ban it anymore.

http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/rti-response-dit-blocking
[though the above article mentions arizona]
http://india.indymedia.org/

They say above that the only URL’s exempt from disclosure under the RTI act are those that are requested by security services - so surely they should disclose the rest?

The courts generally don't allow detailed disclosure of any ongoing legal proceedings and stuff. So if those URLs which were blocked are still under any ongoing judicial process, they would not reveal them.

Thank you.

Vidyut

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At my cousin's place in Chennai, using Airtel, many of the torrent listing sites including kickasstorrents and thepiratebay are blocked. But the same sites work fine with other ISP's. So, I doubt there are regional wise or ISP wise blocking in place too, along with blocking the sites country wide. How can such things be figured out?

http://www.medianama.com/2012/08/223-consumer-forum-airtel-torrent/

Airtel and Reliance have a history of blocking torrent sites.

And oh hey Vidyut, are those your blogs? if so, can you give me your email or something?