How tech can transform law enforcement

 This will significantly increase the efficiency of our LEAs and, at the same time, drastically reduce the time taken to provide justice. It can be a win-win for all the key stakeholders.There is an urgent need for law enforcement agencies (LEAs) to adopt technology in their operations as it can act as a force multiplier. This is especially true in India where the police to population ratio is less than 150 per 100,000, whereas the United Nations recommends 222 police officials per 100,000 residents. But there are ways in which LEAs can use technology to increase their efficiency and effectiveness.

One, digitise citizen-facing services. Most citizens in India dread the idea of having to go to a police station. Technology can help make this interaction more pleasant. By providing digital access to the police, citizens can avail services from the comfort of their home. The Punjab Police has a citizen-facing portal, Saanjh, which provides online services for downloading first information reports and searching for stolen vehicles and lost mobiles, among other services. These digital portals also provide an easy and transparent mechanism to the citizens to register their complaints, provide feedback and track their complaint status. Technology can also be used to provide senior police officials dashboard views for their areas of jurisdiction, identify trends, patterns, outliers and take corrective action.

In addition to digital portals, social media can be used by LEAs to reach out directly to citizens — providing information on traffic jams, how to protect against cybercrime, dispelling rumours, countering fake news. The social media interaction can be both “push” — alerts are sent to citizens — or “pull” — citizens access the social media page/handle in order to get the desired information.

Two, use it for crime detection. Technology can effectively help get a digital footprint of the criminal. Mobile forensics can be used to retrieve critical information such as contacts, photos, SMS, video, email, web browsing history, location information and social networking messages. Call Detail Records (CDR) contain information about calls made and received, cell tower location, International Mobile Equipment Identity — a unique identifier for each mobile phone, and International Mobile Subscriber Identity — a unique identifier for each SIM. Due to the high usage of mobile phones, it is difficult to analyse these records manually. CDR analysis tools can be used to identify call patterns, most frequently called numbers, geo-location, and help in tracking missing persons, lost mobiles, movement, and establish relationships between criminal associates.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be used to match fingerprints, facial images, analyse CCTV footage and recognise vehicle number plates. In order to detect false number plates, AI can also be used to recognise the make and model of the car and match it with the vehicle registered with that number plate. Big Data can be used to integrate data from multiple sources such as social media tools, financial institutions, travel records, hotel stays, CDRs and criminal records. This can help create a 360-degree view of the criminal and draw linkages between criminal associates.

Smartphone apps linked to centralised databases can provide the investigating officer real-time access to information on missing vehicles, missing people, dead/unidentified bodies and criminal records, thereby significantly reducing the time taken to investigate a crime.

Three, use it in the realm of crime prevention. The holy grail for any LEA is to be able to prevent a crime before it takes place. Big Data can play a major role as it can be used to identify crime patterns and hot spots. AI can be used to draw correlations between the type of crime, time, location. Analysing crime patterns in Punjab showed that snatching incidents peaked around 8 pm in rural districts whereas the peak occurred around 10 pm for urban areas. Information of streets/roads where most of the snatchings occur can be studied by plotting the crime locations on maps. The findings can then be used to deploy beat constables more effectively thereby reducing/preventing crime. Given the high number of postings and transfers in the police, the MIS reports and dashboards can help the newly transferred officer to get up to speed quickly.

Sentiment analysis of social media chatter can be used to identify potential riots (including location and time) as well as track the source of rumours designed to create communal disharmony. Social media can also be used in a proactive manner to provide authentic information to the public and dispel false rumours/fake news.

Four, LEAs have often not fully appreciated the impact of technology for improving internal efficiency. While most police departments in India have an operational human resources management system in place, efforts need to be put in to mine the data more effectively. Analysis of educational qualifications, age, gender, religion, caste, training, posting, rank, and supervisor-to-employee ratio can be used to identify gaps in the organisation.

These gaps can be addressed via hiring, training, postings thereby ensuring a more “balanced” and effective organisation. Similarly, key performance indicators such as the time taken to file a charge-sheet, types of crimes solved, time taken to address complaints, citizen feedback scores can be used to determine an officer’s performance in a more objective manner.

Training-Open Source Learning Management Systems, low-cost bandwidth and a digitally aware workforce mean that it is now possible to provide online training in a cost-effective manner on an unprecedented scale. To increase reach and effectiveness, these courses need to be offered in vernacular languages, they can be quiz-based, and certificates and recognition given to officers who demonstrate the ability to leverage these learnings in their jobs.

And finally, real-time integration. The five pillars of the criminal justice system are police, courts, prosecution, jails and forensics. While efforts have been made to integrate data from these five pillars at the central level, a lot of work needs to be done to integrate these systems at the state level. Countless man-years are lost in taking physical files from one place to another. Real-time integration between the information technology systems of these pillars will help in reducing duplicate data entry and errors. This will significantly increase the efficiency of our LEAs and, at the same time, drastically reduce the time taken to provide justice. It can be a win-win for all the key stakeholders.

Dhruv Singhal is the chief technology officer of Punjab Police

Source: Hindustan Times, 12/02/21

The new avatar of the encryption wars

 The specific implementation of encryption technology that has worried governments the world over is the Signal protocol (E2EE), which guarantees that even intermediaries who provide these services will not be able to decrypt these messages in transit

The government has proposed a new bill to regulate mathematics. The bill envisages that certain mathematical operations such as multiplication, division, LCM and GCD would be banned, if they are prime numbers and have more than 309 digits and a licensing regime, which would only allow licensed entities to perform these operations.If the above reads like a parody, it may soon cease to be and become reality.

An Australian Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull declared in 2017 that, “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia”.

In a joint communique issued on October 11, 2020, the Five Eye nations (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada), along with Japan and India, stated, “Particular implementations of encryption technology... pose significant challenges to public safety, including to highly vulnerable members of our societies like sexually exploited children” and called upon technology companies to enable “law enforcement access to content in a readable and usable format where an authorisation is lawfully issued, is necessary and proportionate, and is subject to strong safeguards and oversight”.

The specific implementation of encryption technology that has worried governments the world over is the Signal protocol (E2EE), which guarantees that even intermediaries who provide these services will not be able to decrypt these messages in transit. It also guarantees plausible deniability, where if someone receives an encrypted message from you, they can be absolutely sure you sent it (rather than having been forged by some third party), but can’t prove to anyone else that it was a message you wrote.

A variation of their anxieties played out in India, in the “WhatsApp traceability debate”, where the government pushed for traceability (Tell me who the sender is), but also said that it does not want to break end-to-end encryption, an impossible request, as sender deniability is at the heart of the end-to-end encryption. When repeatedly rebuffed by WhatsApp, an attempt was made to resolve the matter through the judicial system to compel the intermediaries (WhatsApp) to stop deploying messaging systems that use E2EE.

Given this background, the use of children in the statement to build a case for banning E2EE is interesting because it uses a propaganda technique called Pedophrasty, where children are invoked to prop up an argument, and make the opponents against the argument look like unprincipled savages and make everyone else suspend all rational and critical thinking, and agree to the argument.

But we must not agree to this dangerous set of proposals, as they are a continuum to the encryption wars, which started in the 1970s, where Western governments tried to limit use of encryption technologies by using export controls and ultimately failed.

In the 1990s, the National Security Agency in the US proposed the use of “Clipper Chip” in every phone, which implemented encryption but gave backdoor access to the US government. After Matt Blaze showed how rogue applications can use the chip to access data without the government backdoor, this attempt was abandoned.

In 2010, Google published a blog post, detailing how Chinese state backed hackers, attacked Gmail to spy on Chinese human rights advocates via a backdoor, installed by Google at the behest of the US government in Gmail to comply with search warrants on users. When Ericsson put backdoors into Vodafone products and deployed these in Greece for aiding law enforcement, these backdoors were used to spy on the Greek prime minister, by unknown perpetrators, who were never found.

All these incidents point out two fundamental realities. The first one is that backdoors are always dual-use and can be used by anyone and, hence, they don’t keep anyone safe. The second is that E2EE is safe and easy enough for anyone to use and hence has achieved mainstream adoption. This has made the usual approach preferred by law enforcement agencies of coercing intermediaries to put backdoors irrelevant and obsolete.

Outlawing E2EE deployment and forcing intermediaries to comply with these proposed rules or leave the country by threatening to shut down their business operations, hence, may become the preferred policy response. But these rules, even if they become the law everywhere, are doomed to fail, in the same way, the discovery of irrational numbers (square root of 2) could not be suppressed by drowning its inventor Hippasus, in the sea, as it takes only a rented computer at ₹700 a month to run a back-end service implementing E2EE.

If existing intermediaries are forced to abandon it, others like EncroChat (popular among drug cartels) will step in and fill the void. The busting of EncroChat, when law enforcement agencies successfully penetrated the drug cartels by putting a “tool” in its servers, also indicates that it is possible to work around E2EE in some cases, using offensive technical measures by compromising endpoints. It would also be a far more proportionate measure than attempting to ban mathematical equations.Anand Venkatanarayanan researches disinformation, cyber weapons and data security and is a privacy advocate

By Anand Venkatanarayanan

Source: Hindustan Times, 4/02/21

Needed, a policy framework in step with technology

 As technology has evolved in the latter part of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century, the traditional boundaries between goods and services have blurred. By virtue of Moore’s law, computing capabilities have surged faster than capabilities in traditional industries. These information-based technologies have been widely adopted across a broad range of industries and products that traditionally have not been perceived as electronic or software based.

Information is the new currency powering economies. The expansion of computing power has driven the pace of information gathering and analysis. The new currency drives processes and decision-making across a wide array of products and services, making them more efficient and value accretive for consumers.

Data is a new currency

Let us look at a traditional good, the automobile. A modern automobile has 40% of its component value from electronic-based products and a modern electric vehicle has close to 100 million lines of code, which is more than that used by a Boeing 787 or the Chrome browser. This is a paradigm shift as the amount of “value add” from intangible technology services as opposed to physical objects, even in traditional goods, is being transformed by information.

Even if you look at a conventional “metal-based” industrial product, information and electronics are becoming all-pervasive, ensuring that we set boundaries to control quality or the uptime of the equipment. There is increasing digitisation and electronification of industrial activities, products and services, influencing the evolving skill sets in industry.

This revolution is taking place across products, as information availability drives efficiency and creates value for customers by providing greater control over the product and its surrounding environment. And, this is what impels customers to value products that have utilised these evolving technologies.

Working in silos

As governments have focused on improving the lives of people, they have looked at economic development and industry as catalysts to progress. To address the needs of various stakeholders, governments have tended to build specialised departments and designed policies that govern those areas. However, over time, as each of these departments grew, they have tended to operate in silos. This has for most of the 20th century been reasonably successful in driving economic development in countries.

The recent developments in technology have, however, blurred standard boundaries that dictate policy framework in most governments. If you take India, industrial promotion policies look at encouraging capital formation from a manufacturing perspective. As technology is driving an increasing share of the value add coming from digitisation and data analytics in products and services across industry segments, there needs to be a way of encouraging capital formation by way of intangibles in traditionally tangible industries.

If you look at the automobile industry, policies are governed by the Heavy Industries and the Surface Transport Ministries, respectively. However, increasing electronification and digitisation of the automobile are not covered by industrial policies that govern the Electronics and Information Technology Ministry.

Another example involves drones that could serve different sectors, including agriculture, and would require a lot of inter-departmental clearances outside of the Department of Agriculture. There is increasingly a need for inter-departmental cooperation and synergy not only in policy framework but also in deployment.

Taking an aggregate view

This departmentalisation of policies is facing a challenge from technology that very often blurs the boundaries served by different policies. There is a need to have a holistic view of policies for economic development as technology is becoming a significant enabler in most industries. A change in policy framework regarding economic development that enables various ministries to work together is essential. A sufficiently empowered policy clearing cell could ensure a holistic view on policy across departments of government, at the State and the Centre.

In terms of attracting investments, policies have always been driven by subsidies and incentives but increasingly, in a competitive scenario, these are becoming hygiene factors. More significantly, a nourishing ecosystem for industry, including the hard infrastructure and softer areas such as education, skilling, technical institutions, laboratories, testing centres, etc., has to be cultivated. The creation of clusters of companies in adjacent but complementary areas could constitute such an ecosystem that encourages multi and cross-disciplinary learning and spur innovation and economic development. Moreover, this type of ecosphere could also attract investment and capital formation.

There is also the larger issue of a shift of value between manufacturing and services as technology changes. The policy, by and large, promotes and gives incentives for manufacturing, whereas the share of intangibles, even in traditional manufacturing companies, whether it be software, research and development or even servicing of products, are not adequately covered in industrial policies. It is important to include these to encourage innovation and technological development.

In this evolving policy framework, it is important that there is close cooperation and alignment between the Centre and State to ensure effective implementation on the ground. Some of these thoughts could help us navigate through an ecosystem that is changing with technology.

Srivats Ram is Managing Director, Wheels India Ltd.

Source: The Hindu, 17/11/20

Use technology to improve governance

 

NITI Aayog released a discussion paper earlier this year, in which it identified use-cases where the technology can potentially improve governance ranging from tracing of drugs in the pharmaceutical supply chain to verification of education certificates.

A memorable quote paraphrased from the Arthashastra by Kautilya goes: “It is as difficult to prevent a government servant from corruption as to prevent a fish from drinking water.”

This suggests that corruption is not a new phenomenon.The East India Company is known to have struggled to keep corruption in check. In fact, the problem of corruption in the social and political spheres has often come in for strident criticism.This issue has triggered several measures aimed at enhancing integrity in public life – the enactment of the Public Procurement Bill, Lokpal Act incorporating, inter alia, the disclosure of assets by public servants and reforms in higher judicial appointments to name a few. While there are divergent positions in terms of strategies and focus areas, the one point of convergence is the unanimous acceptance that technology and e-governance promotes greater transparency.

It has been five years since the adoption of the United Nation (UN)’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) by India and other member states. It can be argued that corruption in public life, directly or indirectly, adversely affects the achievement of all 17 SDGs. A proactive and preventive vigilance regime is critical to the realisation of these SDGs.

Governments are expectedly risk-averse in dealing with both public policies and public money while enterprises thrive on risk-taking. This often hobbles the entrepreneurial spirit in the public sector. How do we make governance more effective without inhibiting its objectives? Today, administrative affairs grapple with leakages in public delivery of welfare and development goals on account one critical problem— manual processes that can be very easily manipulated. These are often so complex and laborious that even a well-intentioned public servant is, on occasion, chary of implementing beneficial decisions. Technology can cut through much of these daunting processes.

In the recent discourse on procurement methods, transparency of policy, procedure and practices is increasingly being seen as an imperative when utilising public money.However, transparency is not an end in itself. The whole process must be open to public scrutiny. The transparency of procedure as seen in online applications is one of the simple yet effective features of digitisation, as it shifts the onus of submitting correct information and data to the applicant.

In an effort to plug leakages in procurement systems, the government launched the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) in 2016 for goods and services required by central and state governments, and public sector undertakings. This not only made it simpler to procure goods and services but also significantly impacted cost savings. An assessment by the Centre for Public Impact showed that the savings from the implementation of GeM has been substantial. The price reduction of approximately 56% of goods and services coupled with demand aggregation has led to savings of ₹40,000 crores annually.

Given the fact that the public procurement economy in India constitutes about 20% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it is imperative to build on this initiative with a view to onboard as many goods and services as possible.In the next decade, the business of government is going to experience massive disruptions. This comes on the back of technological enhancements that reduce the need for intermediaries and ensure that the sanctity of process remains unimpeachable. One such technology is blockchain. NITI Aayog released a discussion paper earlier this year, in which it identified use-cases where the technology can potentially improve governance ranging from tracing of drugs in the pharmaceutical supply chain to verification of education certificates. The three key principles of blockchain technology are transparency, decentralisation and accountability.

One of the most productive areas of intervention for this technology would be in land records. A vast developing country like India, with its diverse land tenure systems, is bound to have major problems in this area. The system is riddled with inefficiencies that reduce trust in the government. Currently the United Nations Development Programme is involved in Proof of Concept (POC) pilots across India. This is to create an immutable history of transactional records that helps in checking authenticity; create a tamper-proof system to avoid forgery; create a distributed ledger so that all stakeholders see the same information and set up a secure encrypted environment, where updates are available in near real time. The NITI Aayog paper notes that, in order to ensure that transactions are not fraudulent, the physical presence of witnesses is mandated at the time of sales deed registry. Deployment of blockchain would potentially eliminate the need of these processes while maintaining the sanctity of the transaction.This has several spin-off benefits. It helps create a tamper-proof audit trail that allows for tracking decision-making and ensures that such decisions are in accordance with anti-corruption principles. It addresses concerns around cyber security that come with any effort towards digitisation. Currently there are interesting pilots being conducted across the world, where deployment of blockchain is being tested for public procurement.

From the perspective of Internal Controls and Governance (Vigilance), it is strongly recommended to employ a five-part test while assessing such deviations from process: One, whether the issue being pursued has corruption connotations; two, the general reputation of the employee involved; three, whether better options were available and ignored without valid reasoning; four, whether the situation inhibited the selection of any other option but the one finally chosen; and, five, whether the larger interest of the organisation was safeguarded.However, a significant factor in blockchain’s success will be the ability to develop/reform laws and building robust data protection and maintenance regimes. Until such time, blockchain is not likely to have a significant impact in creating an integrity-first governance ecosystem.

The general environment now is in favour of a regime which ensures that companies not only do profitable business but do so in an ethical manner. The United Nations Convention against Corruption ratified by India in 2011 as well as the anti-corruption principles of the the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) cover a wide swathe of vulnerable areas and aspects of business operations including anti-bribery, public procurement and conflict of interest. Going forward, more countries will be obliged to establish laws and mechanisms to ensure clean business operations.India needs to review its existing legal frameworks to address issues around, inter alia, data security, corrupt practices and corporate governance with a view to address anti-corruption objectives. The government made a significant change to the Prevention of Corruption Act in 2018. In the earlier regime, even honest public officials were harassed if a decision provided pecuniary advantage to a person without any public interest. Now the element of intention has been added under the definition of criminal misconduct. Similarly, broadening the definition of “unfair advantage” and the introduction of corporate criminal liability will go a long way in apprehending or deterring those indulging in bribery.

While these amendments will help guide the work of internal control agencies, it is important to institutionalise a system where compliance and established processes can be routinely checked and quantified. A metrics-based system for oversight in governmental processes will bring about transparency, build trust with citizens and spur further digital innovation to make any administration more robust.We must also focus on the well-intentioned public servant who finds the processes leading to greater transparency and ensuring value for taxpayers’ money cumbersome and who is, therefore, tempted to short-circuit these. Well-intentioned though she may be, any attempt to overwrite the processes despite even demonstrable honesty of purpose, carries the major risk of opening the system to misuse by dishonest players and will lead to the loss of public trust and decimation of the structure of public procurement. It is only through robust yet streamlined procedures that a bureaucrat can achieve the intended outcome and avoid unintended consequences.

Rajesh Ranjan

Rajesh Ranjan is an Indian Police Service officer

Source: Hindustan Times, 9/10/20

How to stay relevant in constantly changing world

With the advancement of technology, we are only going to see the pace of change accelerate and continuously upskilling yourself has become the most sensible way to stay relevant.

There has been a dramatic shift in the way we do business in the past decade. Businesses are more global and technologically advanced, which requires highly skilled employees who thrive in a time of change. What started as a slow process, has been propelled forward, and now both businesses and employees are faced with the challenge of how to best adapt to the rapidly changing environment.

With the advancement of technology, we are only going to see the pace of change accelerate and continuously upskilling yourself has become the most sensible way to stay relevant.

In a report by McKinsey, the consulting firm concluded that it is an urgent business priority to invest in retaining and ‘upskilling’ existing workers. It is no longer enough to think about what works for the business right now but rather developing strategies for future growth through investment in the employees. The shift from skilling continuous learners to connected learners maximizes the core value for corporate learning; there is a culture of simultaneously learning and developing the skills that an individual acquires, thereby fostering an environment for connected progression. As a result, it is imperative for corporations to lead the way with upskilling their employees.

In another report by PwC, the research shows that employees who lack the right skills can become a major threat to business growth and development. The global survey discovered that business leaders are willing to upskill their employees to fill the current skills gap when presented with options to either retain, outsource and/or take in employees with a strong academic background.

Both entrepreneurs and business leaders alike have consistently emphasized that the single most important thing to achieve and sustain market leadership is relevance. Relevance comes along with upskilling and innovation which acts as a growth imperative for companies. With the surge in technologically complex tasks, the need to upskill has never been more critical. Better innovation, lower costs of additional training, a decrease in outsourcing and client understanding are some of the benefits that in-house upskilling and training offer. Employees tend to become highly adaptable when presented with opportunities to upskill, which the organization can harness effectively, leading to business development in all areas of the business.

Microlearning helps learner engagement

The workplace continues to evolve, with increasing demands on employees’ time and performance. Microlearning is the practice of delivering just the right amount of information to help a learner achieve a specific goal. The short nature of microlearning fits easily within a busy workday, and it’s what most employees prefer. This is why shorter videos can maximize learner engagement.

Agile Learning

It’s increasingly critical to understand the business needs for each part of the organization. While it’s important for every learning and development team to tie learning back to organizational objectives, it becomes crucial when the objectives vary largely throughout the business. Business leaders should consider implementing an agile approach and modernise their solutions to manage constant disruption and deliver learning and development at the speed of the business.

Blended Learning

Blended learning has become a powerful method to drive upskilling as new digital technologies are redefining learning experiences in the modern workplace. While in the past blended learning programs meant combining the best of the classroom and online learning, today, blended learning experiences mean layering classroom learning and online learning with a wide variety of digital technologies and social practices.

Scalable coaching

There are a number of ways learning and development leaders are incorporating coaching into the learning experience. This might involve layering social learning and one-on-one coaching post-classroom to reinforce learning on the job and ensure behavior change occurs. Or, it might be offering to coach in a more scalable and affordable way by leveraging internal group mentors, video-based meetings, and coaching tools to ensure outcomes are achieved.

Lifelong learning is the answer to staying relevant in today’s fast-changing business world. There are many different ways an organization can help its employees upskill and prioritizing that will stimulate growth, for the organization as well as the individual.

(Irwin Anand is Managing Director, Udemy India. Views expressed here are personal.)

Source: Hindustan Times, 31/10/2019

The politics of information

Information systems strengthen socio-economic transformation, but transparency and accountability are crucial.

An article in this publication, ‘The learning state: How information becomes insight’ (IE, March 18), written by two economists, has made some important points about “information”, but it is their perspective on “insight” that needs to be challenged.

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Designing, using and evaluating information systems is all about perception and perspective. Information systems that might strengthen socio-economic transformation, is contingent on the active participation of people. Digital tools have proliferated over the last decade leaving millions out of the ambit of meaningful participation. For instance, an MGNREGA worker is the primary producer of information but she has no stake in its presentation and access. This raises pertinent questions about transparency of what and for whom. The citizen has been made transparent to the State and the market instead of the other way around — Aadhaar is a powerful example of this. Rural workers and pensioners have been coerced to migrate to the Aadhaar platform without their explicit consent. The authors make an important mention of the proliferation of management information systems (MIS) without examining its obvious inherent biases. The term “management” itself reflects the lack of a participatory framework in information design. There is a genuine concern in the context of MGNREGA that the MIS has become the de-facto implementing agency thereby burying accountability in reams of software codes hidden behind “administrative logins”.

The Right to Information campaign has, for long, made a demand for a Janata Information system (JIS), instead, driven by a democratic and moral compulsion towards an information system designed by and for the people. Activists and concerned citizens have had to campaign for generating and accessing actionable information — to dig for pertinent jaankari (knowledge) from the universe of soochna (available information). Years of reiterative practice have demonstrated that for this to happen, it is imperative that the main users of information must be involved in the complete cycle of information — designing of frameworks for information collection, collation, disclosure, and, subsequent action. There has been considerable progress made to take this principle from theory to practice. For instance, the Department of Information Technology (DoIT) of the Rajasthan government has engaged with a consortium of civil society organisations working over a range of issues such as MGNREGA, ration, land rights, mining, education and health over the past two years through an ongoing process of consultation called the “Digital Dialogue”: It provided a platform to suggest and determine means by which existing information systems could be reformed for ensuring greater public accountability. This resulted in the development of a JIS for registering, availing and monitoring monetary relief for patients affected by pneumoconiosis/ silicosis; for making applications under the Forest Rights Act, and, enabling applicants to trace their status. This also led to the development of a single window portal known as the “Jan Soochna Portal” for disclosing information related to all the gram panchayat/ward-level schemes. Each of these initiatives were based on consultations with the people to demonstrate how people-centric monitoring systems can be strengthened through appropriately designed technology. There is also an urgent need to move away from the myopia of the digital medium as the sole substrate of information: Dissemination of information shouldn’t be a mutually exclusive, reductive debate of online versus offline.

Disclosure of information through MIS is not an act of benevolence by the State. It is a legal mandate. Section 4(2) of the RTI Act makes it mandatory for public authorities to “provide as much information suo-motu to the public at regular intervals through various means of communication, including internet, so that the public have minimum resort to the use of this Act to obtain information.” Administrators need to be mindful of this legal commitment: While there are indeed 400 MISs developed, it is a matter of great distress that they ignore and violate the RTI Act. Admin logins for viewing rights are regularly introduced in the MIS as a way of doing the opposite of what Section 4 of the Act mandates. In any case the only permissible criteria for placing an admin login is under Section 8 of the RTI Act that mandates exemptions to the disclosure of information. Lack of a framework has created situations when the MIS is causing disempowerment. In the MGNREGA MIS, which is more “transparent” than most others, there are numerous instances of how the highly centralised system has resulted in software codes overriding the law. For example, in contempt of a Supreme Court order, the BJP government continues to use the MIS to wilfully suppress the delays in wage pIn conclusion, a JIS must have at least the following three building blocks to ensure that information does result in insight in a democratic polity: First, user groups/affected communities must be compulsorily involved in the complete cycle of information production, dissemination, and action. Second, there must be equal access of information between administrators and citizens. The concept of “administrative logins” promoting privileged access of certain kinds of information to administrators must be revoked. Third, the priority must be to recognise and create a system where information leads to enhanced democratic participation and accountability.

The BJP-led Central government has carefully manipulated, fabricated and suppressed critical information in several domains. For example, the leaked Periodic Labour Force Survey containing crucial data on the worst unemployment in the last 45 years, continues to be suppressed. Control over data and information cannot be only in the hands of the government or subject to the whims of the political leadership.Building on the renowned statistician, John Tukey’s comment — “Information comes with politics on its back”, it is high time that information is seen as a political tool in the hands of every citizen: To question, confront, monitor, and, to more effectively demand accountability.ayments caused by the Centre.

Source: Indian Express, 4/04/2019

Women in tech still look up to Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg

Sheryl Sandberg oversees parts of Facebook that have been most embroiled in scandal but the company has faith in her.

For the last decade, the gathering of the global elite at Davos has been a safe space for Sheryl Sandberg. This year, though, fresh off a bruising 2018, the Facebook COO arrived in the Alps on the defensive, apologizing over and over again for Facebook’s privacy and ethical slip-ups. She was notably absent from the conference’s main equality and gender discussions; she was fighting a cold and her voice was a rasp.

Over the last few months, the Sheryl Sandberg brand has taken a beating, and news about Facebook’s misdeeds—and her reported role in them—is unrelenting. Questions about privacy, Russian election hacking, unsavory opposition targeting dominated the end of 2018, and the New Year began with new reports of questionable data collection practices that led Apple to ban some of Facebook’s internal apps.Through it all, pundits dissected Sandberg’s “fall from grace,” employees blamed her for the company’s woes and a stunning stock slide, and critics called for her resignation. Corporate feminism fell out of favor, #MeToo exposed the weaknesses of “leaning in” and Sandberg’s own fallibility cast her feminist empowerment side-project in a newly harsh light.

But there are signs that Sandberg’s reputation is on the mend. It helps that Facebook doesn’t seem to be suffering any: fourth-quarter results were better than expected and the stock is up. Both the company and Lean In say they’re committed to Sandberg’s leadership, and from Switzerland to San Francisco, women, particularly those working in technology, are coming out in support of the embattled COO.

“I still look up to her,” said Annie Hsieh, an engineering manager at Square Root, an Austin-based tech company. Like more than a dozen women interviewed by Bloomberg, Hsieh said she doesn’t think Sandberg acted to the highest moral and ethical standards, but she also knows how hard it is to make it to the top in the tech world. “She’s just another human and she’s not a superhero. I think some of the criticism is valid and a lot of it is unfair.”

Sandberg, for her part, started off the New Year on an image rehabilitation tour. On January 20th, she made her first public appearance in the new year at the DLD conference in Munich. “As we listen to people around the world,” she said, “they tell us that they want an internet, where people speak up, but they’re not spreading hate.”

“We know we need to do better,” she went on. “We need to stop abuse more quickly and we need to do more to protect more people’s data.”

From there, she went to Dublin and then Davos, where she atoned again and again. For her peers at the World Economic Forum, the apologies were more than enough. “There isn’t a single organization that I have the honor to work with out there that doesn’t still look to her for leadership,” said Patricia Milligan, a senior partner at Mercer, the HR consulting firm.

That includes Facebook. Sandberg directly oversees the parts of the business that have been most embroiled in scandal, such as policy and content operations, but the company says if there’s a problem, they believe in Sandberg’s ability to address it. “Under Sheryl’s leadership, we now have more than 30,000 people working on safety and security, we’ve cracked down on fake accounts and misinformation, and we’ve set a new standard for ads transparency,” the company said.

“She has done a lot for women in tech, we shouldn’t forget that,” said Gillian Tans, the CEO of Booking.com. “It takes 3 to 4 times the effort for a woman to achieve the level of success that many of us who are here have achieved. Yet it takes one misstep to fall off your pedestal.”

Back at sea level, women like Hsieh are also inclined to forgive. Many women working in tech told Bloomberg they dislike Lean In’s message of do-it-yourself women’s empowerment. Most of them denounced Sandberg’s recently reported involvement in covering up Russian interference on Facebook (if true). But most also said she’s been held to an unfair standard, and overall, they believe she’s done more good than bad.

“She has crossed a boundary,” said Nancy Wang, a Senior Manager of Product Management at Amazon Web Services. “But we have to look at someone holistically. What she has done for women in tech, that’s something you can’t take away from her.”

It helps to understand how rare Sandberg’s accomplishments are. Women make up about a quarter of the computing workforce but just 11 percent of leadership roles, according to a study by McKinsey and Company. Among those leaders, no one has the power or portfolio of responsibility that Sandberg does. At Fortune 500 companies with COO positions, only 10 percent are filled by women.

So while there are plenty of examples of powerful men logging all manner of successes and failures, Sandberg has come to stand-in for all women in technology. Her very existence has opened up streams of funding, according to Lisa Falzone, now CEO and co-founder of Athena Security. She started her first company in 2010—before Facebook went public and before Lean In—and it was hard to get venture capitalists to take her seriously. Now, she says, things have changed, and that’s a credit to Sandberg.

“You have to have more successful women that people can point to so VCs will give more women money,” said Falzone. “If they’ve never seen a woman be successful before, they’re not going to invest in women.”

Lean In’s own research suggests that “leaning in” isn’t the panacea Sandberg herself once thought. Women are asking for raises more often, but they’re not getting them. Some 40 percent of women in technical roles are often or always the only female in the room at work and, as a result, they often need to provide more evidence of their competence. They’re also likely to be mistaken for someone more junior.But Sandberg’s existence—and her success—does make a difference. Research shows that women are more harshly penalized when they make mistakes. They’re also less likely to get second chances. One reason women are rooting for her rehabilitation is self-interest: They worry if she falls, they’ll suffer too.

Ironically, the solution, according to Stefanie Johnson, an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, is more Sheryl Sandbergs, not fewer. If there were more women in positions of real power, more junior workers wouldn’t feel like they had to hold on to their one hero. Then the world could experience women with a variety of leadership styles—good and bad—and judge them as complex, holistic humans—just like we do with men.

Bloomberg Opinion

Source: Hindustan Times, 8/02/2019

Develop effective policies to regulate tech giants

Facebook doesn’t merely connect people. It is a growing marketplace where user information is sold to advertisers.

It was a leap year. The year of the Athens Olympics. Only four years since Y2K, George W Bush would win his second term as President in November, and there would be a devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean towards the fag end of the year. But early in 2004, recovering from an almost expulsion from Harvard for having hacked their student directories to create Facemash (a sort of ‘Hot or Not’ ranking site for Harvard students) and having had Facemash unceremoniously taken down, a 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg was toying with code to create a way to connect all the student directories (called “face books”) of Harvard. This project was launched 15 years ago on February 4, 2004, as The Facebook. It was such a hit that within a month of going live, more than half the undergraduate students of Harvard had signed up to the service. In about three months, it had expanded to most universities in the US and Canada. By June, it had become an incorporated company, set up headquarters in Palo Alto, California, and was well on its way to becoming the social media behemoth it now is.

In the past 15 years, with their famous “move fast and break things” mantra, Facebook (having dropped the definite article from its name) has managed to go from being a place where people found old, long lost school friends in the mid-2000s, to being the harbinger of borderless digital movements, such as the one that aided the Arab Spring and Occupy Movements in the early 2010s, to now being one of the Big Four in the technology world, and one of the worst offenders in terms of privacy, surveillance, harassment, and bad psychological effects. The rise and growth of Facebook — which now owns Instagram and WhatsApp — has allowed it to become, in many ways, the largest purveyor of ways in which people share content or communicate with each other across the world.

Not only has this radically changed the way we communicate with friends, family, social acquaintances, and even colleagues, it has also created a system of amplification for the worst tendencies of human beings — be it bullying, hate speech, spreading malicious rumours (sometimes euphemistically referred to as fake news), or misogyny. The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed that Facebook had allowed the harvesting of personal data of up to 87 million users without their consent. It brought into focus exactly how much power companies, such as Facebook, wield. And how easy it is for someone to manipulate public opinion using social media.

The crux of the matter is that Facebook — and indeed Google and Twitter and Uber and Amazon — are not merely companies that connect people. They are centres of an advertising marketplace, in which you, the user, is the product being sold to the advertisers. Make no mistake, the goal is still to make you buy things — be they in-game purchases of boosters for your sword, a politician’s position on important political matters, or a new brand of toothpaste — but in a way that allows these companies to know a lot more about you than you may want (or choose to tell them). As he faced American lawmakers, Zuckerberg was asked how Facebook made money, and he answered, simply, “we run ads”. What he chose to not mention was that these ads are targeted to individual users based on not just what they share or say on Facebook, but by collecting data about their behaviour across the internet.

Fifteen years ago, it would have been unthinkable that a Silicon Valley tech company was being blamed for everything, from a teenager’s suicide in the UK to ethnic violence in Myanmar, according to the UN. But that is the world that Facebook built for us as it became the world’s largest social media site; and one that we must now learn to live and survive in.

The way forward from here must, therefore, necessarily be one of regulation of technology giants through forward-thinking digital policies that will create safeguards for users of platforms such as Facebook. India has made a good beginning by creating one of the world’s most robust net neutrality laws. Europe’s General Data Protection regulation (GDPR) is another step in the right direction. But far more needs to be done in order to regulate the manner in which technology companies control the world. The onus, however, is not just on governments. As users, we must demand the right to own our data and know how it is used and by who — be it Facebook, or even our elected governments.

Vidya Subramanian is a post doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, IIT Bombay

Can technology change the way our children learn?

The combination of innate curiosity and a hands on approach to learning will help foster a culture of continuous learning

A decade ago, when kids wanted to research a school project, they stopped by the library. They consulted a well-thumbed encyclopedia at home, or they asked you, the parent. Children today – comfortable with voice-based technology – turn to a digital assistant like Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa for help. They search online on their smartphones or iPads. Technology is fundamentally altering how children imbibe knowledge. It is also transforming the delivery of education for newer generations, whose lives are enmeshed with the devices and technology that power their world. I see this radically changing how our children will learn in the future and how we as parents and teachers, need to respond through this change. With the right intervention, techenabled transformation in education can close critical gaps in the traditional classroom of today, even as it opens up new opportunities for our children.

THE END OF ONE-SIZE FITS-ALL

Personalization is already touching so many aspects of our kids’ lives. They are used to tailormade choices, right from the delivery app that pulls up their favorite pizza, to the shows recommended just for them on Netflix. In education, this has deeper implications and benefits. Technology is making a far more adaptive and personalized learning experience possible. Every child does not learn at the same pace. Or have the same learning style. Teachers in a traditional classroom with over 40-50 children have very little scope to individually assess students. Artificial intelligence powered adaptive learning software systems are now solving this problem – courseware can be customized to meet the child’s individual learning needs, at their level. We are moving to a future where the curriculum will be personalized for every child in the classroom. Children will be able to learn at their own pace, on individual learning paths, for optimum results.

CLASSROOM OF THE FUTURE

Technology is shaping the classroom of the future. Students will move seamlessly from a traditional to a global virtual classroom in the same school day. Video communication tools will allow them to interact with classmates from around the world as they work in real time on a school project. Debate clubs would stream live from two or more continents. Virtual classrooms would open up access to highquality learning or specialized curriculum, besides giving children exposure to rich multicultural experiences and communities far removed from their own. Schools across the world are already bringing virtual and augmented reality into the classroom – technologies that can turn learning into an immersive, often magical experience. With apps like Google Expeditions, for instance, students can take field trips from their classroom with the teacher as a guide, see and walk around a place or object.

A ‘SMALL’ REVOLUTION

Our kids are growing up reading flash fiction. They microblog and think in 140 characters. The way they express themselves and communicate is also extending to the way they want to learn. Research shows us that learners online prefer to study in bitesized increments. They want concise, crisper modules that are engaging. They want learning content to meet the same high engagement standards they expect elsewhere in their lives.

Technology is also bringing a more fundamental shift in the path to education. Future learners will adopt a flexible approach to build relevant skills, as technology – moving at an unrelenting pace – makes existing skills redundant.

Our children will go into a workforce where they will need to continuously build competencies to keep up with technology and stay agile. Stackable, rather than single, monolithic credentials that take years to acquire, will disrupt how students acquire education. Learners will be able to accumulate a series of credentials, studying with flexibility, as they move towards a single degree..

LEARNING TO BE LIFELONG LEARNERS

On Coursera, one of the most popular online courses of all time, with 2 million enrollments, is Learning How to Learn, developed by Dr. Barbara Oakley from Oakland University. It teaches students how to use tools drawn from neuroscience to learn more successfully – critical for the future. Helping children learn ‘how to learn’ and master new or tough subjects will be increasingly important for their success. Our children will need to be lifelong learners in an unpredictable workplace, where a college degree alone no longer suffices. Learning will become a way of life, not a stage in life.

Models like online learning will offer them the flexibility they need to be continuous learners. Learners are already seeking greater convenience. They want to watch a 20-minute video on the way to work, for example. A mobile experience is helping them learn on the go, on a device of their choice.

Perhaps the more important shift will be “what” our children learn. “We cannot teach our kids to compete with machines. They are smarter. We have to teach something unique,” Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba Group, told an audience at this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. He argues the “knowledge based approach of 200 years ago” would “fail our kids” because it does not prepare them to compete with machines. Children, he believes, should be taught “soft skills like independent thinking, values and teamwork.” According to the McKinsey Global Institute, robots could replace 800 million jobs by 2030. Skills like creativity, lateral thinking and adaptability will be indispensable for our children in this age of automation.

Helping them develop these skills will be the most important contribution we as parents or teachers can make, to prepare our kids for a new future. As the contemporary world continues to change, the term ‘digital disruption’ has become a watchword in the industry. Efforts today are consistently geared towards maximizing one’s potential through regular skilling to adapt to changing industry requirements. At its core, however, the abilities that form the foundation upon which the skilling process takes place have remained relatively unchanged. These abilities, hence, must be inculcated early in life to ensure individuals are capable of achieving their optimal potential in society.

Source: Hindustan Times, 14/11/2018