The Tianjin warehouse blasts on August 12 caused a weak surface quake in the Chinese port city, made houses uninhabitable in a 2-km radius, absolutely decimated a parking lot of 8,000 cars in its vicinity, blew a crater below the warehouse, released a very-toxic chemical into the surrounding air and water, and consumed the lives of 114 people and counting. The structure was known to contain hazardous substances, and claims have surfaced that the company managing them – Ruihai International Logistics – was transporting obscene quantities illegally.
But beyond the illegality itself, the explosions had an underlying chemistry whose strength far outstripped the weaknesses of structures in the vicinity being susceptible to shockwaves, a strength that exacerbated the government’s failure in not clamping down on Ruihai earlier, in allowing residential settlements in the neighbourhood of such chemicals and, in the aftermath, not reacting swiftly enough to either allegations of cover-ups as well as informing the media of what had gone up in flames. According to one video (link now dead) on weibo, the Chinese microblogging website, one of the principal explosions occurred after the firefighters arrived, implying that the destruction was drawn out by the already-burning warehouse being sprayed with water by authorities in the know.
For instance, the structure was known to contain ammonium nitrate, potassium nitrate and calcium carbide, as well as sodium cyanide. Of these compounds, ammonium nitrate and calcium carbide are known to be explosive – but for different reasons – while the rest are deadly in their own right.
Ammonium nitrate
Simply put, ammonium nitrate is the Liam Neeson of fertilisers but also the Ra’s al Ghul of explosives. It was used as the explosive material in the 2013 Hyderabad blasts. Each molecule contains two atoms of nitrogen, three of oxygen and four of hydrogen. The way the atoms are bonded, the molecule as a whole is eager to give away an oxygen atom to any other molecule reacting with it because doing so would send it a stable, less energetic state. This eagerness is exemplified by the molecule’s low sensitivity to physical shock and heat: just a little jerk or heating will blow it up, generating a shockwave at 5,270 m/s – more than five times the speed of sound.
What could make such a shockwave even more powerful has to do with another property of ammonium nitrate. If not stored in tightly sealed containers, the compound gradually absorbs moisture from the atmosphere and coalesces into solid lumps. In the Tianjin warehouse, then, large quantities of ammonium nitrate could’ve become moist and formed proximate clumps, and when one section of those clumps got heated, it blew up and generated a shockwave that shot the rest of it to Hell as well.
Calcium carbide
By itself, calcium carbide is mostly harmless. But should you spray it with water, it reacts to produce calcium hydroxide (slaked lime) and acetylene. When acetylene is burnt in the presence of oxygen, it produces a flame of 3,600 K, hot enough to melt a metal as sturdy as tungsten – so its application in welding. And like ammonium nitrate, acetylene is susceptible to shockwaves, especially if the surrounding pressure goes beyond 103,421 pascals (almost equal to the atmospheric pressure at sea level). In such situations, it explodes into its constituent atoms – carbon and hydrogen.
And here it gets worse: hydrogen burns violently with… well, the atmosphere. Remember the reactor-3 explosion during the Fukushima disaster in 2011? That wasn’t the work of any nuclear substance as much as leaked hydrogen.
Potassium nitrate and sodium cyanide
While potassium nitrate is used in the preparation of gunpowder, it’s explosive when reacting with reducing agents – i.e. electron-donators. The incredibly poisonous sodium cyanide on the other hand isn’t considered explosive. However, an explosive derivative presents itself. The compound is hygroscopic, absorbing moisture from the atmosphere to form sodium formate and ammonia, and in sufficiently high quantities, ammonia reacts explosively with air, especially if heated up to 200° C.
Sodium cyanide is also wildly toxic, and already reports have emerged that it has been found in “nearby drains after the blasts“. It is very soluble in water, and if it enters the body in quantities as small as 3 mg/kg, it rapidly knocks out the lungs’ ability to take in oxygen and results in death. The Associated Press claims “several hundred tons” of it were present in the warehouse (according to one estimate, 700 tons, a decidedly unholy quantity within a kilometre’s radius of residential dwellings, and enough to poison 91% of all Asia to death*).
*
According to a BBC report, China is the world’s largest consumer of hazardous chemicals, and so can claim expertise in the storage and transport of large quantities of chemicals and no ignorance of how the warehouse came to store over 3,000 tonnes of the chemicals with the nearest houses less than a kilometre away. The chemicals themselves are frequently used in the metals industry, for the manufacture of synthetic substances, and for extracting some precious metals from their ores.
No wonder then that some Ruihai employees have been arrested, as well as a former government officials who’d served in the area called in for questioning. Beyond the difficulty of cleaning up an area made more potent by the addition of water, the bigger challenge facing the Chinese government is the chemistry itself: without a license to handle hazardous substances between October 2014 and June 2015, how did Ruihai amass the ammonium nitrate, calcium carbide, potassium nitrate and sodium cyanide, and why?
*Assuming the average body mass of an Asian adult is 57.7 kg, and with “people” referring only to Asian adults.
The Department of Biotechnology, under the Ministry of Science & Technology, is soliciting feedback on the Human DNA Profiling Bill, a scanned copy of which has been uploaded to the DBT website – accessible here. It is dated June 9, 2015, and is accompanied by some handwritten corrections. Public feedback is being solicited after the Bill was slated to be introduced in the monsoon session of the Parliament. However, the introduction eventually didn’t happen at all thanks to washed out sessions.
The last date for submitting feedback is August 20, 2015, at this email address.
On July 24, The Wire had reported on numerous shortcomings in the draft Bill, largely concerning the lack of accountability and privacy safeguards, as well as the absence of any financial memoranda. While a government representative – Dr. J. Gowrishankar, director of the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics – had responded to our criticisms on July 25, he nonetheless didn’t mention if the draft Bill would or wouldn’t be modified in response to the issues we had raised.
However, the June-9 version of the Bill on which feedback from the people has been solicited differs from the working draft we had used – dated January 16, 2015.
In the new version, the table of contents and preamble aren’t included; Gowrishankar had previously noted that the Bill would be tabled without the preamble. However, it’s unclear why the table of contents was left out, too, apart from having uploaded a scanned version of the Bill.
Anyway, such minor changes have been made throughout the Bill – although a few significant changes stand out as well. For instance, Section 12(k) of the working draft has been excluded from the new version, that the supervising DNA Profiling Board will be “making recommendations for maximising the use of DNA techniques and technologies in administration of justice”.
For another, the self-contradictory Section 14(2) of the draft Bill has been removed in the new draft, i.e. that DNA profiling labs in already in existence at the time of passing the Bill needn’t get approval to perform tests. Now, all labs – no matter how old or new – will require the Board’s permission to serve the Bill’s interests.
While largely well-intentioned, the older draft Bill lacked watertight safeguards against the abuse of the DNA profiles that’d be stored in the database. Specifically, it abdicated the responsibility of defining best practices for extracting the profiles, didn’t define any operational costs, didn’t factor in any of the privacy-related course corrections suggested by the 2012 Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy, provided for no anonymisation protocols, and vested too many powers in the overseeing Board.
With the removal of Section 12(k), the new draft gives the Board a less self-indulgent ambit, even if the drafting committee hasn’t gone farther than that to ensure there will be independent regulatory oversight. In a previous conversation, Gowrishankar had said that such oversight would stem by default from the Parliament, but the just-concluded monsoon session illustrates how important decisions concerning the database could be delayed simply because MPs are distracted by other commitments.
Just as well, the Group of Experts’ privacy recommendations are also still missing. Without them, the Bill doesn’t do the following things, even as they’ve come to be recognised as important limbs of an effective privacy law around the world.
Provide a notice that DNA samples were collected from so-so areas of the body
Inform anybody – particularly the individual – if and when her/his DNA is contaminated, misplaced or stolen
Inform a person if a case involving her/his DNA is pending, ongoing or closed
Inform the people when there are changes in how their DNA is going to be accessed, or if the way their DNA is being stored or used is changed
Distinguish between when DNA can be collected with consent and when it can’t
Say how volunteers can contribute their DNA to the database even though the draft Bill has a provision for voluntary submissions
Provide any explicit guarantee that the collected DNA won’t be used for anything other than circumstances specified in the Bill
Specify when doctors or the police can or can’t access DNA profiles
The new draft also contains a new provision – under Section 24(5) – that DNA profiles’ databases will set up in individual states as well without saying if the same safeguards that apply to the national repository will apply to the regional ones. So, as a result of all these omissions the new draft Bill remains, like its previously availed version, in a suboptimal state. But while it is odd that the draft was opened up for public feedback after it was set to to be introduced in Parliament – it usually happens before – it has been opened now, until August 20.
In the throng of American companies and their confused compliance with the National Security Agency’s controversial decade-long snooping on internal and international communications, The New York Times and ProPublica have unravelled one that actually bent over backwards to please the NSA: AT&T. The basis of their allegations is a tranche of NSA documents detailing the features and scope of AT&T’s compliance with the agency’s ‘requests’, dating from 2003 to 2013.
The standout feature of the partnership is that, according to a note from AT&T, it wasn’t contractual, implying the ISP hadn’t been coerced into snooping and sharing data on the traffic that passed through its domestic servers. As ProPublica writes, “its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency”. One of the documents even goes as far as to “highlight the Partner’s extreme willingness to help with NSA’s SIGINT and Cyber missions”.
The documents were part of those released by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013. According to the reporters, the three entities implicated in them – NSA, AT&T and Verizon – refused to discuss the findings, in keeping with what has become a tradition of various ISPs refusing to reveal the terms of their ‘collaborations’ and the NSA refusing to reveal the ISPs it did work with. Since Snowden released the documents in 2013, public ire against the government’s intrusive snooping programmes have increased even as President Barack Obama as well as the judiciary have been in agreement that revealing any more details than Snowden already had would threaten national security.
As a result, the news that AT&T didn’t bother challenging the NSA throws valuable light on how the agency was able to eavesdrop on foreign governments and international organisations.
The ISPs aren’t named but are referred to by code names, but their real identities were given away when the dates of some of their surveillance ops coincided, sometimes too perfectly, with dates on which some fibre optic cables were ‘repaired’. For example, a document dated August 5, 2011, talks about Fairview’s data-logging resuming over a cable damaged by the earthquake near Japan in the same year – while, ProPublic states, a “Fairview fiber-optic cable … was repaired on the same date as a Japanese-American cable operated by AT&T”. So, the Fairview programme was found to be NSA + AT&T and the Stormbrew programme, NSA + Verizon/MCI.
However, AT&T got more attention than Stormbrew. In 2011, the NSA spent $188.9 million on AT&T and less than half that on Verizon, possibly because the former also practiced peering, a technique in networking where one company relays data through the network on behalf of other companies. As a result, users’ data from other ISPs and TSPs also ended up going through the wired AT&T servers.
AT&T’s complicity dates back to the mid-1980s, when antitrust regulators broke up the monopolistic Ma Bell telephone company, a fragment of which was AT&T. Its formation roughly coincided with NSA’s launching the Fairview program into which the TSP got subsumed. Following the 9/11 attacks, both Fairview and Stormbrew assumed centre-stage in the agency’s anti-terrorism programmes, with Fairview being especially effective. As the Timeswrites, “AT&T began turning over emails and phone calls ‘within days’ after the warrantless surveillance began in October 2001”.
All the documents disclosed by the publications in the latest release are available here.
While governments scramble to provide the laziest climate-change commitments ahead of the UN conference in Paris later this year, the world is being honed to confront how life about land will change as the atmosphere and surface and heat up. But for another world – a world that has often shown up its terran counterpart in sheer complexity – scientists are far from understanding how things will change over the next 85 years.
Climatologists and oceanographers were only recently able to provide a rounded explanation for why the rate of global warming slowed in the late 1990s – and into the 2010s: because the Pacific Ocean was absorbing heat from the lower atmosphere, and then palming it off to the Indian Ocean. But soon after the announcement of that discovery, another team from the US armed with NASA data said that the rate of warming hadn’t slowed at all and that it seemed that way thanks to some statistical anomalies.
Irrespective of which side is right, the bottomline is that our understanding of the oceans’ impact on climate change is poorly understood. And although it hasn’t been for want of trying, a new study in the journal Geology presents the world’s first map of what rests on the oceans’ floors – a map that’s been updated comprehensively for the first time since the 1970s.
The ocean floor is in effect a graveyard of all the undersea creatures that have ever lived, but the study’s significance for tracking climate-change lies with the smallest of those creatures – the tiny plankton, inhabitants of the bottommost rungs of the oceanic food chain. Their population on the surface and pelagic zones of the oceans increases with the abundance of silica and carbon, and when they die or the animals that eat them die, the float into the abyss – taking along a bit of carbon with them. This is the deceptively simple mechanism called the biological pump that allows the world’s larger waterbodies to absorb carbon dioxide from Earth’s atmosphere.
Digital map of major lithologies of seafloor sediments in world’s ocean basins. Source: doi: 10.1130/G36883.1
The new map, made by scientists from the University of Sydney and the Australian Technology Park, shows that contrary to popular beliefs, the oceanic basins are not settled by broad bands of sediments as much as there are pockets of them, varying in size and abundance due to a variety of surface characteristics and with the availability of certain minerals.
A photomontage of plankton. Credit: Kils/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
For example, diatom ooze – not watery eidolons of muck sticking to the underside of your shoe but crystalline formations composed of minerals and the remains of calcium- and silica-based plankton called diatoms – is visible in widespread patches (of light-green in the map) throughout the Southern Ocean, between 60º and 70º S.
The ooze typically forms in the 0.8-8º C range at depths of 3.3-4.8 km, and is abundant in the new map where the temperatures range from 0.9º to 5.7º C. Before this map came along, oceanographers – as well as climatologists – had assumed these deposits to be lying in continuous belts, like large undersea continents. But together with the uncertainty in data about the pace and quanta of warming, scientists had been grappling with a shifting image of climate change’s effects on the oceans.
The locations of diatom ooze also contribute to a longstanding debate about if the ooze settles directly below the largest diatom populations. According to the Australian study’s authors, “Diatom ooze is most common below waters with very low diatom chlorophyll concentration, forming prominent zones between 50° S and 60° S in the Australian-Antarctic and the Bellinghausen basins”. The debate’s origins lie in the common use of diatoms to adjudicate water quality: some species proliferate only in clean water, some in polluted water, and there many species of them differentiated by other preferred environments – saline, acidic, warm, etc.
The relative abundance of one species of plankton over the other could, for example, become a reliable indicator of another property of the water that scientists have had trouble measuring: acidity. The dropping pH levels in the oceans are – or could be – a result of dissolving carbon dioxide. While some may view the oceans as great benefactors for offsetting the pace of warming by just a little bit, the net effect for Earth has continued to be negative: acidic waters dissolve the shells of molluscs faster and could drive populations of fishes away from where humans have set up fisheries.
Ocean acidification’s overall effect on the global economy could be a loss of $1 trillion per year by 2100, a UN report has estimated – even as a report in the ICES Journal of Marine Science found that 465 studies published between 1993 and 2014 sported a variety of methodological failures that compromised their findings – all of precise levels of acidity. The bottomline, as with scientists’ estimates of the rate of pelagic warming, is that we know that the oceans are acidifying but are unsure of by how much.
The new map thus proves useful to assess how different kinds of ooze got where they are and their implications for how the world around them is changing. For example, as the paper states, “diatom oozes are absent below high diatom chlorophyll areas near continents”, where sediments derived from the erosion of rocks provides a lot of nutrients to the oceans’ surfaces – in effect describing how a warming Earth posits a continuum of implications for contiguous biospheres.
President Barack Obama announced a new climate change target for the United States’ electricity generation sector on August 3. Hailed by many as ambitious, the plan dictates that power plants in the world’s largest economy and second largest polluter reduce their emissions below 32% of their 2005 levels by 2030. The US had already committed to a 25% reduction from 2005 levels by 2025 in a deal with China made in October 2014. The new commitment now requires more than a doubling of the pace of emission cuts.
Such declarations allow economies like the US to assume leadership of the international climate negotiations at a time when declarations from other countries have been tardy. At the same time, the US has also given itself some leeway despite the symbolic headstart, the advantages of which lie in the historic details. Consider this chart, compiled by the World Resources Institute:
Among the five greenhouse gases that countries prioritise cutting down on, two contain carbon: methane and carbon dioxide. The chart above shows the methane emissions of the USA and the five BRICS nations from 1990 to 2011. The US’s methane emissions were at their minimum in 2005 – so any future commitment on methane emissions premised on 2005 levels are likely to represent daunting challenges. The dip happened because at that time the US was maximising its extraction and processing of shale gas, activities that emit little methane. But on the question of carbon dioxide emissions, consider the chart below:
The US’s carbon dioxide emissions peaked in 2005, at 5,828.63 million metric tons. This convenient choice of a base year allows the US a leeway that’s 18.64% higher than its 1990 emissions – 1990 being the year that the Kyoto Protocol uses as a base. The absence of any rules on what can or can’t constitute base years is leveraged by many countries. In Europe, for example, the base year is 1990 because that’s when emissions peaked followed by a steady decline in industrial activity as well as a growing adoption of renewable energy options.
However, the absence of options in choosing a base year – as under the Kyoto Protocol – is problematic for developing nations. Their domestic demands for energy translate to increasing emissions, so the choice of 1990 as a base year restricts such economies to feeble, economically infeasible increments in energy production. This is one reason why India and China feature among the protocol’s second-phase’s non-ratifiers, being opposed to agreements that legally bind them to their targets.
As it happens, the US is also a non-ratifier for the same reason. Based on the WRI data, its rate of emission cuts between 2005 and 2011 was 70.8 million metric tons of CO2 per year. Assuming a simplistic linear rate of cuts until 2030, its power plants will have to knock off 83.53 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year starting 2015 to meet its target of having 32% less carbon emissions than it did in 2005. But had it gone with 1990 as the base year, it would’ve had to knock off 122.46 million metric tons of CO2 year on year – an averaged annual leeway of 46.6%.
I agree with large sections of his response, but am disappointed that they don’t address any specific points of failures – especially the lacklustre privacy and accountability safeguards. This is also why I don’t ask for the Bill to be shredded but that it be referred to a Parliamentary Standing Committee (at least) before it can be tabled. The following is a an unnumbered ‘listicle’ of my replies to Gowrishankar’s response.
That a part of the Indian Bill’s strength lies in having borrowed parts of laws from other countries, where DNA profiling has been around for more than a decade
The text of India’s Human DNA Profiling Bill may in large part be based on that from the USA, UK, Canada, etc., but many of the problems that the Bill could exacerbate are unique to India – such as the many privacy and accountability concerns highlighted in my article. Those parts of the Bill can’t be compared to what’s happening in the West. In fact, the USA, UK and Canada also have legislations in place that explicitly specify how the DNA profiles can be collected, the best practices for storing and indexing them, as well as who can access them, in what circumstances and how. TheDNA Identification Act 1994 (USA) specifies that all federally supported DNA labs comply with operational standards for collection, storage and analysis set by the FBI. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 does the same in the UK. The DNA Identification Act 1998 (Canada) also does the same and further requires a periodic review of itself every five years.
That DNA profiling has a steadfast record in being able to solve disputes and that my skepticism of it is misplaced
Yes, DNA-profiling has a fabulous track record in settling disputes. However, the drafting committee, as well as anyone interested in the Bill’s tabling, would do well to learn from the mistakes of those who have been systematically pressing DNA-profiling to the resolution of civil and criminal disputes in modern times. I am skeptical of the technique – as I’m skeptical of all techniques – so I’ve asked that the Bill be cognisant of the various statistical blips and prescribe best practices to eliminate them. As I write in my article: “This isn’t to say that a reliable [match] can never be arrived at, but only that the draft Bill does not have the commensurate depth required to identify and tackle the sort of statistically motivated mistakes in DNA profiling. In fact, it also abdicates itself from specifying any best practices for the collection, storage and analysis of DNA samples…”
That only identity-neutral information derived from a person’s DNA will be stored in the database
The Bill doesn’t say this. As far as the draft document is concerned, the contents of the database are profiles – not identity-neutral profiles, just profiles. I respect your attitude to privacy but I only ask that it be reflected fully in the Bill as well.
That a database of DNA profiles will only contain the profiles of offenders, missing persons, unidentified bodies and volunteers and that its regulation will, beyond the Bill’s sanctions, require judicial oversight
Bringing criminals to justice faster is a good aspiration to have, but it must be done not at the expense of anybody’s privacy and definitely while the government’s actions – in the form of the Board’s – are always accountable. On the question of retention: it’s understandable if you want to store the profiles of those who are repeat offenders – but why indefinitely? The law in the UK stipulates that profiles can be retained for a maximum of six years. And what’s the rationale behind storing the profiles of those who have been sentenced for life or to death?
That the Board has been given discretionary powers to empower them to keep up with advances in DNA profiling, and that the Board will be staffed by, for example, the Chairperson of the NHRC
Those staffing the Board may be upstanding folk but the Bill has a responsibility to account for the worst of times as well. I don’t want to have to keep a check on who’s on the Board and who’s not – I want the Bill to provide guarantees once and for all that things won’t go wrong. Please also note that the Bill is scheduled to be introduced at a time when the country’s leadership is unwilling to accept that the right to privacy is a fundamental right, at a time when the Central government insists on interfering in the management of highly regarded public institutions. I can only read the Bill’s intentions through the lens of the government that will enact and, ultimately, be responsible for enforcing it.
That the DNA profiles’ database will contain only digital information and not the physical samples from which the data has been derived
I have already stated that setting up the Indian database will incur a one-time cost of Rs.20 crore. And on the other hand, I would like you to explain who will pay for acquiring the DNA profiles at costs that could well run into thousands of crores. In fact, the Bill does not contain the word ‘cost’ in it and seems unconcerned about how its implementation will be funded.
Next, on the question of whether the DNA database will store the physical samples from which the profiles will be derived: Usha Ramanathan – a researcher and advocate who was a dissenting member of the Bill’s drafting committee – has revealed an email communication she had with Gowrishankar dated June 25, 2014, in which he states the following:
“On your question of destruction of DNA collected from the relatives, I wish to state that the CDFD has so far not destroyed any DNA sample received by it since its inception. These samples are being maintained in safe custody in the institute. Once again, it is my assessment that the policy on such destruction needs to be developed and evolved by the proposed DNA Profiling Board.”
As a result, could the costs could be comparable to the NDNAD in the UK?
That my criticism has cherry-picked facts from the Bill
I have cherry-picked facts, but never out of context (that’s the reason the article runs into 4,000 words). I still want a Human DNA Profiling Bill to be passed and agree with you that it has benefits – but it gets to them at a great cost. That’s why I’d like to repeat my statement that the Bill be referred to a Parliamentary Standing Committee, and its niggling as well as substantial issues be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, before it’s tabled.
The Human DNA Profiling Bill which the Narendra Modi government wants to pass in the current session of Parliament is one of the most intrusive enactments of its kind anywhere in the world, a measure that will render obsolete the national debate on privacy before it has even begun.
Drafted by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT) in the Ministry of Science & Technology, the Bill’s pithy title belies the ambitious, even disturbing, goals that its text envisions. To be sure, that it was drafted at the outset to expedite civil and criminal disputes where possible, to help identify the unclaimed dead, and to track down missing persons is a benign, even desirable, intention to have. Where it fails is in situating this agenda in an accountable and secure framework of rules.
Once passed, the law will set up a national DNA database, a DNA Profiling Board and a mechanism for the use of DNA profiles to resolve criminal and civil disputes with few safeguards to guard against the abuse of this information.
For example, in the Bill, a version of which The Wire was able to access, the Board gives itself wide-ranging discretionary powers about whose name gets into the database (sometimes without consent), who gets to access the DNA profiles, what the database could be used for (“population” studies), and who watches the watchers (in a word, nobody) – readying a potent cocktail of abuse.
The Bill is set to be tabled in the monsoon session of Parliament, which began on July 21. But that could be too soon given the scope and seriousness of the issues the draft raises. The proposed laws’ failures broadly have four facets – reliability, costs, privacy and accountability – and if passed in its current form could gravely jeopardise the integrity of sensitive biological information as well as poison the criminal justice system with a false conviction of judicial infallibility. In the absence of a reason to expedite its passing, the draft Bill could instead be referred to a Parliamentary Standing Committee before it’s tabled.
After human fingerprints were pressed into the service of criminal investigations in 1892, DNA profiles have been the only other biological marker discovered by scientists to be unique to each individual. Since fingerprints at a crime scene can be easily obfuscated, or not left behind at all, and it is almost impossible for a criminal to not leave behind a clue bearing his or her DNA, DNA profiling has assumed great importance in modern forensic science.
Every cell of the body contains a copy of the DNA molecule, a total of three billion base pairs of smaller molecules called nucleotides neatly arranged into structures called chromosomes. Consider this a giant word with three billion letters. Some 99.9% of those letters are identical for every individual – but that 0.01% difference amounts to three million letters that are arranged in a different configuration. Among them, there are parts that contain a short combination of letters repeated a few times. These are called short tandem repeats (STRs), and the frequency of their repetition differs from person to person so much so that no two (known) people have the same DNA overall – unless they’re identical twins or closely related. Identifying this difference forms the basis of DNA profiling, also known as DNA fingerprinting.
The idea of the Bill was first mooted by the DBT in 2003, during the National Democratic Alliance government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In 2007, the DNA Profiling Advisory Committee, which had been put together by the DBT, developed the Human DNA Profiling Bill 2007 that has seen changes between 2007 and 2012. In January 2013, a committee of experts was formed to scrutinise the 2012 draft: J. Gowrishankar, Director, CDFD; R.K. Gupta, adviser (C&I), Planning Commission; Jacob P. Koshy, science writer, Mint; Kamal Kumar, retd. IPS, retd. DGP of Hyderabad; C. Muralikrishna Kumar, senior adviser (ICT), Planning Commission; Usha Ramanathan, researcher and advocate; T.S. Rao, adviser, DBT; N. Madhusudan Reddy, staff scientist, CDFD; Raghbir Singh, fmr. Secy., Ministry of Law; Alka Sharma, Director, DBT.
Till late 2014, the committee continued to deliberate and make changes to the draft Bill. Then, it was circulated within the Ministry of Science & Technology for comments, which were then incorporated in the draft.
By January 2015, the revised document had wound its way to the Legislative Department of the Ministry of Law & Justice. According to DBT Secretary K. VijayRaghavan, the department has now finished drafting the Bill and “processed it further for the necessary approval”.
In the same period, 2003-2015, the Central and various state governments have toyed with the idea of collecting and storing DNA profiles. Notably, the Tamil Nadu government sought to amend the Prisoners Identification Act 1920 intending to set up a database of prisoners’ profiles. In 2012, the Uttar Pradesh government made it mandatory for the DNA profiles of dead persons to be saved along with the postmortem.
Although the draft Bill banks on an amendment to the Criminal Procedure Code made in 2005 – to allow DNA evidence to be admissible in a court – its principal and most problematic feature is the central repository it envisages of DNA profiles belonging to crime suspects, criminal offenders, missing persons, unknown deceased persons, and volunteers.
Its contents and operation will be managed by a DNA Profiling Board and a Databank Manager that the Board will appoint, who altogether have too many discretionary powers that drag the credible parts of the document down. These parts include useful mechanisms such as for post-conviction DNA-testing (where a conviction can be overturned by allowing the defendant to appeal for a DNA test).
What are the chances you’ll be killed in an airline accident? There is a number ascribed to this high-cost enterprise, and it is calculated using statistics because it’s hard to estimate how the failure of one of thousands of the components constituting it will or won’t precipitate the failure of the overall entity. So, the chances that you’ll be killed in an airline accident are 1 in 4.7 million. That means if 4.7 million flights are undertaken, one of them will result in a fatal accident, right? Not exactly, because the chances of an accident could be significantly increased if certain components of an aircraft fail, and engineers are not aware of all such precipitant failures.
Analysing the DNA of an individual to look for clues about her/his identity is subject to similar stochastic caveats. This is because, despite the many unique properties of the DNA molecules in our bodies, our ability to preclude errors in indexing them isn’t perfect. The implication is that DNA profiling throws up fewer errors when validating or invalidating less systematic proof, but there are errors nonetheless that a law – and definitely a court interpreting that law – must be aware of.
Moreover, the proofs are also dependent on how rarely or often the STRs have been observed in the past. Estimates of their rarity are based on studying some preset locations on the DNA: the CODIS database of DNA profiles in the US looks at 13 locations, the NDNAD in the UK looks at 10, whereas Interpol analyses look at 12. The CDFD (Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics) – the nodal agency for DNA analysis in the country – plans to look at 17, according to Dr. J. Gowrishankar, its director. These locations were determined to be important in the early days of DNA forensics, and according to lawyers in the US and UK are overdue for a reexamination.
The Human DNA Profiling Bill, on the other hand, is dismissive of this aspect of the technique it is centred on, with its January 2015 draft saying in its introduction that DNA profiling can distinguish between any two people “without a doubt”. The words give the impression that the experts involved in drafting it have no reason to believe that DNA profiles could ever be fallacious. In fact, conspicuously missing from the document are the statistical procedures (performed on DNA information) that will be admissible as evidence in a court of law.
Speaking to The Wire, Gowrishankar clarified that the three words “without a doubt” had been removed from the draft Bill in a later iteration – but only because the Bill would be tabled without that part in Parliament. However, he also added that he would be able to defend the infallibility of the technique.
In 2009, New Scientist reported the case of Charles Richard Smith. Smith was convicted of a sexual assault on Mary Jackson (not her real name) in Sacramento, California, which took place in January 2006. Jackson was sitting in a parking lot when a stranger jumped into her truck and made her drive to a remote location before forcing her to perform oral sex on him. When police arrested Smith and took a swab of cells from his penis, they found a second person’s DNA mixed with his own.
… a forensic scientist testified that the chances that the sample did not come from Jackson were just 1 in 95,000. Smith was convicted and jailed for 25 years. Genetic evidence, however, can be analysed in multiple ways. The analyst who provided the 1 in 95,000 number was convinced that he saw reliable ‘peaks’, indicating matches, at most of the 13 places in the genome where American forensic scientists compare DNA. His supervisor, whose evidence was also presented, thought fewer of these matches were reliable, and so put the probability that the DNA wasn’t Jackson’s at 1 in 47. A subsequent review of the case used a different technique, based on a computer algorithm, to compare the likelihood of the different interpretations of the evidence advanced by the prosecution and the defence. This suggested that this pattern of evidence was only twice as likely if the DNA was Jackson’s than if it belonged to someone else.
This isn’t to say that a reliable estimate can never be arrived at, but only that the draft Bill does not have the commensurate depth required to identify and tackle the sort of statistically motivated mistakes in DNA profiling. In fact, it also abdicates itself from specifying any best practices for the collection, storage and analysis of DNA samples – while in countries like the UK and USA, a more matured approach to DNA profiling has been instituted through laws like the DNA Identification Act 1994 (USA), the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (UK) and the DNA Identification Act 1998 (Canada).
According to Gowrishankar, “The Bill has been drafted keeping the future in mind, so we have not included the different ways in which the information can be analysed. We want to keep our options open,” and that it was up to the defence attorneys to refute findings.
The upper hand that DNA profiling claims in being able to identify a person is bifurcated: it simultaneously relies on being similar to one set of data and being dissimilar to another. And how much a profile is closer to one and farther from the other can be interpreted in many ways – all of them reliant on a control group, a reference point based on which the analyst can say how much similarity and dissimilarity a profile exhibits. This control group is defined by a sub-database that contains the DNA profiles of volunteers. Gowrishankar said that the significance of each match (or mismatch) will be determined relative to how unique the ‘letters’ in the profiles are. As a result, the size of the volunteers’ database plays a critical role in determining the outcome of cases.
In 2007, the noted legal experts Michael Saks and James Koehler presented a problem called the individualisation fallacy that arises when examiners confuse infrequency with uniqueness – a flaw that can be eliminated (to a certain extent) only by enlarging the control, i.e. volunteers’, database. For example, if an anomalous pattern in the DNA of a person has a one-in-a-quintillion chance of occurring (based on its frequency of occurrence among the volunteers), the examiner will assert that given the population of all the people on Earth only that person’s DNA has that pattern (absolute uniqueness). However, the examiner assumes wrongly that he/she is aware of all the sources of that anomaly in human genetics (relative uniqueness). A similar mix-up between the two kinds of uniqueness results in the prosecutor’s fallacy exemplified in the infamous Sally Clark case of 1999.
Another issue that worsens reliability of results is that the draft bill doesn’t explicitly ask to regularly check if any samples have been contaminated, even if it goes to some length to talk about what will happen to those who are found damaging samples in any way. How credible those sanctions are is a different matter. In at least one high-profile human rights case, the murder of five Kashmiri civilians at Pathribal in 2000, DNA samples were tampered with in an attempt to absolve the security forces of the charge of murder. The police officer who orchestrated the tampering was never punished.
II. Visible and hidden costs
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The CDFD charges Rs.5,000 for each blood sample or person and Rs.10,000 for each “forensic exhibit” – such as an item of clothing from a crime scene – and an additional 12.36% as service charge levied by the Government of India. Though the draft Bill proposes including the profiles of only those under the scanner of the criminal justice system, data from the National Crime Records Bureau shows that over 32.7 lakh people were arrested in 2012 alone on criminal charges (proven and unproven) And while Gowrishankar said the official estimates were Rs.5 crore a year for keeping the database updated, acquiring the DNA profiles alone would cost more than Rs.1,800 crore.
The number of 32.7 lakh (even if only for reference) is too bloated for the database’s purposes because it also includes persons accused of minor crimes. Even if the size of the database has to be as big as possible to minimise the effects of the individualisation fallacy, its size becomes meaningless after a point, as the British government discovered in 2008. In that year, the number of profiles on the NDNAD jumped from 1.9 million to 4.1 million but the number of cases solved by the use of DNA profiles fell by 2,632 to 17,614. This was because the 2.2 million profiles were almost entirely of people who hadn’t been charged with any offences, making their DNA profiles irrelevant when it came to comparing those picked up from crime scenes. Similarly, the draft Bill would do well to include only the profiles of those charged with serious criminal offences – comparisons would be more efficient and costs would be lower.
Next, according to GeneWatch UK: “In 2010, putting someone’s DNA profile on the database in England and Wales was estimated to cost £30 to £40 and storing one person’s DNA sample was estimated to cost £1 a year.” The CDFD analysis rates are comparable to these numbers – so it must be noted that the capital costs of setting up the database in the UK was £300 million (Rs.3,000 crore approx.). Third, there is the operational cost – to maintain the communication and security infrastructure, and ensure it is compatible with indices like the CODIS. In fact, in September 2014, the FBI and the CDFD signed an agreement to install an instance of CODIS in CDFD’s Hyderabad office and train the personnel there. However, Gowrishankar said all of this would warrant only Rs.20 crore.
None of these expenses are mentioned in the draft Bill.
A person’s DNA profile contains similar information as a person’s password – however, it is more visceral. In the mammoth spatial configuration of the DNA’s atoms is encoded many of our characteristics and personal tendencies – including colour, race, behavioural features and susceptibility to some diseases. However, the few of the three million positions that the CODIS, NDNAD or the CDFD will be looking at are considered “neutral” – they don’t codify any of our features that might give our identities away, so it’s safe to store them without being anxious about what the government is finding out about us. That’s what Gowrishankar says, too, and that only information of those 17 positions that the CDFD will consider will be stored in the database.
However, this information is missing in the draft Bill, giving the impression that non-neutral information from people’s DNA profiles will be stored as well – and sans any safeguards beyond the Bill itself, like the USA has the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act 2008. Gowrishankar said that the Bill omitted this detail because some advancement in the future could require analysing more than 17 neutral positions, or fewer, or others altogether, and that if the Bill had been specific to that extent, it would have to be modified over and over again to keep up with the times. Be that as it may, the draft Bill in its current form neither withholds the database from holding distinctly personal information nor does it acknowledge that possibility.
In that context, the information should be accorded the same rights that information on the Internet, or anywhere else, is if not more. First, a person should be able to appeal the inclusion of her DNA profile in the database – although Gowrishankar insisted no profile could mistakenly enter the database as it would require either a court order or an expression of consent to get there. Second, the person should be able to access her/his own DNA profile whenever the need arises through appropriate legal channels – which he said wouldn’t be possible at all. Third, the person whose profile is under scrutiny should be able to know how the information contained is being used and why, and to ascertain its deletion when due. These three rights are missing in the draft bill.
Moreover, in a separate note, the committee says,
The Expert Committee also discussed and emphasised that the Privacy Bill is being piloted separately by the Government. That Bill will override all the other provisions on privacy issues in the DNA Bill.
But even as the draft DNA-profiling bill seeks to deflect the responsibility of securing privacy to the Privacy Bill, aReport of the Group of Experts on Privacy, Chaired by Justice A.P. Shah (former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court), explicitly set out the missing privacy and security provisions in October 2012, and a majority of them remain unresolved or unaddressed. By neglecting them, the CDFD and the DNA Profiling Board run the risk of turning themselves opaque and, for all practical purposes, unaccountable. For example, the draft Bill does not:
Provide a notice that DNA samples were collected from so-so areas of the body
Inform anybody – particularly the individual – if and when her/his DNA is contaminated, misplaced or stolen
Inform a person if a case involving her/his DNA is pending, ongoing or closed
Inform the people when there are changes in how their DNA is going to be accessed, or if the way their DNA is being stored or used is changed
Distinguish between when DNA can be collected with consent and when it can’t
Say how volunteers can contribute their DNA to the database even though the draft Bill has a provision for voluntary submissions
Provide any explicit guarantee that the collected DNA won’t be used for anything other than circumstances specified in the Bill
Specify when doctors or the police can or can’t access DNA profiles
Without these protections, the DNA profiles could be collected for one purpose but end up being used for something else. Consider #7 – the draft Bill doesn’t aspire to be self-contained and leaves itself open to expanding in the future. At one point (Sec. 31(4)), it spells out the various indices according to which profiles in the database will be stored:
Every DNA Data Bank shall maintain following indices for various categories of data, namely:
(a) a crime scene index;
(b) a suspects’ index;
(c) an offenders’ index;
(d) a missing persons’ index;
(e) unknown deceased persons’ index;
(f) a volunteers’ index; and
(g) such other DNA indices as may be specified by Regulations.
Why bother to specify any of the indices at all if the committee has (g)? And without specifying what regulations those could be and who, apart from the DNA Profiling Board, has the authority to spell them out, the draft Bill signals it could just about bring anyone’s DNA profiles into the database.
Additionally, who will watch the watchmen? The DNA Profiling Board is tasked – rather tasks itself – with determining which DNA profiles enter the database, who gets to access them, and how the database will be organised and maintained, in effect establishing a low quality check over itself. Although Gowrishankar clarified that there would be a Parliamentary check on the Board’s activities and that Parliament would be the ultimate arbiter for all “major” issues arising due to the Bill, there is still a lack of supervision – and potential for abuse – in the day-to-day dispensation of duties. If the Human DNA Profiling bill has to be effective and honest, it must account for the privacy shortcomings described by the Group of Experts.
Another concern is anonymisation – the process through which information contained in DNA profiles can’t be used to retrace the individuals from whom they were acquired. There is no description of a form or application of any kind that the draft Bill expects to be submitted along with the materials containing human DNA. If the Bill expects to use the form currently being used by the CDFD, there is an anomaly: the CDFD form asks for the applicant to mention her caste. Even if the draft Bill doesn’t explicitly mention that the database will have a ‘caste’ column, being able to associate an application form with a sample – and therefore ‘its caste’ – is plausible, especially in the volunteers’ database.
More troublingly, Section 31(6)(a) states that a DNA profile in the database will bear the identity of its source if its source is an offender, and that (b) all other DNA profiles will be relatable with the case reference number. The problem is that the case reference is not anonymised with respect to the people involved in the case.
The DNA Profiling Board overseeing the implementation of the bill (when enacted) has given itself, and the bill, some conflicting rules and powers that together result in ambiguity about the scope of the bill and its accountability. Some examples:
Conflicts of interest – Section 12(k) states that the board is responsible for “making recommendations for maximising the use of DNA techniques and technologies in administration of justice”. Then, throughout the bill, the board’s powers are also detailed as extending to specifying the rules for how DNA information is collected and secured. Put them together and the board’s essentially saying, “We’ll try to use DNA evidence for as many things as possible, we’ll decide how the information is collected for those purposes, and we’ll decide how we’ll use it.”
Ex post facto implication – Section 13 states that any laboratory that wishes to undertake human DNA-profiling must get prior consent from the board. Then, Section 14(2) allows any DNA laboratory that’s in existence at the time the bill is enacted to perform human DNA profiling without prior approval from the board.
Use of profiles – Section 39(g) states that “Information relating to DNA profiles, DNA samples and records relating thereto shall be made available” to a slew of judicial and executive agencies as well as “for any other purposes, as may be prescribed”. However, those prescriptions have not been detailed in the Bill, and appear to be at the discretion of the DNA Profiling Board. In fact, Section 39(e) states that the profiles, and “samples and records relating thereto”, may be used for creating a “population statistics” database. This is to facilitate population-wide studies of genetic characteristics, and in the absence of perfect anonymisation, could potentially become associated with caste data.
Moreover, Section 35(2), which deals with the communication of DNA profiles to foreign states and institutions, doesn’t limit it to offenders and convicts but, by not discussing it in detail, allows for any profile in the database to be shared. Put this together with an individual’s inability to appeal the inclusion of her/his profile, and anyone’s profile – as long as it has wound its way into the database – can be shared with foreign entities. There are also no restrictions on if the foreign agencies can index the profile in another database.
Legal recourse after three months – Someone who’s been wronged by any of the provisions of the bill can approach a court only if he/she approaches the board first and gives it three months to act on a complaint. In those three months or before that, Section 57(1) of the bill prevents anyone from approaching the courts except the central government or a member of the board itself.
Finally, there’s the absence of a sunset clause – especially when its provisions will expire, and if there is a period after which a DNA profile will be removed from the database. For the latter, the draft Bill specifies that if a person has been acquitted in a case or if the case is set aside, the corresponding profile will be deleted, but nothing is said about the profiles of missing persons who have been identified, volunteers who have died, and other profiles that are likely to be collected at crime scenes. Moreover, no rationale is presented for retaining the profiles of those who are convicted of offences like rape or murder, who end up spending long years or a lifetime in prison. While Gowrishankar asserted that only the DNA profiles of the unidentified dead would be held forever, the draft Bill does not explicitly exclude the rest.
Given the scale of issues with the draft Bill, and its potentially disastrous sidelining of privacy concerns, its scheduled introduction in the monsoon session of the Lok Sabha seems hurried – despite having first been mooted more than a decade ago. Some of the issues may have escaped the drafting committee’s concerns by way of not having received appropriate feedback – such as the issue of hidden costs – but the committee must explain why there is a lack of access to data of the people by the people, why there are no sound anonymisation protocols, and why there are insufficient self-regulation and protection measures.
Download an annotated copy of the Human DNA Profiling Bill draft here (PDF).
The Department of Telecommunications’ new report (PDF) on net neutrality is a deceptive piece of work. Drawn up by a committee set up in January 2015, it was perceived as a reaction to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s consultation paper in May on implementing the principles of net neutrality in Indian telecom regulation. While the TRAI document triggered a controversy by appearing ambiguous about its intentions, the DoT report presents half-measures with the aim of creating a level playing field for telecom service providers (TSPs).
What are the more contentious issues in the DoT report?
On the question of regulating domestic VoIP calls made through over-the-top (OTT) services like WhatsApp, Viber and Skype, the report appears confused. The committee writes that while app-to-app calls made internationally should be unregulated, local calls ought to be regulated by the issuance and revocation of licenses. This has prompted the Indian telecom industry to ask why the DoT wants to spare international VoIP calls. When you call your sibling in Princeton from an Airtel number in Chennai, the TSP that picks up and relays the call in the New Jersey area takes the bulk of the fee you pay to make the call – not Airtel. Likely because of this arrangement, the DoT is not concerned about regulating international VoIP calls. Of course, acknowledging the need for regulatory balance on the one hand but ignore it on the other lays it open to the charge of double-standards.
However, given that it wants to regulate domestic VoIP calls in the interest of creating what it thinks is a level playing field within the country, why not protect a level playing field among TSPs abroad as well? Moreover, WhatsApp, Skype and Viber are all foreign companies and data made via their apps could be routed through foreign servers – further lightening the distinction between domestic and international calls.
Another issue is centred on zero-rating, the practice of ISPs routing some traffic through the network at subsidised rates based on its sources. The DoT committee writes, “if government wants to give services free on the internet (like zero rating), it is considered as positive discrimination and not seen as violation of Net Neutrality. Therefore, it should be permitted in public interest. Government can provide zero rated channels to citizens for essential services (public interest zero rating), based on clear public policy and principles and on non-commercial terms.”
Because zero-rated traffic is qualified based on agreements entered into with the TSPs/ISPs, small players who can’t afford it perceive it as ‘negative discrimination’. However, the DoT report retorts that such agreements will be overseen by anti-competitive laws and that their ability to participate in the ecosystem will be protected by those laws. Overall, in fact, the report also encourages passing on the burden of accomplishing zero-rating’s goals, such as increasing access to the Internet among the masses, to solutions like free Wifi and providing vouchers paid for by the government.
Will regulating VoIP be a direct violation of net neutrality?
There is a difference between making licenses the minimum requirement to operate a business and using licenses to regulate a business. The big bullet was going to be whether OTT and OTT-VoIP services would be banned if they didn’t come under a licensing regime. This is no longer going to be the case for OTT-application services (like Facebook), but for OTT-communications services, the DoT committee is resurrecting an argument that has been around for years.
For example, in November 2014, it was at TRAI’s behest that Skype suspended its app-to-phone calling service. One of the demands then – when the debate on net neutrality hadn’t yet kicked off in India – was not to suspend OTTs but to subject them to the same regulatory bindings that applied to TSPs. Vodafone Essar’s T.V. Ramachandran had told NDTV, “We can do a lot more if a level playing field is given to us”.
And within the limitations of net neutrality, one possible way out of the Gordian knot now is to extend restrictions on features like call-switching and do-not-disturb to OTTs as well. This could even out the regulatory imbalance as well as encourage innovation in the sector, but inevitably also impose some costs on WhatsApp that could be transferred to subscribers.
Such a regulatory environment would be similar to the one in the US, where the Federal Communications Commission doesn’t regulate VoIP calls but requires compliance with a set of law enforcement rules, contributions to a fund that pays for “communication services in high-cost areas”, maintenance of call-records, providing local number portability, and providing special services for people with speech or hearing disabilities. Some other countries – like the UK and Italy – don’t regulate VoIP either but allow differential pricing. In fact, should TRAI and DoT agree on using licenses to regulate OTTs’ domestic VoIP services, India will become the first country to do so.
Why is regulation necessary?
Whether any of these should be regulated at all defers to a deeper conflict: the advent of VoIP is a consequence of technology’s natural disruptive capacity that’s so prized by entrepreneurs, while on the other hand it is perceived as an unfair form of arbitrage by those already invested in the sector. For example, a VoIP call costs 12.5 times less than a call made via a TSP on average – while TSPs like Airtel, Vodafone and others have already sunk in Rs.7.5 lakh crore to develop infrastructure that furthers their business in the country.
An intervening regulator has to decide whom to side with, the consumer or the investor, and he is answerable to both (Is this what prompted the DoT’s recommendation to regulate domestic VoIP calls but not text-messages?).
The answer isn’t straightforward from anybody’s perspective. Because of their low costs, TRAI could let VoIP calls remain unregulated and relax the tariff scheme for TSPs/ISPs to compete with the OTTs. On the other hand, TSPs/ISPs incur significant infrastructural costs when expanding into new areas and have to make that up. And finally, while TRAI can regulate local players but not OTTs like Facebook and WhatsApp that are based abroad, the DoT suggests it can regulate VoIP calls through a licensing regime – which can be long-winded and arbitrary.
I used to think $10 billion was a lot of money before TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion bailout that saved the banks in 2008 and apparently has brought happy days back to Wall Street. Compared with this, the science budget is chump change, lunch money at a place like Goldman Sachs. But if you think this is not a bargain, you need look only as far as your pocket. Companies like Google and Apple have leveraged modest investments in computer science in the 1960s into trillions of dollars of economic activity. Not even Arthur C. Clarke, the vaunted author and space-age prophet, saw that coming.
Which is to say that all that NASA money — whether for planetary probes or space station trips — is spent on Earth, on things that we like to say we want more of: high technology, education, a more skilled work force, jobs, pride in American and human innovation, not to mention greater cosmic awareness, a dose of perspective on our situation here among the stars.
And this is a letter from Todd Huffman, a particle physicist at Oxford, to The Guardian:
Simon Jenkins parrots a cry that I have heard a few times during my career as a research scientist in high-energy physics (Pluto trumps prisons when we spend public money, 17 July). He is unimaginatively concerned that the £34m a year spent by the UK at Cern (and a similar amount per year would have been spent on the New Horizons probe to Pluto) is not actually money well spent.
Yet I read his article online using the world wide web, which was developed initially by and for particle physicists. I did this using devices with integrated circuits partly perfected for the aerospace industry. The web caused the longest non-wartime economic boom in recorded history, during the 90s. The industries spawned by integrated circuits are simply too numerous to count and would have been impossible to predict when that first transistor was made in the 50s. It is a failure of society that funnels such economic largesse towards hedge-fund managers and not towards solving the social ills Mr Jenkins rightly exposes.
Conflict of interest? Not really. Science is being cornered from all sides and if anyone’s going to defend its practice, it’s going to be scientists. But we’re often so ready to confuse participation for investment, and at the first hint of any allegation of conflict, don’t wait to verify matters for ourselves.
I’m sure Yuri Milner’s investment of $100 million today to help the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence will be questioned, too, despite Stephen Hawking’s moving endorsement of it:
Somewhere in the cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean. Or do our lights wander a lifeless cosmos — unseen beacons, announcing that here, on one rock, the Universe discovered its existence. Either way, there is no bigger question. It’s time to commit to finding the answer – to search for life beyond Earth. We are alive. We are intelligent. We must know.
Pursuits like exploring the natural world around us are, I think, what we’re meant to do as humans, what we must do when we can, and what we must ultimately aspire to.
A Department of Telecommunications committee has released a report on the issue of net neutrality, following the controversial policy consultation paper that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India put out in May. The report falls in life with many of the popular demands that surged on social media following the TRAI paper, and includes this telling line: “The Committee is of the view that the statement of [telecom companies] that they are under financial stress due to the rapidly falling voice revenues and insufficient growth in data revenues, is not borne out by evaluation of financial data.”
At the same time, it also tucks in a potentially controversial suggestion that could rekindle debate: of regulating domestic calls made through VoIP-enabled over-the-top (OTT) services like WhatsApp and Viber through the Telegraph Act, while leaving alone international calls made through the same apps. It remains to be seen how many of the report’s recommendations TRAI will adopt.
One of the more contentious topics in the the TRAI paper was if OTT services like Facebook and WhatsApp, called so because they rely on local Internet service providers to relay data between their applications and users, should be regulated in India. The DoT report states that non-VoIP OTTs, as well as application-based services like Uber and Ola Cabs, won’t be regulated. VoIP stands for voice-over Internet Protocol, the use of an Internet connection to make phone calls.
Strangely, the report marks a distinction between domestic calls made through VoIP OTTs and international VoIP OTTs, and recommends that only the former be regulated. The ostensible reason for this is that the DoT wants to protect the revenues of telecom companies and, possibly, doesn’t want to interfere with the millions of middle-class Indians who keep in touch with their sons and daughters abroad. But no explicit reason for this differentiation has been provided. In fact, as Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society pointed out on Twitter, the DoT’s suggested use of licenses to regulate such VoIP OTTs isn’t a net-neutrality issue in the first place.
Beyond this sore point: the report also examines how – and how not to – examine data packets flowing through the ‘pipes’, or connections between nodes, of the Internet, and expressly rules out the illegal use of deep packet inspection. Deep packet inspection is a technique often used on networks to eavesdrop on data as it passes through a pipe. The document has also been courageous enough to admit that not all zero-rating plans “are controversial or against the net neutrality principles”. Zero-rating is akin to a toll-gate within a pipe which allows data of some forms or originating from certain sources to pass through without a fee while taxing the rest. Such implementations could be useful when providing government services – like railway bookings – for cheap to the rural poor, but at the same time would have to be protected from non-competitive uses by private enterprises.
Thus, the report recommends “the incorporation of a clause in the license conditions of TSP/ISPs that will require the licensee to adhere to the principles and conditions of Net Neutrality specified by guidelines issued by the licensor from time to time”.
Beyond the questions surrounding net neutrality, the report also takes a stand on India’s digital sovereignty, taking cognisance of the fact that “there is a need for a balance to be drawn to retain the country’s ability to protect the privacy of its citizens and data protection without rendering it difficult for business operations”. It goes on to suggest that the TRAI could “identify critical and important areas through public consultations” when the question of hosting data locally – in servers as well as pipes physically located in the country – arises. Now, the ball is decidedly in TRAI’s court, and it would be unfair to say the body isn’t under pressure to implement what appears to be an amenable report from the DoT.
