As tech news website IndiaServer puts it:

This arrest was made because of complaint made by a Congress worker in Pune who had noticed these messages on Orkut recently. The police are now on a lookout for everybody who had posted some obscene content about Sonia Gandhi. However, the person who created the community has not been charged for hating a famous personality or having opinion which is illegal in India.

The law enforcement agency had asked Google, who is the owner of Orkut to provide the details of Vaid and it obliged. Google said that the police authorities had asked for the details of the boy and they gave them the IP address information. Till the time India has some strict laws regarding cyber crimes like the US, it is always better to avoid joining such communities or to join them after paying proper attention to it.

For your average 22 year-old IT worker, though, is simply avoiding sensitive online discussion a practical or even desirable solution? As other Orkut users are now asking, what happened to India’s constitution?

As seen in similar cases involving Yahoo!’s operations in China, American ethical standards for corporate behavior don’t always apply in other countries. While American law appears to be moving toward making it illegal for domestic companies like Google to enable foreign governments to suppress online speech, as Cyndy Aleo-Carreira reminds us in a post linked to by Global Voices Online editor Neha Viswanathan, these same companies’ overseas operations ultimately have local laws to worry about:

The prevailing mentality in the U.S. is that U.S. laws are the One True Law and the rest of the world should abide by them in some form of global agreement. I’m sure that given the U.S. government’s tendency to reinterpret even the U.S. Constitution (Gitmo), there are many countries out there who are more than happy that they aren’t subject to the laws of the U.S.

At least Vaid will be given a trial; and as Aleo-Carreira mentions further down in the comments of her post, the role that Indian law has played in his arrest is still what’s most relevant:

According to the complaint, the individual in question crossed a similar line as it applies to Indian law. If it was a matter of simply expressing himself, then don’t you think others, including the group’s creator, would also have been charged? There is this quick jump to judgment by Americans over anything “furrin” when our own adherence to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights isn’t exactly stellar at the moment.

The complaint against Vaid goes back to December last year. What remains to be seen is how scrutiny and opposition has been aimed at the IT Act on a local level, particularly regarding the sections used against him, as well as what exactly it was Vaid put online.

For reference, Google defends its filtering of search results in China by saying that its presence alone does more for free speech than if it had no presence in China at all. Following Vaid’s arrest, a number of groups have been set up on Orkut and hundreds of comments have been posted weighing heavily in Vaid’s support.

According to Download Squad, access to the popular social networking website Facebook has been blocked in the United Arab Emirates. Some UAE internet users are confirming that the ban was ordered by the government-owned Etisalat. The Administrator of itihad.net (UAE) called up his ISP’s call center and they stated that they are blocking Facebook.

Other Internet users, however, are reporting (here [Ar], here [En] and here [En]) they can access the website and that there is no blocking at their end.

On September 05 2007, The UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) told Time Out Dubai that “At the present time we can say that we have no intention of stopping access to Facebook (…) We have heard that people think this is going to happen but that is not the case. However, we do take any complaints seriously and the situation would be reviewed should that happen.”

Apparently, it seems that Facebook is blocked to some people, but not to all. Nevertheless, UAE Facebook community has setup a petition to keep facebook from being permanently blocked. The petition has already more than 690 signatures. According to Time Out Dubai, “Facebook has over 55,000 users in the UAE with numbers rising daily.”

Almost the same thing happened last month in Iran when HAMSA’s “C.R.I.M.E” reported that Facebook was being blocked, relying on Information provided by the “Against internet censorship and filtering in Iran” Facebook group. Hamid Tehrani, Global Voices’ Persian Language Editor, was following the case through his contacts in Iran, received contradictory reports and screenshots from trusted bloggers proving that the ban was most likely on the ISP level and not an official ban.

Some of the inaccurate reporting on the Iran issue illustrated the difficulties of reporting on anti-censorship issues. As Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman has said, “one of the major challenges of documenting and decrying Internet censorship is that it can be very confusing to figure out precisely why you can’t access a particular website. Is the problem specific to your internet service provider? Is the server down? Or is a block of some sort taking place?” Zuckerman cited the reaction to the ban on Blogspot.com in India in July 2006, during which Indian bloggers were documenting and carefully updating the situation, as a good example of anti-censorship reporting.

The police needs to install programs that will capture every key stroke at regular interval screen shots, which will be sent back to a server that will log all the data.

The police can then keep track of all communication between terrorists no matter, which part of the world they operate from.This is the only way to patrol the net and this is how the police informer is going to look in the e-age.

This new monitoring software, CARMS (Cyber Access Remote Monitoring System), that Mumbai’s police are requiring the city’s 500 Internet cafes to install, “will capture every keystroke by users and turn that information over to the government — nearly in realtime by the sound of it,” said the Indian journalist Amit Varma .