Anti-Censorship Machine
Internet Censorship in India has been a major subject of several debates and protests in the past decades in India.
Upload any 600px x 600px image. Get an Encrypted Deconstructed Image ready to share without being censored. Upload that Encrypted Image to get back the original one.
Try one of these 600px x 600px images: A painting that was reported or A cartoon that was censored
Why Anti-Censorship?
India leads the list of countries with the most-submitted takedown requests in the past decade.
That's across multiple major platforms; Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Wikimedia.
In the last decade, India submitted a total of 77,620 takedown requests to four of these major companies.
It's a stark difference between what we think online censorship is like in India, and how it really is. About 20 percent of these takedown requests from India came from the government.
Article Reference:
https://www.indiatimes.com/technology/news/india-has-sent-most-censorship-requests-to-social-media-
platforms-in-last-10-years-377053.html
Example:
Social Media Platforms such as Facebook are often inconsistent and Biased in taking down reported content.
It has been observed that artistic expressions of Nudity, and criticism against Government have been one of the
major post-topics that have been taken down often.
In 2011, a nationwide anti-corruption movement India Against Corruption gathered pace, and Aseem Trivedi,
Indian Political Cartoonist joined the crusade and started a cartoon based campaign, Cartoons Against
Corruption to support the movement with his art.
The site was suspended after a complaint to the Mumbai Crime Branch. The complaint stated that
The Cartoons were defamatory and derogatory for displaying
objectionable pictures and texts related to flag and emblem of India.
Article Reference:
https://art-leaks.org/2012/01/12/democracy-arrested-in-india-aseem-trivedi-continues-his-struggle-against-censorship/
Design Process, Reflections and Observations
I started with exploring the input information that will need to be Encrypted or Deconstructed.
From Text or Messages, to Audio, Video, Photographs, and a plain canvas on which message can be written or drawn,
I explored different media of input information. The best suited option seemed to be a plain canvas where one can
write or draw something, which is customizable, and then the Canvas be deconstructed as an image.
However, the deconstruction, and reconstruction methods itself seemed quite complex, and thus a simple medium of
images was decided for this test-run of an Anti-Surveillance Machine.
What this Anti-Surveillance Tool intends to do:
Choose a sensitive or controversial image to be shared → Deconstruct it → Share it → Reconstruct it
Restrictions/Limitations: createFileInput() was explored so that the users can upload their own image.
The challenge was to create a code that suited all image sizes, and that was done by resizing the image so that the
longest side is 600 px (canvas size), however, this became an issue later on while deconstructing and reconstructing,
thus for now for this Tool, it is coded so that it only works for 600px x 600px image.
Restrictions/Limitations: Various Mathematical calculations were tried so that the shuffle of pixels could be reverted,
however, none made the image distort enough. Several advanced javascript references suggests that random() and shuffle() can
be reversed, but for this tool, with just basic understanding of the language, regular shuffle() function is used to deconstruct
the image, and the image can be retrieved from pre-stored values of the original. This is a limitation of the tool for now, as a
user can only Encrypt and Decrypt an image together and cannot be done if the code is run again or refreshed in-between.
However, this is a work in progress and is expected to be more flexible and universal with additional knowledge of the language.