A major controversy is swirling around an Indian school, the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), an article about the Institute published in a college lifestyles magazine, Jam, and Gaurav Sabnis, a popular Indian blogger who linked to the article and added some commentary of his own. IIPM did not respond well to the critical articles, and after publication a series of attack blogs sprang up. In addition Sabnis was served with a legal notice and, more to the point, according to Sabnis, his employer, IBM, was threatened by IIPM (which happens to be one of IBM's major customers). "IIPM had given IBM a deadline of Monday morning, i.e morning of today, 10th October, to ensure I deleted my posts. Failing which, they would burn the laptops." Sabnis resigned from IBM on Monday (making it clear that the company was not responsible for the decision). Anyhow, as this article notes, a storm has erupted in the blogosphere as many other writers have recognized how easy it is to place this sort of pressure on people to keep them quiet. It makes me think of the 'not hired for blogging' articles we've run here recently. In the previous centuries, civil rights were drafted to protect our liberties, including freedom of speech, from the excesses of governance. In this century, with a shifting balance of power, we have to ask, what will protect us from the excesses of the private sector, within which we have few civil rights? Whether Sabnis is right or wrong, I stand with him - his fate is my fate, a fact of which I am conscious every time I press 'send' in these pages. And that, maybe, is something tenure committees should also think about. Via Dan Gillmor and Global Voices.
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