NEW DELHI: The Government today released the national Cyber Security Policy aimed at facilitating creation of secure computing environment and enabling adequate trust and confidence in electronic transactions and also guiding stakeholders actions for protection of cyber space.

The National Cyber Security Policy document outlines a road-map to create a framework for comprehensive, collaborative and collective response to deal with the issue of cyber security at all levels within the country.

The policy recognises the need for objectives and strategies that need to be adopted both at the national level as well as international level.

Releasing the document, Communications and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal underlined that this policy should be seen as about protecting of information, such as personal information, financial/banking information, sovereign data etc. He said that information empowers, and in order to empower people with information, we need to secure the information/data. He also flagged the need to distinguish between data which can freely flow and data which needs to be protected.

Sibal pointed out that the real challenge is in the operationalisation of this policy. He also stated that the government, through incentives and subsidies will need to support Small and Medium Enterprises for accessing the technology to make their systems safe. He also called on businesses to set aside finances for keeping themselves safe in cyber space.

Speaking on the occasion, Minister of State for Communications and IT Milind Deora congratulated all stakeholders and especially officers in the department who worked towards the formulation of the policy. He underlined that this policy will help protect our sovereign assets.

The "National Cyber Security Policy" has been prepared in consultation with all relevant stakeholders, user entities and public.

The objectives and strategies outlined in the National Cyber Security Policy together serve as a means to:

i. Articulate our concerns, understanding, priorities for action as well as directed efforts.

ii. Provide confidence and reasonable assurance to all stakeholders in the country (Government, business, industry and general public) and global community, about the safety, resiliency and security of cyber space.

iii. Adopt a suitable posturing that can signal our resolve to make determined efforts to effectively monitor, deter & deal with cyber crime and cyber attacks.

Salient features of the policy

In brief, the National Cyber Security Policy covers the following aspects:

? A vision and mission statement aimed at building a secure and resilience cyber space for citizens, businesses and Government.

? Enabling goals aimed at reducing national vulnerability to cyber attacks, preventing cyber attacks & cyber crimes, minimising response & recover time and effective cyber crime investigation and prosecution.

? Focused actions at the level of Govt., public-private partnership arrangements, cyber security related technology actions, protection of critical information infrastructure and national alerts and advice mechanism, awareness & capacity building and promoting information sharing and cooperation.

? Enhancing cooperation and coordination between all the stakeholder entities within the country.

? Objectives and strategies in support of the National cyber security vision and mission.

? Framework and initiatives that can be pursued at the Govt. level, sectoral levels as well as in public private partnership mode.

? Facilitating monitoring key trends at the national level such as trends in cyber security compliance, cyber attacks, cyber crime and cyber infrastructure growth.

NEW DELHI: A majority of the participants in the fifth open house on media ownership in Indore today alleged that the media in the country was in the hands of just a handful of large corporate houses.

Answering around thirty questions that officials of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) raised at the open house which Trai officials confirmed was the last before the regulator finalises its recommendations to the government, the participants wanted greater democratisation in the media.

As in the last two meets, a large number of the 300 plus stakeholders were local cable operators who raised problems relating to digitisation.

The Indore Cable Operators Mahasangh president Iqbal Khan said that the revenue sharing pattern between the multi-system operators (MSOs) and LCO was very lopsided since it was the LCO community which dealt with the consumer. He said that the revenue share of Rs 80 given to the LCO under the conditional access system should not be reduced.
Other LCOs raised the issue of billing, saying that no billing was being done at present despite digital access system having been introduced.

They also complained about the poor quality of the set top boxes claiming that most were not of BIS standards and also pointing out that there was no centre for maintenance of these STBs.

However, officials of Trai claimed that a fruitful discussion was held on the subject under discussion. The meet was addressed on behalf of Trai by principal advisor N Parameswaran and advisor Wasi Ahmed.

The earlier open houses were in Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Delhi and Bhubaneswar.

Trai had set 29 April as the last date for stakeholders to offer their cross-comments on a consultation paper on the subject. The paper had been issued on 15 February but the final date had been extended in view of the ?complexity of the issue?.
The paper among other issues has sought comments on devising ownership rules for vertical integration between broadcasting and distribution entities.

The paper will also devise rules/restrictions in case of mergers and acquisitions in the media sector, and media ownership rules within and across media segments.

Methodology to measure ownership or control of an entity over a media outlet, identification of genres to be considered while framing media ownership rules, and prescribing norms for mandatory disclosures by media entities are some other issues.

Trai has also discussed in its paper issues relating to identification of media segments wherein media ownership rules are to be prescribed, and identification of relevant markets for evaluating various parameters to be used for devising ownership rules and the methodology for measuring these parameters.

At the outset, Trai - which had issued a paper on the same issue some years earlier - said the paper had been issued at the request of the I&B ministry earlier last year following a report of the Administrative Staff College of India, in Hyderabad.

Trai said that it was felt that reasonable restrictions may need to be put in place on ownership in the media sector, to ensure media pluralism and to counter the ills of monopolies. It pointed out that such restrictions do exist in many international markets.