It appears that Gulshan Rai, the head of India's Cybersecurity body CERT-in, at a cyber security conference accused us at MediaNama of being a front for Google because we spoke up against India's draconian IT Rules. At least, that's what Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan of the Times Group has just tweeted. Dr Rai suggested that Radhakrishnan look into our "funding", as well as that of CIS India. The tweets, in reverse chronological order: Our response to this 1. Our Funding Status: For the record: Google has not funded us, and has never even ever advertised with us. We provide disclosures on all our advertisers in related stories (sample 1, 2, 3); we operate transparently. We are unfunded and bootstrapped, and to be honest, I had to take a call two months ago about whether MediaNama should continue or not, because of paucity of resources; we shut some projects and had to ask a few people to leave, and we're doing all right now. The editorial space is sacrosanct, and we would rather shut down than prostitute journalism. 2. On the IT Rules and monitoring: We chose to raise awareness of these issues because we believe that this is in the interest of the digital ecosystem, as well as in the broader interest of democracy, freedom of speech and civil liberty in India. We see it as our responsibility to raise these issues and talk to all interested citizens, companies and industry bodies about them, and not because of some imagined funders. We have raised…
