New Delhi: The government’s pledge to review plans to introduce curbs on Internet freedom persuaded the opposition to join the treasury benches in defeating a statutory motion that sought to annul the intermediary country’s information technology, or IT, rules.

The motion in the Rajya Sabha came on a day when activists hacked the websites of the Supreme Court and the Congress party to register their protest against the government’s bid to curb online access after several video sharing websites were banned by a legal order.

This attack came amid the censorship debate in the country sharpening dramatically, with the government’s various attempts in the past to regulate Internet content being construed as measures towards impinging freedom of speech and expression in the country.

The statutory motion was moved by P. Rajeeve, Rajya Sabha member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), and sought to annul the so-called IT (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, alleging they would lead to “private censorship”.

The rules were notified in April 2011 but led to outrage in India’s Internet community as they require the hosts or the owners of the websites to take action against “objectionable content” within 36 hours of receiving a complaint.

And though the rules are aimed at ensuring due diligence by intermediaries—including telcos, Internet and web-hosting service providers and search engines—they could also lead to censorship with some intermediaries complying with requests to ban websites in a bid to avoid litigation.

Rajeeve’s motion was defeated after communications and technology minister Kapil Sibal assured the house he would seek the views of members of Parliament, industry bodies and other stakeholders on the rules and take action after a consensus emerges.

“Under the new media, there will be new challenges and we will need to be ready for the challenges,” Sibal told the House. After the consultations, he will present an agreed position before Parliament for further decision.

The websites of the Supreme Court and the ruling party were attacked.

The following message was posted on Twitter: “Anonymous Operations@Anon_Central: Namaste #India, your time has come to trash the current government and install a new one. Good luck. #SaveTPB #Anonymous (official twitter handle of anonymous).”

The Anonymous Internet hacker group retaliates against anti-digital piracy campaigns, including bans or censorship of some torrent (peer-to-peer networking) and video-sharing sites, including The Pirate Bay and Vimeo.

In a video posted by Anonymous and telecast by NDTV, the group said, “The department of telecom, has ordered all Internet service providers in India to block access to all file-sharing websites… We cannot let any censorship happen.” The video said this was similar to actions by the UK high court.

It signed off by saying: “We will not let this go, we are Anonymous… Expect us. Operation India engaged.”

Mint reported on 10 May that Reliance Entertainment Pvt. Ltd had got a court order to block these sites ahead of its coming film releases to combat piracy.

Court-decreed bans are implemented by the department of telecommunications, or DoT. A Reliance Entertainment official had earlier told Mint that even though the directions are only for blocking content related to the company’s films, Internet Services Providers, or ISPs, sometimes block entire websites in response.

While Pirate Bay is a torrent website, Vimeo is largely used by independent filmmakers to share their work.

“This attack should not be seen as a very routine attack,” said cyberlaw expert and Supreme Court lawyer Pavan Duggal. It takes place as the intermediary rules under the Amended Information Technology Act 2000 (now known as IT Act 2008) have come into sharp focus, in terms of being very broad in their ambit.

“By and large, the impression is that India is going in the direction of censorship,” he said.

The issue of censorship came to prominence in December last year when Sibal said the government will evolve “guidelines” for social media companies after they had refused to comply with the government over banning “objectionable content”, some of it pertaining to senior Congress leaders such as Sonia Gandhi.

Criminal proceedings followed against companies such as Facebook and Google in the Delhi high court.

“These attacks (by hackers like the Anonymous group) are nothing but a symbolic representation from a group, which believes this is one way of drawing attention of not just the Indian government but the nation as a whole,” said Duggal. He added that though India as a democracy is not committed to Internet censorship, there are certain rules and regulations that “I distinctly believe need to be appropriately tweaked. At no point of time, the Internet as a phenomenon can be completely controlled by the government”.

Campaigns by Anonymous in India are not new. According to digital media news website MediaNama, Anonymous’ last one was in June 2011, when it hacked the National Informatics Centre website because of the police action against Baba Ramdev’s anti-corruption campaign.

The group had also announced its plans for Operation India Against Corruption on Twitter and Facebook.

The hacking of government websites in the country has increased with around 112 such instances in the first three months of the year, which included those of the ministries of finance, health and human resource development, besides the Planning Commission.

This compares with the 117 government websites targeted in the six months between January and June last year.

The blocking of video-sharing websites through court order is the latest tack of the entertainment industry to curtail piracy of films and music over the Internet.

Eduardo Saverin can escape the US, but he can’t escape Facebook.

“Everything I do in my personal life, in my professional life, it’s completely there,” said Saverin, a Facebook co-founder, in his first in-depth interview in conjunction with the company’s impending initial public offering. “A lot of what I do, what everyone does, is influenced by it.”

Alone among Facebook’s 900 million users, Saverin is special: a billionaire with only the vaguest of causes. He co-founded Facebook at age 21, then left two years later with a legal settlement that cut him off from Facebook but left him phenomenally wealthy. His stake will most likely be worth more than $3 billion (around Rs 16,500 crore) when Facebook goes public Friday.

Reports last week that Saverin, 30 and born in Brazil, had renounced the US citizenship he gained as a teenager led to considerable criticism that he was skipping out to avoid taxes. He has become a permanent resident of Singapore, which levies no capital gains taxes.

Saverin said he was misunderstood. He first filed to give up US citizenship in January 2011. It became official last September, and the government published the news at the end of April as part of a routine filing. Coming on the eve of the Facebook IPO, the news brought into sharp focus Saverin’s tax savings, which could easily exceed $100 million.

“I’m not a tax expert,” he said. “We complied with all the known laws. There was an exit tax.” That tax is based on the assets held by a citizen leaving America. The exit tax was designed to make sure the departing wealthy paid something before they decamped.

He professes ignorance about his taxes and refuses to discuss his finances. “This had nothing to do with taxes,” he insisted. “I was born in Brazil, I was an American citizen for about 10 years. I thought of myself as a global citizen.”

US tax lawyers say they think Saverin’s exit had more to do with estate and gift taxes than income tax. If he remained a US citizen, he would not have had to pay the US capital gains tax on his income until he sold his shares. Wealthy US shareholders often borrow against their shares and live tax-free off the unrealized appreciation for years.

When US citizens pass on their holdings to their heirs, however, it is subject to estate taxes, which are difficult to escape (as are gift taxes on assets given to relatives and heirs before death). So Saverin’s decision to leave could have been a wager that the cost of an exit tax now—15% of whatever valuation he could get the IRS to agree to—would be far less than the 35% or more in estate tax his heirs would face on whatever his holdings were worth when he died.

Two of Saverin’s Facebook co-founders, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, dropped out of Harvard to work on Facebook. A third, Chris Hughes, graduated from Harvard in 2006, and then worked at Facebook before leaving in 2007 to run social media for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Saverin received a degree in economics from Harvard in 2006, and in 2009 settled in Singapore while on a world tour with his freshman-year Harvard roommate, Andrew Solimine.

Today Zuckerberg runs Facebook. Moskovitz, who left Facebook in 2008, has a start-up called Asana, which makes corporate management software, based on software he designed at Facebook. Hughes has purchased and runs The New Republic magazine. Of all the founders, Saverin has had perhaps the greatest difficulty figuring out how to build on what is likely a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Saverin said that becoming a Singapore resident enabled him to engage in more sophisticated financial activities within that country. He said it also placed him squarely at the nexus of China, Indonesia and India, three of the world’s largest populations, where the effects of social networking are just being felt. What has gotten attention, though, is his billionaire playboy lifestyle in glittering Singapore. Thanks to the interconnected world Saverin helped to create, the Internet is full of people sharing photos and stories of him embraced by statuesque women and drinking expensive Champagne. “It’s a misperception, especially the playboy,” he said. “I do have a Bentley. I do go out. I’d rather not go into personal details.”

“I’m clearly very busy,” he said, with “friends, family, existing investments”. To date, his major investments have been in US companies that he thinks will have a global impact in a Facebook-connected world. One, Jumio, makes products for merchants to accept payments over a mobile phone.

Another, ShopSavvy, offers discounted deals in brick-and-mortar stores via smartphones. He has helped finance a few other US and Singaporean companies, but his investments in startups amount to less than 1% of what he will soon be worth.

He also said the depiction of him in the movie The Social Network was distorted. “It was more art than documentary,” he said. As to his purported betrayal by Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, the dramatic core of the movie, Saverin said: “There was no burning there. Mark is a phenomenal guy.”

More than anything, he said, he would like to get his head around his wealth. (He planned to quietly watch Facebook go public Friday —which will be the middle of the night in Singapore—with just a few friends around, he said).

And, he said, he would like to inspire young entrepreneurs to embrace the Facebook world, “where people are at the center of everything”.

“People look at my profile and say, ‘You can have all the options,”’ he said. “But really, everyone does.”

As for himself, good advice for the single young billionaire is harder to find. He said he had spoken with a number of people with tremendous wealth, “but every experience is unique. Certainly there has been no one who was a college kid and got it this fast.”

“What does this enable me to do? What am I provided with to help?” he asked. “Right now, I don’t know how to deploy the capital and the blessings.”