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The Supreme Court will now decide whether social media companies such as Facebook and WhatsApp should allow law enforcement to access encrypted and private social media conversations of citizens. It transferred the various petitions in the matter in different high courts to itself, after a plea filed by Facebook.
A bench of Justices Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose said the matter will be heard in January 2020. This came after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology filed an affidavit stating that Intermediary Guidelines (Amendment) Rules 2018, which are social media guidelines, are likely to be completed by January 2020 and sought three months for notifying the final revised rules in accordance with the law. These guidelines are targeted towards intermediary companies like Facebook and Whataspp to control the kind of content they host. This came after the court asked the Centre to submit a timeline.
Two petitions had been filed in the Madras High Court, and one each in the Bombay and Madhya Pradesh High Courts to link ID proofs (such as Aadhaar) to social media accounts for traceability. However, the Madras High Court said that Aadhaar would not be linked with social media accounts but broadened the scope of the petition to include traceability of messages and impleaded social media giants in the case. The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) is an intervenor in the case.
Furthermore, an IIT professor told the Madras High Court that it is feasible to trace messages. When Facebook filed a plea to transfer all petitions to the Supreme Court stating that a transfer of cases would serve the interests of justice by avoiding the possibility of conflicting decisions from the high courts, Tamil Nadu had opposed the transfer plea. It was this transfer plea that the Supreme Court was hearing.
The IFF opposed the transfer of the matter as the hearings in the Madras High Court are almost done.
Attorney-General KK Venugopal, representing the Tamil Nadu, told the court on Tuesday that they no longer opposed the transfer.
Representing the Centre, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta reportedly told the top court said that no intermediary can claim to be so safe and secure that it cannot be misused. He also stressed for a balance between national interest, the sovereignty of the country and privacy and added that the government is not invading the privacy of citizens.
The Attorney General told the court that the government does not want to crack down on encrypted social media traffic to control crime, but expects help from online platforms to facilitate access.
Representing the petitioner, senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi told the court that the intermediaries are caught between pro-privacy parties and the government.
[“source=thenewsminute”]