Give details on governing ISPs, State told

The division bench, comprising Justice S Manikumar and Justice Subramonium Prasad, passed the above direction on recording the report filed by Cybercrime wing that the social media companies fail to respond to their pleas for obtaining user details to crack cyber related crimes.

The bench on posting the case for further hearing to Monday also sought for the regulations evolved by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in this regard. 

The case pertains to a plea seeking to declare the linking of Aadhaar as mandatory for creating email and social media accounts to have a check on social media, specially, on abusive and derogatory posts, comments and memes that promotes misinformation and propaganda.

The cybercrime in its status report had contended that internet service providers like Google refuse to share IP log details citing reasons that the internet protocol (IP address) originated outside Indian jurisdiction. In cases where IP logs provided by other social media operators were sent to local ISPs for obtaining the user details, it is found that the same IP (dynamic IP) was assigned to multiple users at the same time making it difficult to fix the exact user ID of suspected IP.

It further noted that during 2016-2018, the Cybercrime cell had sent 1940 requests to such online social media companies, among which 885 requests were sent to Facebook, 101 requests to twitter, 788 requests to Gmail, 155 requests to YouTube and 11 requests to WhatsApp.  But, out of this, IP logs details were received for only 484 requests. 

Based on the 484 IP logs received, 52 cases were resolved by identifying the culprits while 146 are untraceable and the remaining 286 cases are pending for want of further details from ISPs, the report said.