Govt, social media firms to attend meet headed by CS for detecting cyber crimes

A division bench comprising Justice S Manikumar and Justice Subramonium Prasad passing an interim order on Thursday said the participants are expected to look into aspects as to what kind of information can be made available by the companies to detect cybercrimes and the manner in which assistance in such cases may be sought to create a virtual check on such online frauds and crimes.

The bench asked the State to arrange a meeting between May 20 to 27 and submit a report on the same while posting the case for further hearing to June 6.

Earlier, Senior Advocate Arvind Datar who appeared for WhatsApp submitted that the content shared between users is not available for the company to share owing to its end-to-end encryption policy. While noting that WhatsApp cooperates with government requests for assistance in the investigation of cybercrimes, he said the request had to be made in the appropriate manner.

Senior Advocate P S Raman appearing for Google and YouTube submitted that Google ordinarily responds to requests made by the government to share information to tackle cybercrime. However, the request must not only be made by a government functionary, but it must be through an official channel, he said.

Making submissions for Facebook, Senior Advocate Satish Parasaran submitted that it was cooperating with the law enforcement agencies. But it may not always be possible to trace the real name of the Facebook user in question, since the accounts are created based on the e-mail/phone number provided by the user.

Twitter represented by Senior Advocate R Murari contended that the US base is being operated by Twitter US while for the rest of the world it is Twitter International Corporation, based in Ireland. But often the government’s requests for assistance is being directed to the wrong Twitter entity, he said.

Additional Government Pleader E Manoharan on highlighting the non-cooperation of the social media companies citing statistics, said online companies often decided whether there were emergent conditions warranting the sharing of user information and that cannot be left solely to the online companies alone.

However, all the appearing companies agreed with a proposal to hold a training programme so that the law enforcement agencies are better sensitised as to the kind of information that can be made available by the companies and the way such information may be sought.