Fix more responsibility on social media companies in online crime probe: State

The submission was made before a division bench, comprising Justice S Manikumar and Justice Subramonium Prasad, which has been coordinating efforts by law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and major social media intermediary (SMI) companies to find more effective ways to curb online crime.

The bench had enlarged the scope of the plea moved last year seeking to link Aadhaar with email, resulting in social media giants like WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube being impleaded in the case. It also allowed Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) to implead itself in the case.

The TN Information Technology Department and the State police in its report on cooperation of such intermediaries in cybercrime cases cited a case that took place in Salem in 2016.

It submitted that a morphed image of a girl was uploaded on a fake Facebook profile. The Salem police had asked FB for IP logs and other information of the account. However, it was not provided for four days. Meanwhile, the girl committed suicide. It was only a day after her death, FB provided the information after which the police traced the suspect.

The report explained in detail about how the content requests made by LEAs are always denied by SMIs and only a portion of requests regarding access IP logs and account information are accepted and furnished. FB provided information sought for in 52% of cases, Twitter in 58% of cases, WhatsApp in 15% of cases, Google in 77% of cases and YouTube in 4%, they said.

Requests from LEAs to remove content were also complied with only partially – Facebook removed content in 62% of requests, Twitter in 53% of cases and YouTube in 52% of cases.

Noting that a completely anonymous world where anybody can post any content with an assurance that there is no way to trace them will lead to chaos in the society, the government submitted that just because the SMIs are storing the captured data outside the country, it does not mean that the LEA should follow a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) or Letter Rogatory (LR) process to seek such information. Hence, SMIs may be directed to provide information sought for by LEA u/s 91 CrPC without asking to come through LR/MLAT process, the report said.

The report was also critical about WhatsApp’s continued assertion that it cannot track down the original sender of a message given its end-to-end encryption policy. It may be directed to build a mechanism to trace the original source from where an objectionable post/image is first uploaded, the report sought. The case has been posted for further hearing on July 24.